Theater 650 and picture quality problems

[sunray]

I have a HTPC with XP Home SP2 in which I was running Sage 5.04 with 3 PVR-250 tuner cards connected to analog cable via an Electroline splitter/amplifier. I decided to upgrade to Sage 6.019 and change tuner cards to three ATI Wonder 650s. After installing and setting up Sage I find I'm getting herringbone noise in the recordings and when I'm watching live TV. I always use the DVD Standard Play (3.2 gig/hour) quality. I didnt have this problem with Sage 5.04 and the PVR-250s. The driver I'm using for the ATI Wonder 650 cards is 6.14.10.225. I dont have the ATI Control Panel for the Wonder 650 cards installed because when I tried it gave me an error message so I restored from a backup made before the attempted install.

Does any have any idea as to cause of the problem and how to fix it? Thanks.

[Jesse]

Odd.....

I switched from a pvr500mce to two ATI 650's because I could not get rid of a herringbone pattern in the recordings made by the pvr500. The picture using the ATI cards has been superb, rivaling output right from the Directv STB's I use.

I am still using V5 and I could not tell you which drivers I am using for the ATI cards myself, but I will check tonight and report back. Like you, I do not have the entire control panel installed for the cards.

I have had one issue with the cards. When playing back live tv the video is quite jumpy. Hitting pause for five or so seconds to allow the recording process to get ahead of viewing solves the problem. Obviously recordings are no problem. To get around this I set the delay playback property in sage to start playback five seconds after tuning the channel. A wee bit clunky but it works for me.

Sorry you are having trouble....

Jesse

[sunray]

Thanks for the reply, Jesse. I wonder if the problem you were having with the PVR-500 and I'm having with the Wonder 650s could be caused by the fact they both have Samsung tuners. I remember reading somewhere that the Samsung tuners were causing problems and that Hauppauge at least had finally switched away from them.

[Jesse]

Hi sunray,

FWIW I am using the 6.14.10.194 drivers dated 8/1/06.

HTH

Jesse