Vbox Cat's Eye 3560 crashing my SageTV server

[cord]

I recently bought a 3560 and hooked it up to my SageTV server, running the latest and greatest drivers from Vbox (2.1.705.7) and the latest Sage version. When I enable the tuner in Sage, my heretofore stable system becomes incredibly unstable. The average CPU usage goes from < 10% to > 60%, the system reboots itself periodically, it frequently pops up "the system has recovered from serious error", ocasionally forces me to restore my active desktop, and almost constantly causes my Sage clients to disconnect for 10-60 seconds at a time.

Even with the drivers still installed, as soon as I remove the tuner from SageTV, all the problems stop.

In addition to the Cat's Eye 3560, I have two PVR-150s and a Dvico FusionHDTV III+ (IIRC). All of those work like champs, with no troubles. The HD card is recording OTA, of course, as is the 3560. The two SD cards are hooked to regular old cable TV.

The operating system is XP MCE, without rollup 1.

Any clues, anybody?

[Jesse]

Hi,

I am using two of these tuners with the same drivers you listed and am having no troubles. When I first installed them I did have some difficulty with sage configuring them. This was a while back (SageTv V4.1.xx) and so I dont recall all that happened. I ended up doing two things. First I removed the tuners in the sage tuner config. menus and completely removed the drivers. The driver removal proved tricky and I had to go looking for help with this. I finally found some info. on AVS. Here are the instructions I found for removing the drivers:

In order to remove the drivers in this situation you have to delete the files manually.

In folder \windows\system32\drivers you have to delete the following files.

Dtf8575b.sys

Vb35xxb.sys


At the Windows \Inf directory search for all files with the extension *.inf that
containing text "vbox" word inside, you have to delete each found file, go to the
Windows \ inf folder and then open the folder options under the tools menu.

Click the Search icon and select the option to search the hidden files as you can see
at the attached screen.

The file names are subject to change , it should be like oemXXX.inf when the XXX is a
number that can change every installation.

After deleting the files reboot the system while the device is disconnected to the
system ,connect the USB-A 3560 and point to the place you have the drivers for
installation, install them and check the system.



As stated in one of my earlier post - the first two files that Shimon names are easy
to find and remove. The second set of files that Shimon talks about searching for are
all named "oemxxxx.inf" where the xxxx are numbers. You'll have to open each one of
these files with notepad and look at the discription at the top of each file. If if
says anything about VBox, then delete that file. I found two .inf files that needed to
be removed from my system (so I deleted a total of four files).

When you reinstall the drivers make sure neither sage or anything else is running. I seem to remember having some problems the first go-round, so I would definitely check in the device manager to confirm that both parts of the driver installed properly. There should be two lines for each tuner. The first will say: VBox 3560 USB2 Receiver, BDA Driver. The second line should say: VBox TV Receiver, BDA Tuner Driver (DTF8600 - ATSC). Make sure it all looks good before running sage to set up the tuner.

I also seemed to recall reading somewhere that these things like a powered usb hub. My wife happened to have one she was not using so I gave it a try. I dont know if it made a difference, but everything worked well so I have continued to use it.

There used to be quite a bit of stuff on these tuners on the AVS forum so you may want to have a look there as well.

HTH.

Jesse

[mike_15]

From what i understand the benefit of the powered hub is to have additional power for the tuner, some MB usb ports don't have the power needed to run the tuner. It is possible you may not see a difference if your MB has ample power to the USB ports.

[jptaz]

I have 3 of these tuners working. I had some prblems with 4.x just like Jesse, but I agree power is very important. Also I had to get a special DLL from MCE for it not crash(SageTV Support Provided it)...it was related to multiple HD tuners causing a crash. I would recommend that you get Rollup 1 and any other fixes for MCE since that is where my multiple HD Tuner fix came from.

John