HDHomeRun Tweaked by Beyond TV?

Hi Folks,

Does anybody know what Beyond TV might have done to my SiliconDust HDHomeRun?

It was working fine in Vista Media Center (32 bit, SP1). I installed the Beyond TV trial and poked around with it. Some channels seemed to be coming in less smoothly than with VMC so I opened up VMC to have a side-by-side comparison. No dice. Black screen for VMC.

I shut down Beyond TV thinking that maybe two pieces of software can't be running live tv simultaneously. VMC still black screen with eventual "no signal" message.

So I disabled Beyond TV and rebooted fresh. Same deal. VMC gets no signal from the tuner. I went into the SEttings of VMC and did the channel scan again. All channels found. Green full signals. But no ability to tune the picture.

I went into the HDHomeRun setup interface and rescanned there. All channels found. But, when I tried to view the picture with the "View" button that brings up the VLC viewer, again no picture at all.

If I ran BeyondTV again, pictures are fine in it.

Now get this: I restored the operating system from an image taken right before installing Beyond TV. After doing so, I STILL had the problem. VMC no picture, eventually no signal reported.

At this point I figured Beyond TV must have done something strange to the tuner. I uninstalled the HDHomeRun software and reinstalled it hoping it would reconfigure the tuner properly.

Finally, back to normal with VMC. What was this all about? A quick googling didn't get me many answers... I figured I would come to my best source of info: you folks.

I'm interested to play with Beyond TV more but not if it's going to screw up the tuner for other apps. I didn't try it, but my other computer probably wouldn't have been able to connect and get picture from the tuner either, since apparently something in the HDHomeRun box was changed.

Thoughts?

Marc

Tried power cycling the tuner box. No joy.

Tried rebooting the PC without beyond tv starting up (both recording engine and main interface disabled). No joy. Complete uninstall of beyondtv, power cycle tuner, full restart. No joy.

Restored disk image to pre beyondtv state. No joy.

Re-ran HDHomerun setup. That fixed it.

Must have set something in the box. Maybe characteristics of the data stream?

I bought the discrete tuner to avoid these kinds of issues. Sigh.

Further thoughts ?

Tonight I may try again to seei if it repeats. May try on another pc on the network.

Anxious to hear any experiences of hdhoerun in beyondtv plus other software environment.

ASTC Terrestrial HD Digital signals only.

The part I really can't explain is why the HDHomeRun still knew the channel frequencies and such, and I could scan with it and find the right channels, but when I tried to VIEW the channels to use those found signals, no picture/sound. Very odd.

Marc

But... The point of this discrete tuner box, accessed over the network, is that it is platform-agnostic. So, a PC could be using one tuner and a mac on the network using another at the same time.

Why should two diff applications on one machine, independently accessing the tuners, cause the tuner box to barf at all, much less to the extent that a power cycling didn't cure it?

Marc

I may install beyondtv on my other pc and see if there are problems in the situation of:

PC1: beyondtv
PC2: vista media center

Will report back.

Marc

Good suggestion. I started a thread. Click here to go there.