Bad AverMedia A180?

[rfburns]

Background: I've got a Celeron D 3.2 GHz, 2 gig RAM.

When on the SageTV trial, I bought a Hauppauge HVR-1800 to toy with, and it worked fine. When I bought the SageTV license (and an HD-100 extender), I also got the AverMedia A180 with it, for use as a second tuner. I'm having problems with the A180, though. I wanted to run it by the group and see if others have had this problem and possible solutions, or if I may just have a bad card.

I'm only using OTA HD (I don't really care about the HD part of it, as I have an SD television, but I want to see the digital stations). I have an amplified antenna running into a splitter, then feeding each of the tuner cards.

On the Hauppauge card, everything is fine. Full signal on all channels (100% on most, 85% on one station).

On the A180, the signal (as shown on Setup Video Source) is never as high as the Hauppauge card. It even jumps from 35% to 75% back and forth. It occasionally hits 100%, but will go back to 75% or 35% within a few seconds. I get lots of stuttering on most channels. With the composite inputs, the video takes about 4-5 seconds to make it to the TV (which I just attributed to encoding time), and the audio is about 3-5 seconds behind the video constantly. Oh, and the composite video quality is awful. It has lots of "static lines" across the screen, even though the video looks fine on my videocamera's LCD, and looks fine if I plug directly into a TV.

Back on the Hauppauge card, I can't try composite video (it only has an S-Video input), but when I try the composite inputs for audio, the audio only takes about 1 second to come through to the TV. That makes me even more suspect of the A180's composite inputs.

I tried running the system with only the A180, in case it was conflicting with the Hauppauge, but same results. I ran the antenna directly to the card, bypassing the splitter. I turned the amplified antenna off. I adjusted the antenna all sorts of ways. I reinstalled drivers. I installed the AverTV application (suggestion found elsewhere on the forum), and uninstalled it. I moved slots. I reinstalled the Hauppauge and tried moving it to another slot. Through all this, the Hauppauge works fine, and the A180 has the same problems.

So, with all that said, does anyone think this could possibly be a driver issue, or do I most likely have a bad card?