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.