One Tuner no longer working

[zubblwump]

I've got a two tuner setup, with one tuner using the cards tuner with regular analog cable, and the other tuner using a DCT2000 for digital cable. I've been running SageTV v2.1 for ages because i never felt like putting forth the effort and time to upgrade until recently when the digital cable box stopped changing channels wit the serial cable plugin. So a couple days ago I uninstalled everything Sage and upgraded to v4.0. I know I maybe should have gone to 5.x, but I had the v4.0 installer already dowloaded and am a bit wary of new releases.

Anyway, once I got everything installed, I setup the tuners and everything appeared to be working until yesterday when the analog cable tuner stopped working. now all I get is a black screen with a "No Signal" message on that tuner. Funny thing is, it seemed to work fine when I originally set it up. I've tried restarting the sage server, rebooting, etc multiple times, but nothing seems to help. Even removed the source in Sage and re-added it, but nothing works.

Any suggestions? I've been wary of updating the drivers since one of the two cards is a Roslyn (EDIT: Sorry, I meant Freestyle) and I seem to remember issues with using that card in the same system as a normal PVR250 which required a certain driver version to work. Is this still an issue? Is there anything else I should try?

[zubblwump]

No suggestions/known problems? I'm at a loss here. Anyone remember Sage v4 bugs or such that may be related? Anything at all?

[gplasky]

Sounds like either something is wrong with the cable feed or the card is dead. I would try a different cable directly off the cable box. Then I would test the card in a different PC with newer drivers and the WinTV program. I can't think of any issues with ANY of the versions that would cause this. I'm assuming the other card is working fine. That would tell me not a Sage issue but a card issue.

Gerry

[zubblwump]

I noticed that, in the process of cleaning things up a bit before installing v4, I had removed the WinTV2000 application. Unsure if that was required somehow for the tuner to work, I tried downloading and installing the latest WinTV app, but when I tried WinTV to see if the tuner was working correctly, I'm now getting missing .dll errors. Maybe it's something to do with the latest version of WinTV2000?

I've had the second source removed from sageTv for a couple days, and just for kicks last night, I tried re-adding it, fully expecting it to hang when trying to show the preview window after selecting the tuning method. To my surprise, the preview window came up fine. I'll have to test again tonight when I get home to see if it's stopped working again.

[zubblwump]

Originally Posted by zubblwump

To my surprise, the preview window came up fine. I'll have to test again tonight when I get home to see if it's stopped working again.

...and, of course, it has. I find it hard to believe it's a problem with the card since it's worked fine for about 2 years until I upgraded SageTV. The card and server itself are located in the basement, and I've been VNCing in so i know I haven't physically done anything to it (although I did check all connections, etc last night). Even tried upgrading the drivers, but I'm getting the same deal. I'll pull the card tonight and try it in a spare box I've got, just to be sure. By the way, the card is a 'Freestyle', not a 'Roslyn', as I'd mistakenly called it in my original post. Don't know if that helps, but that's what it is.

[zubblwump]

After much more testing, I'm fairly certain it's not the cards. After first installing the cards, I can set up the Freestyle in Sage. No problems, everything works great. But after I set up the PVR-250 MCE, the Freestyle stops tuning. Well, technically it doesn't mmediately stop working, I believe it's only after tuning a channel or two with the 250 (hooked through Svid to a DCT2000 cable box with serial cable control and the MultiDCTTuner plugin)

Still not sure what's going on, but it's getting very frustrating, to say the least.