Was working fine...

[chip33az]

I had everything working perfectly. I have a VIA EPIA as the server, with an HDHR for tuning and an HD Extender.

Last week, I called Cox and had them lower my Internet bandwidth to the lowest speed (money saving time), but shortly after (it seems like it), taping channels in the HD side seems to be hit or miss.

Before last week, everything was perfect. I could record and watch any channel I had listed. This weekend it took me 3 tries to tape a show. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't.

The local channels (non-HD) work fine.

Any suggestions?

[ntisdale]

Hmm it's always frustrating when you think you having it working perfectly and then the system decides you're not obviously not busy enough. The best course of action in situations like this is to verify the signal integrity at each stage of the link. So if you have some other way of checking your cable signal with a seperate cable box or try recording/viewing content from the HDHR using a different computer with software that you know to be reliable (i.e. on a windows/mac pc using silicon dusts supplied software). If the signal seems fine at that point it's time to check the HDHR in linux using some basic command line tools (i.e. without sage) that dump the received stream straight to the harddrive. As I have DVB-T tuners I use the DVBTools suite of programs when testing, unfortunately I have no experience of the HDHR so you'll have to do some research to find similar tools but I'm sure they must exist. Finally, contact Sage support, there is a way of telling sage to dump the raw data it receives from a digital tuner to a file, by inspecting those files in a decent video player program it should be clear if sage is having a problem at the point of capturing the signal or at the point of processing it (splitting it etc...)

I hope this gives you a starting point, let me know how you get on.

Neil

[chip33az]

Thanks.

It might be the signal strength. Don't know for sure.

I ran the HDHR tools from my Ubuntu box and the same thing happens. Sometimes I can tune the channel, sometimes I can't.

The signal strength for the channels I can always tune looks to be around 69 - 70% (weak, but I'm in an apartment). The channel(s) that I'm now having an issue with reports a signal strength of 70 - 71%.

I'm curious if it could be a Cox issue as yesterday and today, their Internet connection has been flakey. Over the weekend I didn't really use the Internet so I don't know if they had issues then.

[chip33az]

I did some checking on a local board about Cox and sure enough, on July 1st, they modified their setup (something about PAT and SDV - have no idea), but it is affecting quite a few people in AZ.

Glad to see it wasn't my setup