This is going to be long so pleae bear with me. I woke up Friday morning and sat down in front of my HTPC to watch a show while having breakfast. I noticed a warning indicator in BeyondTV and discovered that none of my shows had been recorded from the night before as BTV could not locate a signal from any of the tuners. I've got six ATSC tuners connected to an external powered USB hub so there's plenty to choose from. I checked the Device Manager and all six tuners were listed. I then reran the BTV setup and I got zero signal from every tuner.
My first inclination was that the USB hub was bad as this has happened before with another hub. I swapped out the hub and restarted the PC. The POST screen hung on the part where it was initiating the USB devices and just sat there for at least five minutes before finally booting into WinXP. This time only three of the six tuners showed up in Device Manager, but it could have been the replacement hub I was using. I ended up putting the original hub back in.
After playing around with the BeyondTV software and eventually reinstalling it, I was finally able to get two of the six tuners to provide a signal, but they eventually vanished as well. I have a HDHomeRun connected to my network so I installed the HDHR software on the HTPC, but BTV could not find the tuners. I checked one of my other PCs with Win7 MC and it had no problem picking up a signal from the HDHR. The USB tuners are all fed the same signal as the HDHR from a splitter so I know that the antenna feed is good.
I have an ATi 4650 graphics card feeding an Asus HDAV 1.3 sound card via HDMI. With the HDAV in the PCI-E slot, I would only get a blank screen. After removing the HDAV and running straight off the 4650 I was able to get video again. The PC would also boot without hanging on the POST screen as before.
Whenever I made a selection on the screen using my mouse or remote, the screen would blank for a few seconds and then reappear. The remote would also function hit or miss.
Synopsis:
Can't boot without hanging if the HDAV is installed
Can't get video if daisychained thru HDAV
No signal from tuners
Remote control is intermittent via USB-UIRT
My first inclination is that there's a problem with the USB bus as anything connected to a USB port is acting flaky. The PCI-E bus is also acting weird due to the intermittent video and the HDAV issues. My guess would be that one of the chipsets that controls both buses is going bad.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
My first inclination was that the USB hub was bad as this has happened before with another hub. I swapped out the hub and restarted the PC. The POST screen hung on the part where it was initiating the USB devices and just sat there for at least five minutes before finally booting into WinXP. This time only three of the six tuners showed up in Device Manager, but it could have been the replacement hub I was using. I ended up putting the original hub back in.
After playing around with the BeyondTV software and eventually reinstalling it, I was finally able to get two of the six tuners to provide a signal, but they eventually vanished as well. I have a HDHomeRun connected to my network so I installed the HDHR software on the HTPC, but BTV could not find the tuners. I checked one of my other PCs with Win7 MC and it had no problem picking up a signal from the HDHR. The USB tuners are all fed the same signal as the HDHR from a splitter so I know that the antenna feed is good.
I have an ATi 4650 graphics card feeding an Asus HDAV 1.3 sound card via HDMI. With the HDAV in the PCI-E slot, I would only get a blank screen. After removing the HDAV and running straight off the 4650 I was able to get video again. The PC would also boot without hanging on the POST screen as before.
Whenever I made a selection on the screen using my mouse or remote, the screen would blank for a few seconds and then reappear. The remote would also function hit or miss.
Synopsis:
Can't boot without hanging if the HDAV is installed
Can't get video if daisychained thru HDAV
No signal from tuners
Remote control is intermittent via USB-UIRT
My first inclination is that there's a problem with the USB bus as anything connected to a USB port is acting flaky. The PCI-E bus is also acting weird due to the intermittent video and the HDAV issues. My guess would be that one of the chipsets that controls both buses is going bad.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
