Tuner Issues...

A while back I decided to go for the whole Media Center experience, and while I didn't have a copy of Windows MCE at the time, I used and open source alternative - MediaPortal (www.team-mediaportal.com). I bought a dual tuner - specifically a Hauppauge PVR 500 MCE, which worked a treat and allowed me to watch one show while recording another - perfect!

Lately I've bought a new PC - Quad Core, 4GB ram, dual monitors, Vista Ultimate x64...a pretty nice machine for my purposes! Similarly to most computer folks out there, I relish the painstaking labor of a fresh install - loading all my apps and my settings and configuring my new box just right. All went well and in a matter of hours I was able to run Vista's in-built media center - a beautifully designed piece of software (though PiP would have been a nice addition…). Watching tv shows wasn't an issue, and all was well…or so I thought.

Days went by before I decided to watch my first scheduled recording - but to my horror I had nothing but a few minutes of green screen. The same went for the other shows I had set up to record. So I did everything conceivable, reinstalling a bunch of drivers for my Hauppauge TV tuner. At first everything worked ok. I installed, I saw tv - happy days. But once I rebooted (regardless of the driver I installed) the green screen came back!

I ripped my configuration apart but finally came upon a post which offered a solution - necessitating a fairly large tradeoff. Apparently many users have been having this issue and the hauppauge forums are flooded with complaints by angry users such as myself. Hauppauge seem to blame Windows, specifically a memory issue - the only fix I can find is as follows:


http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/board/showpost.php?p=60958&postcount=367


Yes, you read that correctly:

"The only 100% guaranteed fix is to reduce the total system memory so that it is below a certain amount (i.e. < 3 GB). This can be done either by pulling RAM sticks from the machine or by using a command prompt in administrator mode with the command bcdedit /set {current} removememory X where X is the amount in MB to hide from total system RAM."

I used bcedit, removing a gigabyte of ram from my system - and MCE has worked without an issue for a few months! Meaning that I have been running on only 3 of my 4 cylinders for a few months - I am pretty annoyed. Apparently this may (read "I don't believe this for a second") be fixed in Vista SP1, but from the later user posts in the above forum, it appears that the issue continues, only this time with a black screen. I plan to test this theory as I want my memory back!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Excel - Adding an existing Pivot table to the data model

Image
  I've been working more with, and continue to be amazed by, Power Pivot. I recently ran into an issue where I needed to add the data for an existing Power Pivot report to the Data Model. There is a checkbox that makes this easy when creating a PivotTable: As so often happens, the analysis grew in scope/importance and I found myself needing to add the data to the data model. While it's not obvious how, there is a way to add an existing Pivot table to the data model. There's a More Tables... link in the PivotTable Fields pane.  Clicking on the  More Tables... results in a dialog confirming that you want to Create a New PivotTable .  Doing so will result in the creation of the new PivotTable in a new sheet. By default the data is added to the data model. You'll likely lose some formatting but for anything other than a trivial PivotTable, this should save effort, as it did for me.
Read more

Getting Started with Mirth (Part 1)

Image
This is the first post in a 2 part series. The second post is here Recently I posted about my positive experience when using Mirth by Webreach as an open source communication layer between one of our in-house applications and a third party and proprietary web service interface. That post received a large amount of attention (relative to my other posts :o) ) so now I will post a quickstart guide to creating a similar setup. In this post I will go over the very basics of using Mirth (please dig in and play around with some more advanced options/configurations), specifically I will demonstrate how to use Mirth to read data from a database, package the data up in a SOAP envelope, send the data to a web service and process the SOAP response. I'll also show you how easy it is to monitor channels once deployed. Once you've installed and opened Mirth for the first time you'll be presented with an empty dashboard - but it wont stay empty for long. This is where you'll s...
Read more

Mirth

Image
Introduction Let's talk about Mirth. At it's simplest, Mirth  link is an Open Source HL7 interface engine. HL7 (Health Level 7) is an NPO involved in the development of healthcare standards and the HL7 v2.x and HL7 v3 standards are commonly used in Medical Information for data interchange - including but not limited to clinical, financial, logistical and administrative messaging. I first ran across Mirth over a year ago on a personal quest to find an alternative to our client's legacy HL7 application. Academically, I wrote a number of lexical analysis tools using lexx, yacc, bison and JavaCC and knew the challenges of writing and maintaining complex parsers. I was simply looking for something that could parse HL7 for us, and perhaps log messages and provide a little more transparency than our application currently allowed.  A year later and our legacy application is still going strong (read: my proposal was declined), but Mirth is being used in production, far away from th...
Read more