Win 7 - The Stench of Failure

I have not completely given up on Windows 7, but this weekend I trimmed 100 GB off my media partition and restored a Vista backup on the NAS. I fired it up and started to record normally for the first time since early August.

I got here because while WinTV 7 was able to record normally, and it's viewer is pretty good, it has a very elementary scheduler. Windows Media Center has an OK scheduler, but it doesn't record HD very well. (It doesn't appear to use the hardware encoding on the card. Of course, it also doesn't appear to use a standard file format, so perhaps it is reencoding it. All I know is that the audio is fine and the HD picture is jerky. So, the latest beta for SageTV 7 came out. I ponied up money for it and I reinstalled it from scratch. Everything was going well until I got to scanning the digital channels. SageTV reported that there were no digital channels. I tried to play one manually and got bits of audio and no video. I checked with WinTV and Windows Media Center and they could view the channel fine. I thought that perhaps it was a problem with the capture card drivers, so uninstalled the card and reinstalled the same ones that worked on Vista.

So, at the end of my rope, and with the new TV season upon us, I fell back to good old reliable Vista. (How often do you hear that?) Unfortunately, I have about a half a week's recordings on the Windows 7 partition in Windows Media Center format, and nothing else appears to be able to play them, so I'm going to have to boot Windows 7 to watch them, which means I can't watch them when something needs to be recorded, and I don't feel like installing Windows Media Center for Vista. (I didn't really want to install the Windows 7 one.)

I reported the signal problem to SageTV and I'll keep trying SageTV on Windows 7, but I just can't deal with this nonsense anymore. I want to watch TV on my HTPC, not fix problems with it.

Audio Problems

Well, I just thought that the upgrade to Windows 7 was complete. In early August, a couple of weeks after I let SageTV start recording programs, I finally worked my way through the programs that I had recorded before the conversion and got to ones that I had recorded after the conversion, and their audio was awful. It wasn't quite a stutter, more like living in an echo chamber. Sometime the audio problem would clear up, but the audio would be behind the video.

I put a request for help on the SageTV forum, but didn't get much help. The only person to reply suggested that I also try WinTV and Windows Media Center. Sadly, those two things worked, but I was no closer to solving the mystery. The only thing that I learned was the WinTV was using only about 2% of the CPU, while SageTV used 25% to 30%. So I gave up and submitted a request directly to SageTV's support, and their answer was to install the SageTV 7 beta. Well, I did that and I got the exact same results. They had me turn on some tracing and simultaneously record a minute of same programming using SageTV and WinTV 7 and send them to them. After some mulling things over, they sent me an updated DLL, which fixed the problem, for the GUI version of the software. However, the service started to reports:

Error - Capture Device failure while starting recording.

So, I reported this problem and left the GUI version running hoping that the next beta would fix the problem. Unfortunately, the Beta license was a temporary one and I couldn't figure out how to pay for the upgrade. With no new beta in sight, when the beta license expired, I just uninstalled SageTV 7 yesterday, and the new TV season is starting this week.