Sage sometimes not tuning properly

[dinki]

Hi. I've been experiencing problems with my pvr150's tuning at certain times. What happens is the card tries to tune the station but doesn't seem to totally 'lock on'. The picture is somewhat distorted and there is no sound. I'm attaching an image as an example.

I am running on a XP PRO SP3 P3 3ghz, 2 gigs ram, 2 pvr150s, 1 pvr1600. All drivers are up-to-date. Please advise on what I need to do to fix this annoying problem.

[Slugger]

If it's your PVR-150 card then that's an analog card so there's no such thing as a signal lock/strength. Bad PQ is a result of a bad signal either from your cable co or antenna. Check your input signal - there's no settings on the card or in Sage that will fix that kind of PQ issue. If you're input to the card is from the cable co then are you using a splitter to split the signal to more than one location in the house? If so, that could be the cause of what you're seeing.

[dinki]

I see from your post that I need to add a little more detail. I am recording from cable in for basic cable. The odd thing is that this sometimes happens on the same tuner that I am watching live tv on. I'll be watching a program and then at the start of the next program sage will switch files and the problem will start with the new program whereas the previous program looked great.

I'm almost ceratin that it is not a signal issue as the same tuner plays the same channel fine at one moment and then terrible the next.

[dinki]

Can anyone _please_ offer any possible solutions?

[dinki]

I've written to Sage support and they have been unusually unhelpful. I received a reply asking for the version of my Sagetv Server (current version) and a suggestion to upgrade my hd200 to the latest beta. This problem also occurs on the server itself as well as my Media MVP. The problem is evident in the recorded mpeg file and is not a playback issue with the HD200.

I'm pretty desparate to get this working and would appreciate any suggestions.

[dinki]

Still looking for advice. Sage support has yet to give me any type of feedback on what to try either. Is it normal for Sage support to take this long in addressing problems?

[robogeek]

First, make sure you have the latest drivers. Check the hauppauge.com web site and maybe head over to shspvr.com and check the message board there for possible solutions. If it's not happening all the time or is a problem that didn't always exist, it may be failing hardware on the tuner card. The tuner card may be picking up RF interference from nearby cards in your case or other RF noisy sources near the computer or the cable line. If you think it's a problem of fine tuning the exact frequency to get a cleaner picture and not a noise or hardware problem, check this message thread: http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...16&postcount=5

[dinki]

Jason, first, thank you for taking the time to reply.

I'm using the latest drivers and am experiencing this problem on both pvr150s and the SD side of my PVR1600. The real strange things is that I can be watching a station and things are fine until I get to the top/bottom of the hour and sage switches to the next program's mpeg recording. When this happens, I sometimes get the tuning problem that I described above. This is on the same tuner that was not having problems only seconds before. It just doesn't make any sense.

[robogeek]

The only other thing I can suggest would be to try to hook up one of the tuners as close to the incoming cable line as possible with no splitters (or as few splits as possible), just to see if it's a cabling or signal loss issue. As far as SageTV goes, I don't think there is much they can do on their end...SageTV just tells the driver what channel to tune the tuner to and sends the mpeg stream from the tuner to a file on the hard drive. Other than messing with the registry to tweak the tuning frequencies, I don't think there is anything else that can be done on the software side of things.

[dinki]

My problem has been narrowed down to not always getting the correct frequency when Sage requests a channel change. One of the tech support guys told me that the channel frequency is sent via DirectX when Sage asks for the channel. Most of the time the channel frequency is correct, but sometimes it is not. Here is an example from my log file when Sage fails to tune the channel properly:

un 11/15 8:00:12.274 [AsyncWatch@15c9b76] Seeker channel string=24
Sun 11/15 8:00:12.275 [MainMsg@19274f9] autotune0 analog tuner 'Hauppauge
WinTV PVR PCI II Capture-0' hr=0x0 num=24
Sun 11/15 8:00:13.087 [MainMsg@19274f9] DONE: autotune0 967026592 hr=0x1
result=0  freq:222000000.

Sun 11/15 8:07:23.004 [Seeker@5e3ad0] Seeker channel string=24
Sun 11/15 8:07:23.004 [MainMsg@19274f9] autotune0 analog tuner 'Hauppauge
WinTV PVR PCI II Capture-0' hr=0x0 num=24
Sun 11/15 8:07:23.423 [MainMsg@19274f9] DONE: autotune0 967026592 hr=0x0
result=1  freq:223250000.

You'll see that the first channel change got the wrong frequency but the next one received the correct one. The correct frequency of channel 24 is 223250000. The Sage tech suggested that I use the program FreqShifter to add the frequencies to my registry. I've done this with channels 23 and 24 as these are two channels we watch often. I've confirmed that the values are in the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\TV System Services\TVAutoTune .

Despite all of this, I am still having problems. Can anyone think of anything I can do to keep this odd behavior from happening? Your help is greatly appreciated as my WAF has gone way down!