Windows 7 RC, Hauppauge 1800, Sage and Clear QAM - ARRRGGGGHHHHH

[shewhorn]

Okay, from my research prior to building this system it appeared as if Windows 7 was a pretty safe bet along with the Hauppauge 1800. Getting the analog channels over the cable was a breeze but when I switched to the digital input... no dice. All of my software is current (downloaded yesterday)...

I started with Win 7 RC (and I went directly to NVIDIA, and Gigabyte to download the most recent Win7 compatible drivers)
I installed the release version of SageTV
I installed the release version of the Hauppaue drivers

No go.

Step 2 - I installed the Beta version of the Hauppauge drivers.

No go.

Step 3 - I called Hauppauge support. They sent me a little registry modification it didn't do a lick of good. It's worth noting that the modification was to get ClearQAM to work with Windows Media Center and that applying that registry hack would disable WinTV. Unfortunately that didn't work for Sage or Media Center (Media Center says "Tuner Not Found" and Sage won't do anything but say "no signal").

No go.

Step 4 - I reinstalled the Beta version of the Hauppauge Drivers and WinTV and connected the ATSC/ClearQAM input to the antenna. Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Signal! So I've at least verified that the input works.

Step 5 - I installed the Beta version of SageTV (so now I'm running beta drivers for the 1800 and the latest beta release for Sage).

No go.

So, what I think I'm up against here is a driver issue. It seems as if others have managed to get this working without a problem but I'm at an impass. FWIW I've noticed that when I install the release version of the driver, the driver has a 2009 date. When I install the beta version (CD 4.8a) the driver version is from 2008? I'm guessing that perhaps they're doing this so that when an upgrade utility runs (say to reinstall what is in reality the older official release) it'll see an old date stamp and overwrite the beta drivers but I just wanted to check.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Just to sum up I have installed:

Windows 7 RC (downloaded from Microsoft on 6/11/09)
Hauppauge 1800 with the cd 4.8a beta release (also downloaded on 6/11)
Sage TV official release and beta release (as of 6/11).

Other info that might be pertinent:
Mobo is a Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H (NVIDIA 9400 chipset... I downloaded updated drivers directly from AMD/NVIDIA for Windows 7 today).
Cable service is Comcast Digital in Londonderry, NH 03053

Thanks! Cheers, Joe

[shewhorn]

Just to add... I also just tried obliterating the driver and reinstalling....

ran hcwclear.exe then went into c:/windows/system32/drivers, took ownership of the hcw* files and deleted them, then went into the c:/windows/system32/driverStore folder and deleted the hcw*.inf files, restarted and reinstalled the 4.8a beta driver but no joy. I also confirmed that the date stamp on the version installed for the driver is from 12/18/2008. The 4.6 official release has a newer timestamp on it which doesn't seem right but again, perhaps that was intentional.

Cheers, Joe

[shewhorn]

Well, starting from scratch I believe I've solved my own problem.

Reinstalled Windows 7 RC (32 bit)

(this step had nothing to do with the solution) Shrunk drive to partition to 50 gigs for system and apps and created a new partition with 64k blocks for the SageTV video streams (the drive is a 1 terabyte WD Green, not a speed demon but PLENTY fast to stream video to multiple sources... I don't think this was really necessary and in reality it could actually create performance issues (when the partition is nearly full and the drive has to thrash between the swap space partition and the Sage partition) but for now I'll see how it goes)

Went to the NVIDIA website and directly downloaded the drivers for the 9400 chipset.

Downloaded the rest of the drivers from the Gigabyte website (the mobo is a Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H)

Flashed the bios with the most recent version

Went to the Hauppauge website and downloaded WinTV v7 and installed the drivers only.

Went to SageTV and downloaded the current release (not the beta).

So, now I have Clear QAM coming through. Woohoo. I still need to iron out bugs (in another post) as the high def stuff is having problems (playback is jerky, audio sync is off, sometimes the whole stream gets a rather unique edgy kind of artifacting (not compression artifacts, this is something else). Getting closer to having this be usable though.

Cheers, Joe