media centre suddenly has no signal

hi,having lots of problems in the last week trying to get tv back on my computer.

all started last tuesday when i swapped an ati radeon 4350 graphics card for nvidia Geforce 210 GPU,,i fully uninstalled all ATI drivers,switched off,,installed nvidia card,,restarted and installed new drivers,things looked fine until i opened WMC,,it was in 4:3 resolution and not 16:9 (the shape of the player,not the program output resolution) and it would not change shape,even though i had been through the setup and changed to 16:9,so i ignored this problem and went on to the tv channel setup in WMC,,it wouldn't find my tuner though (REALTEK 2832U,,usb freeview tuner).

After many failed attempts to find the tuner,i gave up,uninstalled nvidia and reinstalled ATI,again,no problems with swapping cards over,but WMC will not work.

Heres what ive tried upto now to get WMC working again:

many times trying the standard retuning in WMC,

checked outside aerial on a freeview box,works fine,so the aerial is fine,

from my outside aerial,i have 4 coaxial extension cables pushed together to reach from front room aerial point to back room where comp is,checked each cable by only using 3 cables,making sure that i have swapped each cable,meaning i have run a signal using different combinations of cables,so i know that an individual cable isnt at fault,

installed blazedtv program from the disk that came with the tuner,which finds upto 75 channels,but all pictures are badly broken up (mainly green and red blocks),with virtually no audio,,,i can hear something,but cant make any sounds out,also,no tv information (tv name etc) is available,just numbers that mean nothing to me,

whilst writing this,a search on WMC has returned 14 channels,none of which are playable,only black screen if i press play,time bar is visible,but nothing happens,

as this only happened during a hardware change,im fully confident that my signal is perfect,had great picture for 2 years with this setup and although i have had problems with WMC before,any problems have always been resolveable,

oh yes,,i've also reinstalled windows 7 as a last resort,but with no effect.

i've tried give as much info as possible,but feel free to ask for any more info,,im reasonably computer literate so am open to trying anything,,,thx for reading.

p.s,,,i also have 2,,10 metre lengths of coax extension cable,but have never got them to work,which is why i use the 4 extension cable setup :)

p.p.s,,,checked in device manager and the realtek tuner is showing under 'sound,video and game controllersand drivers are up to date.

Have you put the coax straight into the TV? Does the signal work fine there?

Have you attempted a system restore to back when the system was working perfectly?

scudybeef said:

hi,thx for the reply,,,to answer your first question,the coax has to go through a freeview tv box,then connected to the tv,,,i notice your USA flag under your name,,im in the UK,if you put your coax straight into the tv,there will be no signal (sorry if that sounds obvious),when plugged into the freeview box using exactly the same coax,the picture and signal strength is perfect on all channels,,the box is also already tuned as i use it upstairs,so as soon as i plugged it in,the picture appeared straight away.

As for the second question,i have done both system restore and windows 7 reinstall,i did the reinstall because the system restore had virtually no reserve space,so i could only restore to 1 day earlier,which didn't help, (fixed the system restore reserve space now).

So im still stuck for ideas..the signal is perfect from my outside aerial,the coax cables are working fine,,the computer finds my tuner device in device manager,,media centre recognises the tv tuner,,it just wont find channels when searching,,although occasionally it will find 6,sometimes 14 channels,,none of which will show audio or video when i press play,,its almost as if its almost finding the channels,but not quite.

Hope i can get this sorted,,driving me mad.thx.

ps,,,i have another dongle which while looking identical,is from a different manufacturer.when i plug this in instead,device manager finds it,but media centre doesn't!!

I was not aware of this freeview box of which you speak. Interesting. Learn something new every day.

Okay, onto other random thoughts. If any of my assumptions are wrong, feel free to correct me. You have a usb dongle that has the same capabilities of a freeview box, and it's a capture device. You plug your coax straight into the dongle (Realtek 2832U). Have you tried using the dongle on another machine?

Do you have a friend with a Windows 7 machine you can try it on? It'd be good to test out the device on another Media Center capable machine. It's hard to imagine it's anything else since you just reinstalled Windows, and you've already verified that the coax has a good signal. Unless there is some other driver that needs to be installed with your dongle that you haven't done. Windows might install something on its own, but maybe there are additional drivers needed.

Use the best tools for the job. I love Ubuntu and Mint. If the tuner works there then I'd go to it. MythTV, Media Portal, XBMC... All fun software