HD recording just stopped working

[cord]

I've already filed a support ticket on this, but I thought the rest of you might have a clue for me, too.

I'm running SageTV 5.04 on Windows XP MCE. I have a couple of clients, both on XP Pro. The problem manifests identically on the server and the clients, so the clients can be ignored.

My Sage setup has been stable and working for a long time now -- since before the production 5.0 release, really. I ran the 5.0 betas and they worked just fine. When the final release was ready, I wiped everything and reinstalled from zero -- no upgrade. Since then, everything's been cool. A few months back, I added a second HD tuner. Now I have two PVR-150MCE cards, a FusionHDTV3+, and a Cat's Eye USB 3560. I record HD off the air, and the SD cards get cable from Time Weiner, with no cable boxes.

Last Monday, everything worked great. My HD shows recorded and played back fine, as did the SD ones. I was out having fun that night, and on Tuesday night, so I didn't even turn on any of the clients and didn't watch anything. Sometime between 10pm Monday night and 7pm Tuesday night, SageTV stopped playing nice with my HD recording hardware. Now, whenever I try to watch or record HD, I either get snow or I get an incorrect channel. When I get an incorrect channel, it's always the last SD channel I was watching, coming off one of the PVR-150's.

I've tried rebooting. I've checked windows update, and no updates were applied during the period in question. In desparation, I applied the few pending updates. I made sure all the MCE services were off and disabled. I removed and re-added all my video sources. I removed one of the HD sources, leaving just one. I removed all the HD, rebooted, then re-added. Nothing works. The part that really gets me is that, when adding an HD source, the preview works perfectly. I can watch HD in the preview window, and I can change channels correctly. As soon as I try to watch for real, things stop working. I've checked the recorded files on disk, and it's not just that the playback's screwed -- the wrong stuff's being laid down on the hard drives, too.

So, any clues?

Robert

[mattsm]

I have the same problem the EPG data has changed and the channels are missing from the guide. They are in the 1500's except they are not tuning the HD channels.

[cord]

Actually, that's not the same problem at all. My guide data's just as perfect as ever. When I pick an HD channel from the guide, SageTV thinks it's tuning it in, but I get snow, or I get a completely different channel.

[mattsm]

I would like to say they are similar problems. My guide has the right data at the channels in the 1500s it thinks it is the HD channels as well, but when it tunes it I get static also.

[cord]

Matt,

Did your analog cable line-up recently have digital channels added to it? I'm on time-warner analog cable in Austin, and the HD channels just started showing up. I believe that caused my problem. I'm still testing it out, but I was removing and re-adding the analog sources and noticed the digital channels listed in my extended (analog) basic cable channels. I've disabled them, and now I'm waiting for an HD show to come on, to see if it'll record correctly.

[mattsm]

Yes this is what happened, and I also think it is what is causing the problem as well.

I'm also on the same channel line up here in Austin. I have been talking to someone from Sage trying to solve the problem but it has been slow going.

[cord]

So ultimately, we did/do have the same problem. Mine was compounded with some kind of corruption in wiz.bin. Restoring wiz.bin from an old backup fixed my repeated lockups & crashes, but only removing the channels above 1500 from my line-up fixed the HD recording SNAFU (I think it did, anyway).

I suspect these channels were added to analog line-ups because Sage now has experimental support for QAM in the 6.0 beta. If that's the case, they need to quickly figure out how to keep channel lists more distinct between tuner cards.

[mattsm]

Wait, removing the channels from the regular lineup did not fix my recording problems. Although I thought it would. Maybe my wiz.bin is corrupt too? But I doubt it.

Grrr this is pissing me off.

[cord]

Here's what I did, and it's working so far:

1. Removed *ALL* tuners from Sage and restarted (didn't reboot, just restarted Sage)
2. Added my two HD sources back, accepted channel line-up without changes (I did NOT scan for channels)
3. Restarted Sage again
4. Added my two SD sources back, selected channel line-up, did NOT scan for channels, then edited line-up to get rid of channels over 1500 and annoying shopping, country music, and golf channels.
5. Restarted Sage yet again

After all that song and dance, Sage has successfully recorded two SD shows and two HD shows in the last 24 hours. Tonight will be another good test, since it'll be trying to record an SD and an HD show simultaneously.

[mattsm]

Sadly this did not work for me, maybe my wiz.bin is corrupt and it is setting up the channels wrong. Not sure what to do now...

[cord]

Well, I thought that removing the cable HD channels and restoring my wiz.bin would fix the problem, but I was wrong. My system was going BSOD about ever five minutes during HD recording, all weekend. On Monday I wiped and completely rebuilt my system, starting from zero. I switched from XP MCE to XP Pro, reinstalled all the latest & greatest drivers, then installed and activated SageTV.

When I first started trying to record HD after the reinstall, I was back to getting the bogus behavior in which it would try to grab the SD cards for HD channels. That was a rude reminder to remove the useless cable HD channels. After that, everything is working perfectly. Something was obviously very broken in my old setup, but I'm not sure what broke.

All is well for me now. I hope you've solved your issues with less work!