Strange Sage issues...

[ptaylor]

I'm just added an ATI 550 based card last week and I've been trying to set it as the prefered tuner... Not sure if I've done that yet or not... Today, though, I got a recording with no audio at all... Not sure if there was something wrong with the cable signal at the time, but my wife's blaming my PVR setup since it was her soap.. Since it's a hardware encoder, I wouldn't expect any sound settings on the PC to have any affect... If I had an old-style tuner, I could see an issue with the sound card possibly causing a problem or being muted, or something...

On to the second problem... A few days ago, Opus suggested setting my block size to 64K to help reduce some skipping I was getting in video playback... So, tonight I loaded an Acronis product that I happened to have a license for and changed the partitions to be 64K (up from 4K and 8K).

Now, I don't know if that is related, but now when I change channels while watching Live TV, I get the GUI info up telling me what the show is on the channel that I'm switching to... But, that's where it hangs... I hit the STOP button and I can drop back to the menu, then start viewing Live TV again and it starts on the channel that I moved to...

So, in testing to find out the cause, I deleted my PVR-250 from Sage and tried it again, but I had the same issue... So, I added back my PVR-250 and deleted the ATI.. Now, it changes channels without trouble. I add the ATI back, and the trouble starts again... It views the first channel fine, but hangs on changing, then lets me watch the channel after stopping/starting LiveTV...

So, it is possible that the ATI has trouble writing to 64K blocks??? I thought there as a directory for the "live buffer", but perhaps I'm thinking of BTV as I couldn't locate a setting in the GUI for that... I tried removing the two video directories I had set up and set up one on my C drive (set up when installing windows, so it's whatever block size it set it for)...

Oh, and I installed the latest ATI capture drivers to see if that helped, but it didn't. Running Sage 2.27.

[ptaylor]

Hmm.. Been reading another thread on the ATI 550 and it sounds like the channel hanging issue is something that happens in Sage with the ATI 550...

Perhaps I got the ATI encoder set as the primary encoder now.. and when viewing LiveTV, it keeps trying to use it.. When the priority was set to "0" on both cards, it did let me switch channels fine... I think it flopped back and forth between cards...

I haven't read anything about the ATI and sound issues though... Perhaps that problem was the local station..

Paul

[ptaylor]

Changing the encoder merit back to 0 for both encoders seems to solve the channel hang issue, listed above...

Paul

[ptaylor]

Hmmm... The next show to record was, of course, another soap for my wife... Well, it also has no sound... I can watch Live TV without any sound issues... Any idea why I would have a problem with sound? I mean, I'm using two hardware encoders, so it should be in the stream...

Paul