All of a sudden I have fuzzy channels

[mike1961]

Outvit....if your problem is the same as mine...it will return...Steve has helped me to isolate the problem to a tuning/frequency issue when watching live tv. Frankly, I think this is a serious issue that Sage needs to really research.


Steve...I am wondering if I can somehow get the tables from Win TV and why doesn't Sage have the same type of option as WinTV? I have contacted Sage and they suggested the usual..check the splitter, check cables, do another scan, reinstall the source...all that stuff. But, you and I know it's a frequency issue. I have written them back twice since then with my progress and any suggestions along with a link to this thread. It seems to take them a few days to respond since they probably have a lot of emails to sift through. Is there anything I can do short of entering in frequencies for some 70 channels?

Thanks again,
Mike

[mike1961]

Sage tech support responded and said to use the FreqShifter. This is a real blow.......I could be spending the better part of the year entering by trial an error these frequencies unless I can get them from Adelphia....There are about 50 channels that don't work now....Literally all of them above channel 24 are fuzzy. My fear is what if they change them again....

Mike

[shosterman]

I am having the exact same problems as you guys describe. I just wish I had a solution also.

I live in Circleville, OH and my provider is also Adelphia. (Adelphia Oakland Amanda, Lancaster) to be exact. Sometime between Mon 11:00pm (12/26) and Tues 2:00am (12/27) all my channels went fuzzy. Yet, I still pick them up perfectly in WinTV and such, similar to what you describe.

I just purchased Sage last week after my trial went out and it was working so perfectly.

The only thing I can think that may differ from you is with the Sage bundle I ordered, I installed the A180 card I received hoping that would cure it, but it didn't. I now have 3 tuner cards, AverMedia 150 (white box), Hauppage 150, and now AverMedia A180 WinTVHD. If I remove all my video sources from Sage and add only the Hauppage card it will pick up channels clear. Either of the Aver cards will not (inside Sage, outside they work fine).

Anyway, I will join you in emailing SageTV support and let them know this is happening to multiple people and hopefully we can find a resolution without having to personally tune each channel.

[Narflex]

One thing to try is to change this property to false:

always_autotune=false

in the Sage.properties file (do it while SageTV or the SageTV Service isn't running).

That'll disable the 'autoscan' which tries to lock the signal by searching around the frequency it's supposed to be at. Then it will obey any overrides you put in the registry.

Has anybody who has this issue tried building a graph in GraphEdit and tuning it that way (or using AMCap from the DXDSDK)?

[dpothier]

For those that are having to tune channels with FreqShifter:

Here is a page with ranges of frequencies for the channel numbers. My cable company doesn't publish their frequencies, so this helped me. I had two channels that "went bad" recently. It was pretty easy to start at the bottom of each range and work my way up to correct. Incidentally, for those of you that have many channels to correct; the adjustment to one channel was the same as the adjustment to the other.

http://www.qsl.net/atn/library/Broadcast_freqs.htm

For any others that can use this info for their troubleshooting:

I was on 4.1.3 when channels 4 and 5 only went horizontally "fuzzy". 3 and 6 were fine. They were both suddenly identically bad on all of my three tuners with Sage. Perfect with WinTV and on the TV without my PC. Upgrading to 4.1.4 and rolling back to 4.0 did nothing. Removing sources, auto-scanning channels, disabling always_autotune, all did nothing for me.

[Drinyth]

Originally Posted by mike1961

Outvit....if your problem is the same as mine...it will return...Steve has helped me to isolate the problem to a tuning/frequency issue when watching live tv. Frankly, I think this is a serious issue that Sage needs to really research.

FWIW, I'm getting the same issue here. I just noticed it today, but it may have been happening for a longer period of time. I haven't seen it record anything blurry or fuzzy, but when trying to watch live TV I frequently get distorted channels (in my area, it's with the lower channels).

Sometimes with this, I'll also get "No signal" that pops up on my TV before it tunes in the fuzzy signal. Hopefully, someone finds out what's causing this.

[joe123]

When fine tunning channels, is that information kept for each Tunner?

I have 2 WinTV-PVR 150 cards. One shows fuzzy channels, the other shows clear channels. So if I tune one WinTV 150 card, is that affecting the other or does it not matter?

[centralohioguy]

This software worked wonderfully for the first few months, now it's basically useless to me. I have to use the Hauppauge software to make use of my Hauppauge 150 card. I can't even get the low channels in Sage anymore. And I looked at freqshifter; no thanks that's too much work. I bought SageTV to work as is, not to have to learn some complicated program like freqshifter to get functionality. I can only hope Sage puts in some sort of integrated tuning in their next release.

[jensen18]

Originally posted by dpothier
I was on 4.1.3 when channels 4 and 5 only went horizontally "fuzzy". 3 and 6 were fine. They were both suddenly identically bad on all of my three tuners with Sage. Perfect with WinTV and on the TV without my PC. Upgrading to 4.1.4 and rolling back to 4.0 did nothing. Removing sources, auto-scanning channels, disabling always_autotune, all did nothing for me.

What did the channels look like? I recently went to upgrade my PVR150 driver in hopes of a better picture. The short of it is that it failed so I reverted back. Suddenly on three of the bottom 6 channels I have what look like tuning issues but is happens in Sage as well as WinTv. Some channels have diagonal lines through them others have a fuzzy horizontal line that rolls from bottom to top.
Is there a way to real time check the tuning or do you have to:
1 close 2 tune 3 open 4 repeat
until the picture looks ok?

[AWS]

I had this issue. For me, somehow I had mistakenly made one of my tuners source NOT cable but OTA. I even had Comcast come out...luckily they didn't catch the error other. Just a shot in the dark for you, but check to make sure all of your tuners are set to cable or satellite.

AWS

[johnw]

I have three Hauppauge 150 cards and about 1 week ago, the output from one of them became fuzzy using Sage. I swapped around the inputs and confirmed that it was not the feeds to the cards that was the problem (I have three satelite boxes, each connected from SCART to compossite on the 150 cards). This was the situation until last night when I lost all three cards, each of which showed "No Signal". Like the O.P I found that I could see the product of one of the cards quite happily through the Hauppauge Win 2000 software. I have rebooted the server but to no avail.

So far, the symptoms are similar to the earlier posts on this thread. My problem is that I am not aware that a composite imput can be subject to Frequency drift as might have been the case with the previous posters. Has anyone come across this prroblem before.

I aam running a late Beta version of Sage 4.1 (I seem to remember 4.1.8). Since I did a complete re-install a couple of months ago it has run perfectly and I have made no changes to the installation since then. To my knowledge, all automatic updates are turned off.

I don't really know where to turn on this one. Can anyone help me?

[fcrutsinger]

Yet another one to add to the roster. I started with only one noisy channel. I contacted Sage Tech Support. They suggested, among other things, that I rescan channels. Now I have about 15 noisy channels. WinTV2000 is fine. I was about to nuke the hard drive and re-install everything, but I think I'll wait.

I will reply to the last message I got from Sage and include the link to this thread.

Hauppauge 150, w/ Sage TV 4.0

[Yalbik]

Another fuzzy channel customer here...and totally weirded out by my problem.

I have 2 PVR 150 cards in my system. Suddenly ONE of my 150's started tuning fuzzy on any channel over 23. The other still tunes all channels clearly. I tried swapping cables but still the same card tuned fuzzy.

I pulled the bad card & put it in another PC. Same result. After checking the forums, I came across this thread and tried WinTV...the card worked perfectly.

I followed sfisher & mike1961's advice about using FreqShifter (thank's guys...fantastic info), and was able to get the picture up to acceptable quality. Not as good as WinTv, but watchable...

A few things concern me though:

1) If it's a frequency problem, why does the other 150 card still work fine?

2) If I do put the frequency adjustments in my server, will it screw up the card that is tunning correctly now? If so, is there any way to specify frequency adjustments PER capture card?

3) Did anyone ever determine a way to pull the frequency values after WinTV auto-tunes the channels?

4) I'm likely going to look into the Microsoft DirectShow toolkit & see if I can write something to determine the current frequency the card is tuned to. That way I can have WinTV auto tune, then just record all the values it is using. Would anyone else be interested in something like this?

It annoys me to no end that the picture is so much clearer on WinTV. I'm going to do more testing, but I think the WinTV picture is considerably better than even my "clear" Sage picture.

[IncredibleHat]

Strange this topic gets ressurected. I never really thought about it, but yeah... I get a lot of fuzzy channels too (although mine are lower numbered, usually the local stations on cable). Like, for instance NBC is ugly fuzzy (and solarized too), and the CW too. One of our premium (cinemax i think) is fuzzy out the wazoo as well.

I just chalked it up to our crappy analog cable provider... never considered it would be the cards, as I had turned up the sharpness all the way they can go with no effect.

Plus, I then also sort of attributed the problem to recently upgradeing (downgrading?) to nvidia drivers 93.71

However... if this is a frequency tuning issue that needs to be tweaked, that sounds about logical, as its like trying to get your FM radio tuned to a channel just right by messing with it. but since SageTV never had anything of the sort in it, I didn't think too much of it when sage detected channels (actually was hand fed channels through the epg guide).

Hmmm... I dont think I really added anything, but rather just rambled on, didnt I?

[Yalbik]

IncredibleHat, had you tried using the WinTV software with your Haupaugge cards? Everything I've read on this issue (and my own experience) indicates that this specific "fuzzy channels" problem doesn't show up in WinTV, but does in Sage. If that happens for you, then it is almost definitely a frequency problem.

Also, the channels aren't exactly fuzzy...a better description would be that I'm getting light snow on those channels (just like if I twisted the fine tuning dial on a TV with a rotary tuner in the 70's, or had a bad coax cable)

Anyway, a bit of searching and I came across an open-source C# DirectShow library (http://sourceforge.net/projects/directshownet/)

It has samples for obtaining an interface to the tuner card, so I'm definately going to be writing something to try and auto-tune my card. If I get it working reasonably I'll obviously post it here...

[Kev]

I have Verizon Fios cable service with a hauppauge PVR150 and have a fuzzy channel 5 (ABC). I had no fuzzy problems when I had Comcast. Hauppauges WinTV also tunes the station to be fuzzy. My old TV that is use without a STB tunes the station fine.
Does it sound like my problem is also fine tuning, correctable by freq shifter, or since Wintv also shows the same problem does that rule out the freq tunning issue?
Thanks for any help.

[Yalbik]

Does it sound like my problem is also fine tuning, correctable by freq shifter, or since Wintv also shows the same problem does that rule out the freq tunning issue?

It could be...but everything I've seen on the forums seems to indicate that WinTV can tune the channels way better than Sage.

You may want to try rescanning all your channels in WinTV...

If that doesn't work try the following in WinTV:

1) add the channel manually...under "add a channel" in wintv, change the Tuning Mode drop down to "All Channels", then set the Frequency to 77.25 MHz (which is the standard in North America for cable channel 5).

2) You should see a (fuzzy) channel 5 in winTV. Try adjusting the frequency slightly (say 77.75 or 76.75) and see if it gets any better.

3) If you can improve the picture quality this way, then congratulations, you've just entered the fuzzy channel club. If not, it may be something else (cabling, electrical interference, drivers, IRQ confict, etc).

[IncredibleHat]

Well I wont be able to try any of this till end of december as Im sort of out of town But I will try. And report back.

[Kev]

Thanks for the feedback. I was able to clear up the reception of my fuzzy channel 5 issue by using the fine tuning option in wintv. Then I went through and tried to make the ajustment for Sage through the freq shifter program, however have been unsuccessful getting changes I make in that program correctly such that they take effect in Sage.
It would be nice if Sage were to include a fine tuning option, as the freq shifter option isn't simple and the untuned channels seems to be common amongst users.

[Yalbik]

Kev,

Keep in mind that when using the Freq Shifter option, you have to have BOTH Sage TV and the SageTV service shut down when running Freq Shifter.

Yes, a fine-tuning option within sage would be very nice...or a seperate app that provided Fine-Tuning & wrote to the appropriate registry locations. (I'm slowly working on one, but the DirectShow API's are giving me issues)...