Pulling my hair out here and horrible feelings of deja vue...

I had a wonderfully stable system until a few days ago when a close bolt of lightning managed to blow my BlackGold GDI3520 tuner somehow. Bought an emergency Haupauge WinTV-Nova-TD-500. Absolute nightmare. I guess I'll have to order another BlackGold, but they're not perfect either. Here's my experience:

Hauppauge WinTV-Nova-T-500 (2007)
Tuned to all channels perfectly, and appeared to work except with S3 sleep. On waking from S3 to record, would frequently only find one tuner, and/or fail to record. Also after the first wake from S3 sleep it would fail to go back to S3 sleep. Worked with Hauppauge support trying all the usual things like moving PCI slots, disabling the IR driver. After one month, I got fed up with it, and bought a:

BlackGold BGT3510 (2007 - to this week)
Perfect S3 sleep. The failed recordings or instances of wake/sleeps problems in the last 2 years could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The only gripe with this card, is that it would take up to 10 scans to get all the channels (BlackGold acknowledged this as a 'known' issue). Even then, I was never quite sure it had found them all. Case in point, I've gone without FIVER and 5 US for a month - thought they were off air, until now, when that darned act of God made me by a:

Hauppauge (Diversity) WinTV-Nova-TD-500 (last week - next week probably)
Used all the latest Hauppauge drivers, and instantly found all channels including FIVER and 5 US (hence my reluctance to go back to BlackGold if there is an alternative). But S3 sleep is even worse than with the original Nova-T-500. I set a scheduled recording. I put the PC to sleep. The PC wakes perfectly ready to record, bit when it actually tries to record, it will either crash and reboot with an Event error 12 along the lines of "VIA USB Enhanced controller removed itself" or something (yes I know the Nova 500's have some crappy internal USB architecture event though they're PCI cards), or will simply fail to record and leave my PC in a high CPU state until I reboot manually. Tried all the workarounds I tried for the original Nova-T-500, but no joy. Even started the laborious support call process with Hauppauge, but I'm not sure I've got the willpower to humour them for a month until I  reach the point where they say "I don't know" again. Irritating as this card is "Certified for Vista", and has "Use this card with MCE" all over the box, so I though Hauppauge had got their act together.

Any suggestions? There must be a perfect dual DVB-T card out there (PCI or PCI-Express), or at least one without these two problems. Otherwise it's back to BlackGold, and sprepare to spend a long, long evening scanning until I'm pretty sure I've got them all.

Heeeelp. Thanks

JB

 

 

Sounds like you have been having a hard time. It makes me wonder if perhaps your system is getting a little confused because of the tuner changes. Have you removed all reference to the old tuners? I have used the WinTV Nova TD USB stick, and had no problems at all. One thing you might try is getting a cheap Pinnacle 3010ix - you can get one new for £15 inc postage on ebay. I had a few issues with slow channel changes in Win 7, but in Vista these cards worked flawlessly for me. Remember that these are PCIe cards though.

I second the pinnacle 3010ix - I have fitted them in systems that I put together and they work great.

You can't beat the value for money either!

Thanks for the good feedback guys. Usefully (or uselessly) I got a one-liner email back from Hauppauge support:

"Have a look on our UK forums, there is a known issue."

Really inspires confidence doesn't it? I rang them and they've told me to check all the power settings for my USB hub controllers. (The fact that the Nova-TD-500 is internally architected as a USB device somehow is the root cause of everything I'm sure). I'll try that tonight... Expecting nothing...

Otherwise, Pinnacle it is (yes, I did notice the price!). No problem with PCIe for me. I'll let you know how I get on.

JB

Oh dear. My brief hopes have been rapidly dashed. Unsurprisingly Hauppauge's suggestions did nothing.

And I'm going to have to decide against any card made by Pinnacle - I hadn't realized that Pinnacle has sold their tuner-card side of the business to of all people Hauppauge... And that the cards are no longer available new, and (knowing Hauppauge) will not be supported either. Yes I could get one from eBay, but I suspect they will be a dead end as far as ever working properly with Working with Windows 7 (which I will switch to after it's released I'm sure).

So back to square one for me: Does anybody know a good, reliable, current model, dual DVB-T tuner card (PCI or PCIe) which works with Windows Vista with no tuner or S3 sleep problems?

There must be one. Heeelp. Again.....

JB

The only real problem I have with the 3010ix card (and the 7010ix that I have)  in win7 at the moment is slow channel changes on dvb-t.

S3 sleep / resume works fine with the drivers that are included in windows 7 and every channel has been picked up on the first scan whenever I have installed them.

It would be nice to find a card that is still in production though

Just out of interest have you tried any different drivers with the bgt-3510 card?

I know that the bgt-3540 drivers can be used on the pinnacle 7010ix card and wondered if you could use the 3010ix drivers with the blackgold card just for a laugh?

Edit:

I guess it might be worth waiting to see if any new cards come out with support for the dvb-t2 hd channels that are going to appear -  I assume current cards do not?

Actually I got my old kaputt BlackGold card model wrong - it was a GDI3520, for which the BGT3510 is a replacement newer model ( I think... The BlackGold site is pretty awful).

Interesting thought about the Pinnacle drivers. I'll have to give them a go if I do finally plump for another BlackGold. On the HD side - BlackGold seem to state pretty confidently that their DVB-T  tuners are fully 'HD compatible' and ramble on about H.264. Quite whether to believe that when DVB-T2 hasn't launched yet, I'm not sure.

JB

I'm pretty sure that to receive dvb-t2 channels (freeview hd) we will need a dvb-t2 tuner - much like dvb-s  versus  dvb-s2.

We can get bbchd on dvb-s tuners (h.264) at the moment, but if / when they go to dvb-s2 then only dvb-s2 tuners will pick up the signal.

I was going to suggest looking at the hdhomerun twin dvb-t tuner that connects via network, but it's not dvb-t2 either from what I can see - so not really "hd"homerun for us european customers!

I use freeview and freesat on win7 for all of my tv now - I'm going to stick with cheap freeview tuners until the whole freeview hd thing plays out.

If you do find a good card, I would be interested to know though. 

I'll certainly keep you posted as to what I end up with, but sounds like you've got a pretty stable setup. On the DVB-T2 issue (i.e. HD FreeView, hopefully on Winter Hill this December), BlackGold claim the following:

The product has been architected to allow simultaneous management of two broadcast program streams Freeview (DVB-T) or analogue terrestrial. Hardware tuner and demodulator technology supports the detection, receiving and processing of High Definition (HD) terrestrial streams.

Given they're a UK company... it certainly sounds like the tuners ought to be capable of receiving DVB-T2. Otherwise why mention HD at all? Although I am highly skeptical - seems like a bit of a wild claim.

JB

Hmmm. Well I RMA'd the Hauppauge Nova-TD-500 (no problems there - MicroDirect were quite willing to accept that it was complete cack), and after a whole load of research plumped for a Compro Videomate E700. I thought I'd wait a couple of weeks before posting an update.

It found all the (76) Freeview channels on first scan (with the driver from Windows Update, which is the latest - that was nice). Sleeps and wakes from S3 beautifully and no missed recordings. So nearly perfect, my hopes were getting up... but for a new problem I've never experienced before with either the BlackGold or Hauppauge - happened three times now:

Media Center (ehshell) just freezes - once on live TV, once when I tried playing a program I'd just recorded, and once when I was looking at the guide. The thing all of these had in common was that a scheduled recording had just completed. Doesn't happen every time, obviously (we probably record 20+ programs in a week), but the symptoms of the timing point towards (yet another) driver problem to me. It's liveable with (just), as closing and reopening Media Center clears it.

Does this thing any bells with anyone?

Surely there must be a reliable dual DVB-T card out there! That's 3 different makes I've tried now. Although to be fair to BlackGold (friendly email support if you can wait), they assure me that all the multiple scan tuning problems are fixed in their very latest (Win 7 support) drivers. So maybe I should go back to them, and try their latest card.

Hair being pulled out even more rapidly...

JB

Perhaps the thing that killed your original BlackGold card caused damage to your motherboard in the process. The fact that the Nova-TD-500 disappears completely suggests a motherboard or power issue above anything else. Even if your motherboard isn't defective, a lot of motherboards have issues with certain PCI and PCIe cards.

The issue with the original Nova-T-500 (non-diversity) is well known, and is a result of USB devices being re-enumerated after standby. The issue that you had with the Nova-TD-500 is completely different. In your case the PCI part of the card was disappearing from the system. Either you had a defective Nova-TD-500, you have a defective motherboard, or your motherboard is incompatible with the Nova-TD-500.

As for DVB-T2 - NOBODY has DVB-T2 products. The reason they mention HD is because not all countries are using DVB-T2 for HD services (i.e. Australia broadcasts HD over DVB-T).

Just wondering if there wasn't any update on your issue.  I've been experiencing the problems you've had with your nova t500 because of the ridiculous usb architecture.  I was looking at replacing it with the compro e700 and was just wondering if you have the hanging after recording issue fixed or if you have found out what causes it.  Doesn't seem to be much choice regarding non usb tv tuners so if this is as close as it gets to a tv tuner working out of s3 standby then it looks like this is the card for me.

Well I've not had a recurrence of the 'freeze' problem, but more worryingly I did suffer a missed recording with the dreaded 'No Tuner Found' error a few days ago. I've not had a concerted effort to try to find out the causes yet though. The thing is, in the back of my mind, is the knowledege that when I had a Black Gold I didn't have a single error like this, (once I'd managed to tune the darned thing). To be honest, I'll probably end up switching back to BlackGold - I'm just waiting for their BGT3540 (quad tuner - satellite and terrestrial) to be available again. I'll have to trust they they have fixed the tuning problems with their latest driver.

I know people say that BlackGold support is rubbish (and I agree their website doesn't inspire confidence), but I've found they always reply to support emails eventually, and when they do, they're quite helpful.

Anyway, I shall persevere with this Compro E700 for a few more weeks yet, and if I get to the bottom of the problems, I'll post them here. If not, I'll get a BlackGold of some form. (In fact maybe I should just jack it in and order a basic one right now...)

I'm glad it's not me that just had problems with the Hauppauge Nova-T-500. They're such fundamental issues I just don't know how anyone can use the things to be honest.

JB