Looking for a new tuner

[KeithAbbott]

Certainly by now you have sent a support request to SageTV Technical Support, were they not able to help you with this problem?

[rgroves]

I've submitted a case, but I don't see this as a SageTV issue, but a WHS and Hauppauge driver issue.


Still - Can I get an answer to my question of:

WHAT OTHER OPTIONS DO I HAVE FOR TUNER CARDS FOR ANALOG RECORDING THAT WORK WITH WHS/SAGETV ??

[gplasky]

Any tuner that has an XP driver will work on WHS. Any of the older analog tuners such as Happague PVR500 or nVidia Dual TV Tuner card. (Maybe on eBay.) Windows XP drivers are also provider with the 2250. Don't run the autorun CD program. Go into the folder and look for the actual driver setup.exe program.

Gerry

[Fuzzy]

The HVR2250, PVR500 and DualTV are about the only options for analog dual cards, and all have already been recommended.

[rgroves]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Any tuner that has an XP driver will work on WHS. Any of the older analog tuners such as Happague PVR500 or nVidia Dual TV Tuner card. (Maybe on eBay.) Windows XP drivers are also provider with the 2250. Don't run the autorun CD program. Go into the folder and look for the actual driver setup.exe program.

Gerry

Thanks Gerry. I've looked on eBay and the 500's are going for a frikkin' high price. I tried to bid on a few ans they quickly went beyond my comfort level for a "used" tuner card. LOL

Nvidia Dual TV.... Hmmmm, hadn't seen or heard of that one till now.

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

The HVR2250, PVR500 and DualTV are about the only options for analog dual cards, and all have already been recommended.

Fuzzy - Well, the DualTV was only just suggested, so that one is a new suggestion to me.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by rgroves

Thanks Gerry. I've looked on eBay and the 500's are going for a frikkin' high price. I tried to bid on a few ans they quickly went beyond my comfort level for a "used" tuner card. LOL

Nvidia Dual TV.... Hmmmm, hadn't seen or heard of that one till now.

Fuzzy - Well, the DualTV was only just suggested, so that one is a new suggestion to me.

It was discussed back on post 12 or so... Doesn't really matter, most would agree the 2250 is the best choice for a dual analog card. The fact that you're having problems with yours is not ordinary, and would lead me to believe it's some other hardware issue, or your card is just bad.

[texneus]

Nvidia DualTV is an amazingly good tuner card. I've still got one and use it for captures from VHS tape. It does an amazing job cleaning up and stabilizing lousy analog video. But the problem with it is to configure it you must have Windows Media Center. NVidia never wrote a DualTV control panel application that runs independent of media center. You can still use it without but you'll be stuck at defaults, which IMO uses overly aggressive noise reduction if you have a clean source.

Good luck on your quest. I couldn't even tell you who makes single analog tuners anymore...

[rgroves]

Well, I'm desparate at this point. My WAF is hitting an all time low right now. Just about every time my wife or I go to watch something that was recorded, the server has already BSOD'd or crashes at somepoint while watching our show. But I know that it's Not the watching shows that causes it, because it'll happens at the 1 minute mark into recording ANY analog show. SageTV detects a halt in recording (yellow info notice), and then at 2 minutes it gets a another halt (red info notice) and BAM... BSOD.

I can't find my old PVR-500. I had one well over a year ago, and replaced it because of errors in SageTV, but replaced it with the 2250... Looking back, that was a bad idea. LOL.

[michelkenny]

rgroves, I skimmed over this thread... looks like you have 4 GB of memory installed, but I don't see that you've tried taking out a stick.

I too just recently upgraded all of my PVR-500 cards with HVR-2250 so that I could go back to 4 GB of memory... As soon as I did this, I would experience 4+ crashes a day. Took out one stick of memory, problem solved (been running fine for 3-4 days). I see other people running fine with 4 GB, so I am not sure what the problem is. I am running Win 2003 Enterprise, maybe that is the case. Either way it is not worth it for me to keep troubleshooting... it just works so well with 2 GB (even 3 GB) that I just leave it at that.

[rgroves]

I did take out a stick of RAM, but the server slowed down to less than a crawl if I was recording anything, processing comskip, and the wife was trying to watch anything on the extender. the video was choppy and audio lagged. If there was nothing recording, playback was fine. If I was recording and NOT playing back anything, it was fine too. Just not the two together.

I tried to have comslip run a odd/off times, but even with recording and playback on an extender was bad. If I tried to do anything on the server, even just browsing a shared folder things would lag.

So, running on 2GB is a NO GO for me. It's 4GB or bust, and right now it's BUST.

[davephan]

Have you tried rebuilding your WHS from scratch and starting over? If you were using Windows XP or 7, then you could quickly and easily recover back to a point in time when the system was stable. If the system was still was unstable after an image recovery, then you would know that you have a hardware problem, not a software problem. Unfortuately imaging does not work with WHS, so your stuck with a painful manual scratch rebuild. If you had been using Windows XP or 7 for your SageTV computer, with the same occasional BSOD problems, and those were caused by the software, then your system could be fixed in only 30 minutes with an image recovery. Then the WAF would stay high.

If you don't isolate the problem between hardware and software, then you may be stuck with what you have now, occasional BSODs.


Dave

[rgroves]

Dave - Not to make you mad, but you didn't read all of my posts. This has been unstable on old build of WHS, STILL unstable on NEW build of WHS. Yes, I KNOW it's a HARDWARE / DRIVER issue. That's why I'm asking for sugestions on other tuners.

No, occasional BSOD's ARE NOT ACCEPTABLE!!! BSOD's cause data corruption and hardware failures. That is NOT acceptable.

Problems only started when I switched from teh PVR-500 to HVR-2250. I CANNOT switch back to the 500, because I don't have that card anymore, and I've been unsuccessful winning any off eBay (I'm not going to pay more than $50 inc. shipping for a USED card).

Also, I'm staying on WHS for the client backups, data duplication, etc... So don't try to talk me into going back to Win7 or XP.

[Fuzzy]

Just because the problems came about when you added switched to the 2250, doesn't mean the 2250 is the problem. It could very well be the motherboard. Keep in ming that it wasn't necessarily a direct swap, but you removed a card from a PCI slot, and added one to a PCI-e slot. If there are problems with that PCIe, it could definitely cause BSOD when that card is used.

[rgroves]

The problem carried over to a new mobo and a fresh install of WHS and SageTV.