TWC shutting off my signal... now what?

[dgeezer]

So are you using the small cisco tuner box? I have one that TWC sent me a while back. I was never able to get a signal on it. I'm in Greensboro and the couple people I know who have the same box had to get a service call in order to get the box working.

How difficult was it to set up with the colossus?

[sclamage]

Hey, sorry for the late response on this... Guess I forgot to enable emails for this thread and I don't visit the forum too often these days.

Originally Posted by dgeezer

So are you using the small cisco tuner box? I have one that TWC sent me a while back. I was never able to get a signal on it. I'm in Greensboro and the couple people I know who have the same box had to get a service call in order to get the box working.

Yeah, it's the little black Cisco box. Says DTA-271HD on the bottom.

They didn't work at all for me when I plugged them in. They had to send a guy out a few days later, and it took him a good two hours to get them working. Well done TWC!

Originally Posted by dgeezer

How difficult was it to set up with the colossus?

Surprisingly, not too bad! It more or less amounted to:
- get ViewHD HDMI splitter via eBay to deal with HDCP (mine says VHD-1x2MN3D on it, if that helps you track it down)
- install Colossus card, remove old analog tuner card
- wire up boxes, use rubber bands to make sure IR transmitter sticks to DTA box (the adhesive wasn't very good)
- install Hauppauge drivers & software; waste an hour dealing with their janky registration system (blood pressure rising once again as I recall this...)
- fire up the Hauppauge Capture app to verify that it was getting a de-HDCPed signal
- fiddle with powering up the splitter and the DTA in various orders until I got HDCP handshake working (i.e. repeat previous step multiple times)
- apply SHS's registry patches from here so that Sage knows how to talk to your Colossus: http://shspvr.com/reviews/hd_pvr_2/h...sagetv_fix.zip (also make sure to bump up the tuning delay, as noted in the readme)
- add colossus tuner to SageTV (it identifies itself as "Hauppauge Siena Video Capture")
- set up IR blaster:
-- launch Hauppauge BlastCfg app, set Device Type = cable box, Vendor = Time Warner, CodeSet = 142... or at least that's what worked for me. You can test this with the Capture app running to see if you've got it right.
-- back in Sage, configure video source to use "Hauppauge IR Blaster StubDevice". And then there was some magic and prayer happening and I don't remember whether I created this manually or what, but I have an empty "\Program Files (x86) \SageTV\Common\RemoteCodes\Hauppauge IR Blaster\" directory now. There were some forum posts that I can't find now that talk about what goes here. Most of them suggested reinstalling Sage from scratch to fix things, but I didn't have the patience for that so I just followed my intuition and hoped for the best. Fortunately this worked. (I may have also edited my StubDevice.ir, which lives in \RemoteCodes, but I *think* that was unnecessary.)
- Do video source channel setup voodoo... Basically just selecting all the channels I cared about from the existing lineup. I think I ended up doing some channel number overrides since the guide data didn't match up exactly.

That's pretty much it! It was moderately painful, but definitely could have been a lot worse. It took one (very long) evening, and it's been pretty solid for over a month now. Unfortunately I didn't bother to take notes, so this is all from memory. There's a good chance I left out an important step or two.

Let me know if you have specific questions or issues... I'll be happy to compare notes.

Good luck!

[SHS]

New Link to the hdpvr2_sagetv_fix.zip

[KryptoNyte]

If you have any channel changing reliability issues with the Hauppauge blaster, don't hesitate to dish out the cash for a USB-UIRT.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

If you have any channel changing reliability issues with the Hauppauge blaster, don't hesitate to dish out the cash for a USB-UIRT.

USB-UIRT - One of the best investments I have made.

[sclamage]

Thanks for the followups!

The Hauppauge blaster has actually been totally reliable for me, once I got it set up. Everything is still working smoothly several months later... fingers crossed!