Re: Kworld PCI 120 with XP SP3 MCE Loss of Signal
- From: Hula Baloo <wpgwpg@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 16 Aug 2008 15:18:36 -0400
Hula Baloo wrote:
I just bought and installed a Kworld PlusTV HD PCI 120 TV tuner from Fry's on my Gateway GT4010 PC with MCE 2005 XP SP3. The TotalMedia3 software that comes with it works fine, but Media Center does not. It says "Loss of Signal. Media Center has stopped capturing data due to low data rate in the TV signal. ...". I have connected the coax from Comcast cable TV to the card, and as I say, it works fine with the TotalMedia3 software that came with it, but Media Center gives this error message. I suspect maybe I clicked on something wrong when I installed this gizmo, but don't have any idea where to look or what I might need to do. I have many years of PC experience, but am new to Media Center. Media Center finds all the channels and lets me select from them (all analog from cable, no settop box, no digital tuner), gives the correct titles for the show on the selected channel, but produces neither video nor audio. The remote doesn't seem to work either, although that's not a biggie with me.Success finally! Well, limited success actually. In my searching around, I read somewhere that MCE only detects input from the ATSC (i.e. digital) tuner, so I went out and bought a HD amplified room antenna (digital equivalent of rabbit ears) and tried it. It works fairly well with TotalMedia3, using about 85% of my AMD 3500 CPU on HD channels. With MCE it detected the analog channels albeit with very poor picture quality AND a no. of digital channels. However the MCE HD channels peg the CPU meter at 100%, and while the picture is crystal clear, it is very slow and jerky.
My hdwe configuration is a Gateway GT4010 PC with 1 GB RAM, 200 GB HD, integrated Nvidia GeForce 6100 video, AMD 3500 CPU. When I look at Device Manager, everything including the tuner looks good. It shows the following:
PCI ATSC Hybrid Audio Device
PCI ATSC Hybrid DTV Device
PCI ATSC Hybrid Video Device
...
The tuner card's electronics are made by Conexant, from what I've been able to dig up.
I bought this gizmo to educate myself on this facet of Windows, but could sure use some help with this problem. Any suggestions? TIA
All this has been a most interesting experiment. Obviously I'm going to need a faster CPU than this 2.5 year old AMD 3500 one I'm currently using if I want to watch HD TV. Next year I'm looking at buying a new machine with an Intel E8400 dual core processor, which is one I've read very good things about. Then I'll see how that works. With a fairly fast dual processor, I should have CPU enough for the MCE tuner plus other stuff in the background. As the documentation indicates with this tuner, it takes a LOT of CPU power for HD. I guess that's one reason the TVs with HD tuners are so much more expensive than the old analog ones with the same size screens.
A few years ago I bought several 13" analog Broksonic TVs on sale for $38 each; today those same size TVs with digital tuners are around $115. I haven't bought an HDTV yet either because the 3 year old 32" analog TV I have in my den is working just fine; it ain't broke, so I'm not ready to "fix" it with a $1000 HDTV just yet. Prices are still slowly coming down, and I figure there'll probably be a big drop some time after Feb. 2009 when there'll be no more analog broadcasts. I expect there to be a spike in demand which will eventually be matched by greater mass production of these things; and that'll eventually drive prices down further.
For now I think I'll give my processor a break and not try to overload it with HD. I was looking for a learning experience, and I sure found one!
.
- References:
- Kworld PCI 120 with XP SP3 MCE Loss of Signal
- From: Hula Baloo
- Kworld PCI 120 with XP SP3 MCE Loss of Signal
- Prev by Date: Re: Hauppauge 1600 and 1800 same machine?
- Next by Date: RE: Share Folders
- Previous by thread: Re: Kworld PCI 120 with XP SP3 MCE Loss of Signal
- Next by thread: You may not believe this
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
