Scratch that… second tuner card just disappeared… *sigh*

It appears, though I will wait a few weeks before saying its ‘confirmed’, that my TV Tuner disappearances has finally CEASED!

In the end I did the old switch-a-roo with the Media PC’s dual tuner (DViCo FusionHDTV Dual Express2 PCIe) with one of mine (AVerMedia TwinStar PCIe). So far there have been no BSoD’s or problems with hardware disappearing randomly. I’ll reserve my happyness until ive used both machines a while, just to be sure this time lol.

As for the cause of the problem, I can only speculate, but it does indeed appear to be a specific PCIe bridge chip that causes problems when 2 or more exist on the same motherboard. Strange problem though, and Gigabyte are still adamant that it’s the chipset driver. I personally believe it has to do with the AMD800 series chipset, which should be fixable in the BIOS coding.

On further inspection, the DViCo card does not feature a PCIe A/V Capture Bridge, which is interesting. From what I’ve discovered from it’s datasheet, the SAA7160 A/V Capture PCIe bridge (on the TwinStar) is used to multiplex everything received (audio/video) and send it off via the PCIe 1x port to the Northbridge. It seems this would be the point where having two would conflict. That said, I’m no expert and its starting to give me quite a headache, so from now on… I don’t care about it!

Anyways, in the mean time I’ve also been working out the foibles of BSE (Big Screen EPG) and why I cannot get channel logos to work properly. In the end it was easier to just use MyChannelLogos (USD$3.40 donation) to get them working, so that’s that I’ve done, and it’s now looking great!

Until my next problem,

Derryn