DViCO No Channels Found

[empire]

I have successfully been running MCE for the past 3 years with a DViCO FusionHDTV Lite. Recently the hdd died so I thought it was time to give Vista a try. I took the box to a friends house and installed VMC with the latest 3.68 DViCO vista drivers and was able to successfully tune all channels and assign the icetv guide. All was going well, and I was happy.

I brought the box back to my house and realised that all the channels showed no signal. I then realised that my friends house tuned all the stations into the Mt Lofty transmitter (2xx.xxx frequencies) and I use the Adelaide transmitter (7xx.xxx frequencies). I performed a services scan but it did not find any channels. I then ran 'setup my tv' and deleted all old channels and scanned, but still didnt find any channels. Lastly I tried deleting the C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\EPG Folder and scanned again, but no luck, still no channels.

I then tried the FusionHDTV software that came with 3.68. It scanned and found several channels but when I selected them, it showed 90% signal and blank picture with no sound (not working). I figured drivers might be stuffed so I uninstalled and reinstalled the dvico drivers, but it just doesnt want to work.

I am unsure whether the problem is with the DViCO drivers or whether the tuner is not scanning the correct frequencies. When I setup MCE previously I used the psisdecd.dll found on this site to fix my scanning problems. I have searched everywhere and it appears that the hacked psisdecd.dll is no longer needed as microsoft have fixed the problem. Is it still possible that VMC is only scanning the low frequency that typical Adelaide users would want and not the high frequencies that the alternate transmitter (one i use) is using.

Is there anybody out there that can help me? I'm really out of ideas short of reinstalling Vista or resorting back to MCE. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

[wheelie007]

Not sure what to suggest. I suppose doing a clean install of vista doesn't interest you (tho may be necessary) I would suggest it together with all patches and updates.

Dvico have a new beta driver out for vista 3.68.04 available from http://demod.dvico.com/beta/FusionHDTV3.68.04_beta.exe, try that .

BTW the Lite card only supports 32bit drivers not 64 bit so if you're using vista 64 bit forget using those drivers.

cheers

[empire]

thanks, i think i'll end up reinstalling vista and if that doesn't work back to mce. i'm only using vista 32bit but i'll try the newer beta drivers. just odd that it worked at friends house first but not mine which i would have thought indicated the drivers were ok?

i'll post back with results of reinstall. any other suggestions are welcome.

[itr2401]

I had a very similar problem to you - however this was all in the same house / location.

Basically, what it ending up being was the cabling in house - from the antenna all the way through to the points in the house.

To resolve the issue, I basically had to re-wire the whole house. I was already using quad shielded cable, however from the main mast to the power amp, through to 2 x 3 way splitters I checked every cable. It appears that the installer (who shall go nameless ... ) rushed their job and didn’t ensure that the cables were not cut correctly, the F connectors were not fitted / crimped properly & thus cables were loose). When I looked at all the wall plates, the cabling there too wasn’t too flash either. Essentially it appeared I was having a major amount of noise injected into the cables as the shielding in all places was able to touch the inner core. Whilst this didn’t give problems on the analogue TV's it explains why my digital STB would freeze from time to time.

On clearing up all of the cabling issues, I can tune all of the channels without issue - tho the signal strength is never above 70%, no other issues exist.

Replace also all your fly-leads from the wall plate to your tuner with a quad shielded cable too - I found that I also had a dodgy one of those which was contributing to signal loss.

[empire]

not good that you paid someone to install the cable and they botched it that bad. glad you identified the problem.

the issue that I dont understand is that the same box (same tuners) previously worked fine, the only difference being its now running vista. I'll double check the wiring on the weekend, worth checking before I reinstall the lot.

[xena]

Funnily enough I'm getting this exact same problem with my newly purchased TinyTwin USB2. The native software works fine finding most channels (apparently the native DigitalTV uses the dvb drivers) but MCE can't find any channels when scanning.

I wish someone posted a solution to this.

[MCVista]

Originally Posted by xena

Funnily enough I'm getting this exact same problem with my newly purchased TinyTwin USB2. The native software works fine finding most channels (apparently the native DigitalTV uses the dvb drivers) but MCE can't find any channels when scanning.

I wish someone posted a solution to this.

I use a TinyTwin in Vista MC and have no problems finding all channels, the solution for you maybe to go through the TV Signal setup again or start from a fresh install of Vista.

[xena]

Thanks for the reply but I've reinstalled MCE 2005 SP2 several times now with no luck. I am going to try one more time without doing any MS updates and without having the tuner plugged in during the install. If all else fails I'll go back to my trusty old DVico Dual Digital.

(btw. Just so you know my knowledge level, I'm an IT professional and have been running MCE for about 3 years now)

[empire]

I thought i'd post an update to my problem described earlier.
I tried reinstalling vista and the tuner then picked up all channels, i thought the problem was fixed. Then about an hour into watching TV the screen went black. All the channels would not display anything either. I tried rescanning and it did not find any channels. It seemed to be in same state as before.
To fix the problem, I ended up uninstalling the dvico software, removing the card and throwing it in the bin. I installed a new hauppauge 2200 and it has been working flawlessly since. So either the dvico drivers were just problematic although I suspect I had a faulty card. Not a real fix to the problem, but the only way I could get working tv.