New HDHR Quatro on old SageTV setup in Vista

[bmac.to]

I have an old SageTV box setup in Windows Vista which is almost 12 years old. I am one of those who do not like to make changes unless something is broken.

The box has two Hauppauge HVR-2250 tuners connected to an outdoor antenna and has been experiencing slowly degrading tuning capability. Not sure the root cause but it could be more noise in the box itself for some reason, aging of the tuner cards, degrading of the antenna/preamp/balun/cabling/etc, increased cell phone signals, the channel repacking, etc. The family was complaining.

I looked at picking up a Hauppauge Quad card but they are difficult to source. I ended picking up a HDHR Quatro even though it wasn't clear it could be installed in a Windows Vista box.

It turns out the installer is not compatible with Windows Vista - due to a lack of sha256 support, you get a "invalid digital signature" error. To remedy this, you need to install two Windows Server 2008 updates - kb4474419 and kb4493730. These can be downloaded from the Microsoft Update Catalog.

Once downloaded, the need to be manually expanded and installed. Use the following as a guide.

expand -f:* "example.msu" some_directory
pkgmgr.exe /n:some_directory\example.xml

Restart the machine, then re-attempt the HDHR installer, and all should be good.

BTW, the tuner is much, much better than the HVR-2250s - it appears to be on par with the tuning performance of my TV which has always been the gold standard in my house.

[SHS]

If yours was a early model 2250 tuner there prone to having failing tuner I'm surprised your lasted that long the newer model 2255 got update tuner and internal splitter

They be back in stock this week or sometime by the end of month

You want to do rescan on July, 3 that is when the repack is all done.

[Galaxysurfer]

My suggestion is to change over your server from Win Vista over to Linux & take it from there. I successfully changed from a Win server over to Mx Linux. Using HdHomerun tuner for OTA with SageTV is easy once you installed the OpenDCT to bridge with Sagetv. Good Luck!

PS will warn you that Linux drivers for Hauppauge cards isn't great in Linux. The main issue is with signal strenth. You maybe okay if you are using a strong outside antenna to feed your tuners. There are differences if you are running an Ubuntu server with direct ppa driver support vs other linux distros that depend on upstream changes to linux kernels ( supplied from Linux driver maintainer to Launchpad.net as well as submitted to linuxkernel.org ) https://github.com/b-rad-ndi/ubuntu-...kernel-builder is where you can directly communicate with Linux driver maintainer. There is no current support for older 2250/2255 cards in newer kernels. You will have to manually add the firmware & drivers to Linux.

[bmac.to]

So far so good - the Vista setup is working well and the tuning performance of the HDHR is very good. If I ever decide to create a new Sagetv box, I will definitely move the Linux.

I suspect the main issue with the 2250s was just their age - the tuning started become pretty random.