DVB-T Card...anyone? (2 Viewers)

Owlsroost

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  • October 28, 2008
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    If I get the chance tonight I'll try my spare 399U on an XP SP3 PC again, just as a sanity check...

    Tony
     

    Obinice

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    A full scan on both Mediaportal and the stock software both turn up empty :( It's a total mystery to me...

    Lol thanks Tony, I've got a machine here with a fresh install of Windows XP SP3 with nothing but the windows updates, I'm going to try it on there in a while to make sure it's not being caused by any third party software I have installed on my other machines.
     

    funkstar

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    A full scan on both Mediaportal and the stock software both turn up empty :( It's a total mystery to me...

    Lol thanks Tony, I've got a machine here with a fresh install of Windows XP SP3 with nothing but the windows updates, I'm going to try it on there in a while to make sure it's not being caused by any third party software I have installed on my other machines.
    A clean system is definitely worth trying on. No matter what I did with my system no a single channel was found, no amount of re-applying drivers or re-installing of MediaPortal would help. Formatted and moved to Windows7 and everything is working as it should again. Something had obviously got messed up with the drivers, but Vista thought everything was hunky dory and couldn't be persuaded otherwise.

    I do think the BDA driver model is pretty flakey at the best of times, it doesn't seem to take a lot to break it :)
     

    Owlsroost

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    OK, attached is the (old) U399 driver version that I used on my XP SP3 machine - I've just done a quick test using ProgDVB and it scans and plays TV OK.

    I wonder if they've broken something (for XP) in the later drivers - both usualsuspect and myself are running MP on Vista....

    UPDATE: Just tried updating to the latest drivers (v9.603.1), rebooted, and it still scans and plays....

    I haven't got any extra video-related network devces either.

    Tony
     

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    Obinice

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    I installed MediaPortal and the driver you uploaded onto my new PC, and it worked perfectly :) I guess the solution then is to reinstall XP onto the machine I actually want to use the dongle on, and hope that I don't unwittingly reinstall whatever was causing the problem in the first place.

    Thanks very much for the help, I'll let you know how it turns out :)
     

    Obinice

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    The plot thickens!

    I installed a fresh copy of Windows XP with a firewall & antivirus, and full windows updates. I then installed the driver you provided, and MediaPortal. I then did a scan, and it picked up channels! When it detects a channel, the dongle lights up ORANGE. So far, it's done exactly what the other XP SP3 machine I got it to work on did.

    Here comes the odd part. When I ran Mediaportal to try out the TV (just like I did on the other fresh XP SP3 machine), Mediaportal would freeze up when I turned on the TV. I also installed the dvbfix. In Task Manager it's clear that Mediaportal is using between 0-10% of CPU, and is slowly eating up more and more memory at a rate of around 100K a second, with no sign of stopping until I kill it (currently at 150,000K and increasing).

    To make things stranger, now when I'm using Mediaportal the dongle lights up GREEN. It's never lit up green before, not even when I had the TV on on the other machine working fine, or on the Vista machine.

    And just now as I'm writing this I see that the dongle is lighting up orange again (I've left Mediaportal doing its frozen-memory-eating thing to write this post, and at some point it must have switched colours while I wasn't looking).

    And now just as I'm writing this I have closed Mediaportal to see that the dongle is still lit up orange, and I've noticed that TvService.exe is also eating up more memory. It's at 47,000K and showing no signs of slowing down, taking about 23K a second. Killing TvService.exe has finally stopped the orange light.

    I am so confused guys..... :confused:


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    Update
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    Also, I had to uninstall and reinstall Mediaportal because I changed the computer's name (it was set to the name of another machine by accident and had to be changed), and Mediaportal went crazy about it. When I reinstalled Mediaportal, it only detected one of the tuners instead of both, and didn't pick up any stations, as usual. Oh, and now it's deciding not to detect either of the tuners.

    :(

    Unless there's a magical fix you guys can come up with I'm going to take that dongle and have it hung, drawn, and quartered! And whipped! And boiled..... And then I'll do it again! And when I've finished I will take all the little bits, and I will JUMP on them! And I will carry on jumping on them until I get blisters, or I can think of something even more unpleasant to do.
     

    Owlsroost

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    I don't have any experience with running MP on XP (I use Vista) but I'll try and help....

    The orange & green lights are activity lights for each tuner (as far as I know).

    Which version of MP are you running ? (I'd stay with 1.0.2 for now)

    Can you attach some logs (run the MP log collector - in the MP program group on the Start menu) ?

    What sort of network connection does the PC have ?

    Have you tried turning off the firewall ? (the connection between TV server and MP is via the network stack, so network problems/firewalls etc can cause problems)

    When you did the uninstall/reinstall, did you tell it to drop the database as well ? (a good idea if you've changed the computer name)

    TV service will be trying to gather DVB EPG data in the background, so you will see tuner activity when you are not watching TV in MP. This might account for the slowly increasing RAM usage in TV service, since I think it caches the EPG data in RAM before updating the database.


    Tony
     

    Vouzamo

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    From the pictures, it looks like it's a Kworld 'PCI-E Dual DVB-T TV Card (VS-DVBT PE210)' - http://global.kworld-global.com/main/prod_in.aspx?mnuid=1248&modid=6&pcid=44&ifid=18&prodid=77 - which doesn't have any Win7 drivers.....so not so good....although the Vista drivers *might* work OK

    Tony

    According to the url I posted, in the Q&A section, it does support windows 7...

    Q- Hi, is this compatible Windows 7 - Tony
    Answer- Yes, the device is Windows 7 compatible. Download can be found at http://uk.kworld-global.com


    Does this mean that any card will work provided that drivers are available?
     

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