Unable to change channels in Sage TV

[ratt57]

I'm about ready to throw my media center out the window... I have a WinTV PVR-250 card installed in my machine that has been working great up until now... I re-installed SageTV, which wiped out my earlier settings, and now I can't re-configure it back to what it was. If I open up WinTV 2000 I have no problem manually switching TV channels on the card through that program... but when I run SageTV the program stays on the channel that I closed WinTV with... no matter what channel I choose in Sage, it stays on only that one channel. Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Any help would be greatly appreciated...

[stanger89]

Have you gone through the setup wizard again, and did you select TV Tuner as your source?

[ratt57]

About nine times now... I have an ATI Radeon 9200 card, and an extra tuner card (Philips) also installed. About an hour ago I managed to finally get the channels to change by plugging my cable connection into the extra tuner card, and when I rebooted and started SageTV again... this time, channels that I could change but no sound. After fiddling with all the audio options in detailed settings, I had no luck whatsoever getting any sound. Rebooted my computer, NOW I'm at a black screen with no sound... nothing. I've pulled the extra tuner card, checked that the Hauppauge works in WinTV, which it still does, but Sage continues to stay black when I go into LiveTV. I've updated Java, re-installed WinTV and SageTV close to four times this morning.

I had pretty high hopes for this program, but I'm beginning to see that it has a lot of problems. Even when the program worked before, I was consistently needing to reconfigure it, as the screen would often boot up into black... the .pdf file that comes with the program gives absolutely no information into how to configure the program any more than walking through the actual menus does (as an example, I'm still trying to figure out what the word "composite" means... is this my extra tuner card, and, if so, what am I choosing when I install? Also, why does my Radeon card show up in Setup Wizard with the tuner option - with more composite options, no less - when it doesn't even HAVE a tuner built into it?)


Sorry to rant here, but this is really pissing me off. For what Sage TV costs, this shouldn't have to be this difficult.

[stanger89]

I assume you have installed the video decoders that came with the 250? and that you selected the 250 (or Hauppauge WinTV PVR PCI II Capture) as the capture device when going through the Wizard?

Composite is a type of video connection (Yellow RCA connector usually), you don't want to select it if you're using the tuner.

Black screen on start sounds like a 3D accelleration problem, try disabling it if you have it enabled (Detailed Setup -> Advanced).

I don't know why your Radeon shows up in the setup wizard, it shouldn't.

The PDF is oft commented on, there really should have been a full manual, Frey know that and is working on one (not that that helps you really).

Sage generally isn't that hard, but it's market is expanding and things that are obvious to those of us that have been using Sage for a long time (especially the devs) aren't always for new users. Stick with it, it's worth any effort.

[ratt57]

Hey, guess what? After pulling the extra tuner card and rebooting, it seems to be working now. After one re-start of the program I got a black screen, but re-started it three or four times after and it's working consistently. Now I'll try and re-install MalDude's plugin and see if things continue to function.

Stranger 89, thanks for your help. Even if the suggestions don't always work, it's really great to know someone's watching over what you're doing and trying to assist. Definitely keeps the frustration down.

Would like to figure out how to stick this other tuner card in and reconfigure settings... but I'm ahead right now, so I may wait a couple of days.

[ratt57]

Also - now that I've pulled that tuner card the Radeon doesn't show up in the Setup Wizard... not sure why the presence of the Philips card made it do that.

[stanger89]

I try to help where I can

Suggestion to help keep you from trouble in the future:
The sage.properties and wiz.bin files are the important ones that store all your configuration info. The sage.properties file stores most of your settings (lineups, decoders, etc) the wiz.bin holds all the programming info. Back them up before you change something (reinstall Sage/windows whatever) and then you can put them back and not have to redo everything manually.

I'm not sure what that philips card is, but I doubt if it's supported in Sage, so I'm not sure you'll ever get it to work.