Quad Tuner Problems and Solutions

3
UPDATE 2:I forgot that I hadn't finished this problem off, in case anyone actually needs the info, there is only one solution that works. You need to completely shut down the machine, unplug the power supply, wait for the capacitors to drain, then turn it on. This doesn't work 100% of the time, but it seems to fix the problem. So basically when I know I'm gonna need to have more than 2 programs recording, I will go through that process and it usually works well, resulting in all 4 tuners working.
As for solving the problem, I personally believe its an issue with the BIOS (since it does something similar in Ubuntu as well), though I can't get Gigabyte to believe me. Essentially, the solution is to simply work around the problem.

Derryn.
UPDATE: Yet again, I was wrong. It's still disappearing at will and I'm getting occasional BSODs relating to nothing in particular, also, it appears that this not only happens on resume from sleep, but occasionally after rebooting. My latest theory is the Philips SAA7160 PCI-e bridge is to blame. From what I can tell, this is a common element of both the Leadtek Px2300H and the AVerMedia TwinStar (A188) cards. It seems that having 2 of that chip running on the same motherboard causes them to merge and become the same device.

My current setup has 2x TwinStar cards.
One is:
Bus 8, device 0, function 0.

The other is:
Bus 10, device 0, function 0.

But when I see only one device in Device Manager, it's:
Bus 9, device 0, function 0.

And the Creative SB X-Fi Titanium takes up
Bus 8, device 0, function 0.

Weird right? Anyway, it seems to be an affliction of a few different motherboards (I finally found something about it on google) so I'll email Gigabyte but I don't really expect there to be a useful response.
UPDATE: As I thought... Gigabyte were useless, told me to update my chipset drivers

 

I figured I would get another AVerMedia TwinStar PCI-e (A188) dual tuner DVB-T card considering I have encountered many situations when I’ve needed more tuners.

Unfortunately MSY have decided to increase the price since I bought the first one. It was $84 six or so months ago, but I had to pay $93. It’s not *that* much more, but somehow $84 sounds like a much smaller number.

Anyway, as per usual I had a problem, one that I thought I had finally solved a few months back. I thought the solution was to remove the Leadtek cards that were causing the problem (going on the assumption that they were somehow incompatible or damaged). Apparently I was wrong.

Now in the present day, I put another TV tuner, identical in every way to the current one, in my computer and low and behold: CRASH… BSOD … almost the same issues I had when the Leadtek cards were in, although this time at least it gave me the name of the driver causing it. I even had one of the cards disappear from Device Manager.

This immediately rang alarm bells and I knew that my problem had not been caused by faulty hardware (unless I was extremely unlucky – like 1 in a trillion unlucky).

So once again I was faced with a few possible causes:

  1. Faulty Drivers
  2. Incompatibility with hardware/software
  3. Bad PCIe slot
  4. BIOS issues
  5. Bad hardware (like I said… almost impossible)

This time faulty drivers were at the top of the list, though I was still thinking it might have been a problem with the BIOS/motherboard.

To test the faulty drivers I figured the easiest way to test for problems would be to remove the drivers, reboot, and reinstall the latest drivers from AVerMedia. After that, I opened up 7MC and watched TV for about 25 seconds, then it started to jitter then BSOD. YAY! So it wasn’t the drivers.

Next, I ended up ruling out the BIOS as a cause simply because it just didn’t seem possible that I am the only one on the entire internet that has had the same set of circumstances (and I searched and searched for hours).

Then I tried switching the cards around, making sure they’re all in properly. Still no luck.

Just for good measure I also dropped the BIOS back to F3 which apparently was a good idea anyway considering the later versions were buggy.

That left me with little in the way of options, and there is practically no way of testing for incompatibility (although I could have switched tuners with the HTPC’s …but I didnt go there).

Out of options, I decided to go back to the drivers as the cause. This time, I decided to go back to the late 90s and remove the drivers and cards the old fashioned way.

Here’s what I did:

  1. Changed the Windows Update settings and ensured it will NOT use Windows Update to get the latest drivers.
  2. Uninstalled both tuners in Device Manager ticking “remove driver”
  3. Uninstalled all AVerMedia software
  4. Rebooted
  5. Removed both tuners
  6. Booted back into Windows
  7. Opened up regedit and remove all traces of any tuner in HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Media Center
  8. Deleted relevant entries in /Service/Video/Tuners AND /Settings/TVConfig/Recorders AND /Settings/RecorderSettings0 thru 3 (removed contents of ‘id’ and change ‘isConfigured’ to ‘0’)
  9. Rebooted again
  10. Ensured EVERYTHING is as it should be without the tuners.
  11. Shutdown
  12. Installed both cards again, ensured they’re both properly seated
  13. Booted back to Windows
  14. Opened up Device Manager, ensured there are 2 unknown devices (Multimedia Controllers)
  15. Extract the drivers from the AVerMedia self-executing EXE
  16. Ran the installer
  17. Rebooted again
  18. Ensured both tuners and their accompanying IR receivers are ready and working
  19. Run 7MC’s TV setup wizard, made sure there was 4 tuners selected
  20. BAM and the dirt is gone! … or rather, it works!

I did a few practice recordings from 4 separate channels at the same time to make sure all of them are functional, they were.

So it seems there is a lesson to be learnt form all this:

If you put 2 of the same cards into a machine, one after the other, you need to completely remove the first card, and it’s drivers, before installing the second.

One would’ve thought with the advent of Plug-n-Play that this wouldn’t be required, but obviously its an exception not seen very often (and naturally I ran into it).

Live and learn I guess.

I would be curious to see if I could use my old Leadtek cards again, though I currently have all PCIe ports occupied so I guess I’ll never know (now I wish I had forked out the $50 more and got the UD7 model with more PCIe ports).

Anyways, all is well that ends well I suppose,

Derryn

New LCD monitor

0
FINAL UPDATE: Ok, from what I can tell the issue is 99% Firefox's fault. I've been trying out Aurora (Firefox's beta) and it looks perfectly fine  

UPDATE 3:  I’ve been sitting on this issue for quite a while now, and I’ve decided that the best looking settings for my purposes (gaming/movies/internet) were to reset the Windows Color Management profile to sRGB and then set the monitor to sRGB (which disallows changes to most options) in the colour temp menu. Then I ran the Windows Display Calibration wizard, and it now looks quite normal.

Sometime I hope to get around to understanding the root of the problem, but it appears that it has to do with Windows 7 and its gamma setting. I should also note that it looks fine in Ubuntu.

This morning I took delivery of a brand new ASUS 24″ LCD monitor (VH242H) for $150 (can you believe it?).

So I got it from CentreCom, I’m not sure exactly why they were charging so little (though it was partially due to the $40 discount code on their Facebook ‘like’ page) but I couldn’t resist the temptation and I ended up getting one.

Amazingly there were no dead pixels, and it looks good.

It’s got full 1080p support, HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection), HDMI/DVI/VGA Inputs and 2 tiny little speakers with SPDIF input.

 

Now I have 2 monitors.. I can “multitask” 😀

Multitasking

Here’s the link http://www.centrecom.com.au/catalog/vh242h-asus-vh242h-black-p-38468.html

Its at $159 at the moment, though I don’t think it’ll stay there.

Now of course there is an issue to report: there seems to be some aliasing (colours around black text) with both ClearText and Font Smoothing on. I’ve tried without, but it just gets worse.

It may be an issue if there’s nothing I can find, though I’m pretty sure there’s gonna be something on google that will help.

UPDATE: I took away the old monitor and its now normal.

UPDATE 2:  Disregard my last, I still appear to have the problem, ClearType or not.

 

Derryn.

Random disappearances

0

I was reminded recently about an issue I had many months ago. Back when I was building the HTPC, I had many problems to contend with.

Little did I know that these problems were all most probably caused by one (or possibly 2) pieces of hardware which I had dismissed as a cause because they were previously working fine, and so therefore had little reason to check them.

So here was definitely a lesson to learn from this: Always follow standard troubleshooting practise i.e. start with nothing and add devices one by one regardless of their flawless history.

Anyway the problem child ended up being the Leadtek PxDTV2300H PCI-E TV tuner, or rather TV tuners; 2 of them to be precise.

It really should have been a dead give away when it was the 2 tuners that disappeared from device manager. From what I remember, I didn’t think of it because of the LAN adapter (onboard) also disappearing/not working at random, thus throwing me off the scent.

At the time I was sure it was a motherboard failure or a PSU failure or even a problem with the RAM.

It wasn’t until long after I replaced the TV Tuners, the motherboard and consequently, the RAM, that I realised it was the TV tuners causing bluescreens, crashes, random device disappearances and general instability. I confirmed it when I put them both into my own computer and I started to get random BSODs and they also started removing themselves from device manager at random.

Whether this is a driver problem (very possible considering Leadtek’s history) or some kind of chipset compatibility issue (both machines I tried were AMD 800 series – 890GX and 890FX), I have no idea, or way of testing it. All I know is that both cards do the same when put together, as they do apart and no amount of driver changing or windows reinstalls helps.

So from all this I suppose my main point is this:

Always check any addon cards, AGP, PCI, PCI-E;

Check em all!

 

Derryn.

Go to Top