Unable to configure dual Avermedia M791 Tuner Cards

[ti229]

I recently purchased two (2) Avermedia M791 Combo ATSC/NTSC Tuner cards. My intention was to integrate them into a PVR system using SageTV v7 on Vista Home Premium SP2. The problem is that I cannot seem to configure both cards at the same time in Sage.

Both cards do appear in the Source Configuration menu, the second as Avermedia 23888 Video Capture #2. I can setup [either one of the two cards] and scan for channels successfully. However, when I get to Channel Setup for [the remaining card], the Channel Scan will not detect anything. Trying to record with this card then always results in a blank red screen, verifying that it is not functioning properly.

I pulled out one card and temporarily replaced it with an Avermedia M780 card from my other machine. The result was that I could then configure both cards at the same time, seemeingly only because they were two different card models.

This leads me to believe that my problem is somehow caused only by using the two identical cards, i.e. possibly with sharing the same drivers, ID#'s, Registry Keys, etc. If this is the problem, I hope that there is some way around it, because the video quality of the M791 cards is better in this system, and I really want to use them both.

Does anyone have any ideas???

[phareous]

I'm not familiar with those but I've used other avermedia cards side-by-side in the past (though these were internal). If you could return them, you could get a more popular model and probably avoid problems.

I'd try getting the latest drivers from avermedia's site. I read on one forum that the ones from windows update mess things up. Other than that, I don't have any suggestions other than to say it sounds like you might not be able to run two of those in your system, but you might be able to run one and then get a different model for the 2nd one.

[ti229]

I sent support ticket to Avermedia and was told that "this was an OEM card used in Vista based MCE's, however their drivers are standard and should work... the problem might be with Sage."

It's not really even worth returning them since I got them for $12 each from PCPartsOhio, and they have surprisingly good quality video for the price.

In the meantime, I took some time and tried fooling around with the driver installation. I took all the Avermedia drivers and made a copy with a new name (xxxx2.xxx). Then I modified the .inf (text) file to install these files instead of the original ones already in place for the first card.

Somewhat to my amazement, when I ran this on the second card I now had video, but no audio yet on the second card. The audio seemed to use drivers already in Vista through 'includes' in the Avermedia .inf installation file.

I came up with a way around this similar to the previous method, but I had to pre-insert files into the "Windows" folders, and I'm not sure that these won't eventually get wiped out by future hardware additions.

I'm sure there is a better and proper way to do this, but I'm not that well versed with Windows, and it also seems to me that the Vista driver storage and installation system is more complex than previous Windows versions were.