Audio Plays Fine, No Video

Hey,

I just bought this TV tuner (I know, went for the cheap one... I should've expected as much) and here's my problem.

I had cable hooked via a TV that worked fine, but the TV was cluttering my desk space, hence the need for a TV tuner.

I installed the TV tuner, got the latest software from the manufacturer's site and scanned the channels.

My problem is the following:

Using the manufacturer's software (TivMe) I get sound and image on certain channels while on others I only get the audio.
Using Microsoft's Windows Media Center Live TV, I get no image but I do get audio.

Once again, the TV worked fine using the same input, so I'm thinking this is not a signal issue right?

I guess I will try and reinstall the whole thing (drivers, software, rerun the config in WMC's Live TV), but I would like to hear from others what could possible be the source of my problem...

Edit: I'm running Win7 pro

Cheers!

Morgrog said:

Hey,

I just bought this TV tuner (I know, went for the cheap one... I should've expected as much) and here's my problem.

I had cable hooked via a TV that worked fine, but the TV was cluttering my desk space, hence the need for a TV tuner.

I installed the TV tuner, got the latest software from the manufacturer's site and scanned the channels.

My problem is the following:

Using the manufacturer's software (TivMe) I get sound and image on certain channels while on others I only get the audio.
Using Microsoft's Windows Media Center Live TV, I get no image but I do get audio.

Once again, the TV worked fine using the same input, so I'm thinking this is not a signal issue right?

I guess I will try and reinstall the whole thing (drivers, software, rerun the config in WMC's Live TV), but I would like to hear from others what could possible be the source of my problem...

Edit: I'm running Win7 pro

Cheers!

It's probably because the channels with no video are protected ones, from the tv service provider. In other words, they can not be decoded by your tv card.

Cheap doesn't mean much here. That card could probably capture/rip to great results.

Try using iuVCR with Huffy codec to capture. Or you could try VirtualVCR. That's a good one too. Same with Virtualdub. But ya, you want to use the Huffy codec in any case, since it's lossless.

If you use iuVCR only to watch, use its built-in deinterlace plugin. If you are using it to capture, leave the deinterlacing filter off. Apply deinterlacing while you encode to final file.

Normally I would assume the protected part to be right, alas the same channel works fine when a TV is connected directly instead of the TV tuner...

edit: the whole point to my tv tuner is just to watch TV, I don't care much about the capture part :)
edit2: I'll look into iuVCR, looks like it could generate more info, thanks for the tip!

weird

What's even weirder is that channels 2 through 4 are working fine (using TiVMe from the manufacturer) and channels 35++, everything in between I get audio but no video...

For some reason it started working in Windows Media Center... the only thing I did was install iuVCR, still have no idea why it suddenly works, but I'm not gonna complain :)

Thanks for the help!