SageTV 4.1 Client has stopped providing sound

[pointreyes]

I use my laptop for the SageTV 4.1 client. Tonight is the first night in over 60 days of using this product that I have had this strange problem. Sometimes I use the onboard sound and other times I use an Audigy 2 ZS PCMCIA. I simply would change the audio renderer between the two devices. Tonight, no sound whatsoever from either sound device. Sound is definitely not muted or turned down.

Laptop is using an AMD Athlon64 Mobile 4000+ proc, ATi X600m video chip, 1.5 Gig of RAM running Windows XP Pro. The client connects just fine to the SageTV server.

Any ideas what is causing this strange lost to sound?
No new software was installed from the last time I had sound to this time without sound.

[Opus4]

Is it just one recording that plays no sound, or every video that you try? If it is one recording, double check that it actually has sound by playing it elsewhere or via a different program.

I rarely even reboot my laptop... have you tried rebotting yours?

That's all I can think of; maybe someone else will have other suggestions.

- Andy

[stevech]

based on my experiences, try this (assuming it's not a sound card/ddriver issue):

play back a recorded show.
Press the STOP key on your remote (a black square on the Hauppauge 45 key remote)

play a show again.

this cures the once or twice a week problem I have (chronic) where the playback is missing sound or is at the wrong speed (slo-mo). When it happens, you can switch which show is playing back and the problem persists until you do the stop-key thing. Or you can use the setup menu choice to RELOAD MEDIA PLAYER- also cures the problem.

SageTV has a problem ticket on this from me and others but I've heard nothing from them on this in weeks. I think they're busy eating the place-shifting candy.

[pointreyes]

Sorry, I should have mentioned that I only use the client to watch Live TV. I'm using a Hauppauge PVR-150 on the SageTV server side but no remote. I don't really have much need for a remote on my laptop. I have the Live TV set up for 0 recording (er, at least that's what it claims ). I use WinDVD 7 for viewing recorded material and sound works through that ok so I would hope that means that the sound drivers for two different devices is good. Since this is a laptop, it gets turned off and on almost everyday-but I tried a reboot before starting this thread just in case the massive amount of software on this laptop could have caused a conflict.

Could the security updates from MS last Tuesday cause this sound issue? Note that since I'm using IE7 Beta2 that I did not have to install the dastardly cumulative MSIE update. The client software was working just fine after the IE7 installation.

[stevech]

when there's no sound via the Sage client, have you tried playing any mpg file on the pc with Microsoft's media player to see if it has sound?

[pointreyes]

Originally Posted by stevech

when there's no sound via the Sage client, have you tried playing any mpg file on the pc with Microsoft's media player to see if it has sound?

The following formats where tested with Media Player and sound worked:
cda (iTunes album burned to CD)
avi
mpg (I created the mpg with TMPGenc)

The avi and mpg files were tested wirelessly on the laptop connecting to the server.

If this helps, here's my hardware:
http://members.dsl-only.net/~pointreyes/ga/hsystem.jpg

SageTV software is on the file server and the client is on the laptop. The NLE machine does not have SageTV on it.