Sage V7 Audio drops out after playing one program

[tmaddison]

I’ve been using Sage for likely 10+ years now, very little has stumped me before, until now..

I’m on the last version of Sage – V 7-point-whatever. I’ve had that installed in the same machine, running the same hardware, for many years. I recently updated the OS from XP to Win 8.1 a few months ago – that was painful to reinstall Sage, but I ended up getting everything going fine.

Recently I noticed some strangeness happening in the way my tuner cards were working – I have an HVR-2250, HVR-1600, and PV-150. Problem was that intermittently a tuner - all of which had worked previously, would not tune to a station – static.

I tried fiddling around with various things and then noticed there was an update to Hauppauge’s WinTV since I had installed Win 8. Nothing in there indicated it would solve my problem, but in the vein of “making sure I’m using the latest drivers” I downloaded and installed that. Part of that installation process involved running HCW Clear first – to remove all vestiges of the old drivers.

Did that – mistake….

I didn’t realize it would not only remove the tuner card drivers but would have fairly far reaching effects on my Sage install itself. When I first opened Sage, it now it thought it was a brand new install, waiting for me to configure everything from scratch.. Arrggghhh…

I could have just reloaded the config files (I backed them up), but I figured “OK, we’re starting fresh so we might as well start fresh” and I went through the process of configuring everything. Fortunately it didn't clear some things - like favorites...

All worked well, my issues with tuners seem to be resolved. Yay! Back to a flawlessly working Sage install…. I thought.

Then I tried to use it normally and discovered weirdness in audio output – that’s the issue for this post. After I play back a program and start the next program, the audio output just disappears....

What happens is this….

Reboot windows, load SageTV. Start playback (any show....). Watch show. When show ends, navigate to another show - or even re-start the same show again. Start playback – no audio output (no sound at all)….

Check Sage volume, fine. Check Windows sound setup, everything looks fine (not muted, proper soundcard selected, etc.) Windows will play back audio using Windows Media Player, Winamp, etc. Sage appears to be the only program that stops putting out audio.

Reboot windows, load SageTV. Find same program that just played back with no audio, start playback. Audio playing just fine again. Stop, start new program (or same program over again), no audio.

Repeat loop.

The point is that I can only get audio out for “the first show watched after a reboot”, then the audio goes away. This happens even if “the next program I watch” is the same program I just watched – so I know it’s recorded fine, Sage is fine with the audio/video codecs, etc.

Happens whether I’m watching native MPEG2 recordings or recordings that were originally HD and converted to MP4, no difference in behavior.

What is it that’s happening when Sage stops playing one program and then starts playing another that could somehow be interacting with the ability to output audio? I assume when I start playing any program the internal media player in Sage does “whatever it does” to identify the format and proper codec to use, but it just DID that on the same video file, successfully.

What should I look for to troubleshoot this?

Thanks!

Todd

[Skirge01]

Does the same thing happen if you try playing back two media files in an external player such as VLC or WMP?