Weird HDTV tuning problem

[djseto]

I'm experiencing an interesting problem that has been driving me crazy for the past few days. I'm going to open a ticket with support, but I'm hoping in the meantime someone might have some ideas.

I recently moved to a new city and had to setup my SageTV server for the new cable lineup. My cable provider (time warner) provides the local HD channels on unencrypted QAM which is supported by my Happauge HVR-1600 cards (this is how my old cable provider worked as well). I have two of them for a total of 4 tuners, 2HD, 2 SD. I got them all configured and the SD tuners work fine, but I'm having this problem with my HD tuners.My tuners are setup in SageTV as HD1, SD2, HD3, SD4.

Here we go:
When tune to a HD channel and SageTV chooses HD1, my channels come in fine. When I tune to a channel and SageTV chooses HD3, nothing comes up and I get an error with the default STV that says "No signal". If I hit stop and then re-tune the channel, it loads fine. At this point, I thought it was a problem with my signal strength, so I tried recording on 2 HD channels at once. I select HD1 to record a show. I then try to tune HD3 to a channel. Again, I get "no signal". I hit stop and re-tune the channel and now I'm able to record two HD shows. In the setup for my video sources, it shows the signal strength for HD at around 88-90%, so I figure it's not the signal strength.

So now I try some trial and error experimenting. I removed HD3 so now my SageTV has only 3 tuners (HD1, SD2, SD4). In this configuration, when I select an HD show, HD1 has no problem whatsoever tuning. OK...now I think it's a bad HD tuner on HD3. I go out, buy a new HVR-1600, and replace my "defective" one with a new one. SAME FREAKING PROBLEM.

I'm so lost at this point. I've turned on detailed logging. If anyone can interpret the log, I'll add it to this thread. I don't know what's happening here. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[djseto]

I noticed something else weird..

I set HD1 to Fox HD (channel 50-1) to record football. I then tuned to ABC HD (channel 11-1) to watch NASCAR. When it showed that I was watching ABC, it was showing football from 50-1. I hit stop, retuned the channel and it still showed me what was on Fox even though it says it was tuned on HD3 to ABC. I can't exactly replicate the issue with consistency , but I can get it to happen every once and a while. This thread got moved to hardware support, but I think this is a software glitch...

I'm thinking that SageTV is confused about how to address or control my HD tuners? Thoughts?

[djseto]

I also just tried switching the tuner cards on the motherboard. the problem still happens when sage tries to tune HD3 not HD1....

[Opus4]

Did you perform a channel scan on both digital tuners, as the PDF manual states must be done (p. 159 and p. 163), or did you only scan on the first digital tuner and skipped it on the 2nd one?

- Andy

[djseto]

I scanned one and then had it use the same lineup as the first. This has worked in the past, but I'll have it re-scan now.

[djseto]

That fixed it! Man...to think of all the wasted hours I spent troubleshooting.

So now the big question is why did I have to rescan? Why can't one tuner simply use the same lineup listing as the other? Scanning takes a while, so I figured I'd just use one HD scan for both tuners...clearly, I should read directions even though I had this running great at my old place for over a year

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by djseto

That fixed it! Man...to think of all the wasted hours I spent troubleshooting.

So now the big question is why did I have to rescan? Why can't one tuner simply use the same lineup listing as the other? Scanning takes a while, so I figured I'd just use one HD scan for both tuners...clearly, I should read directions even though I had this running great at my old place for over a year

I had to do the same thing because my OTA channels got assigned new numbers and my system was very confused.

[djseto]

Yeh..my channels are QAM and they didn't change in the 2 minutes it took for me to tell HD3 to use the same lineup as HD1....