No signal after resume from standby

[Phaedra]

I can't seem to find the older versions of the driver, are they still available for my testing ?
Another question I have is how I can test for possible PCI-E conflicts or interference ? In the Windows device manager, no resource conflict is found.
I have two PCI-E cards currently in my PC, the TBS6981 card and my NVIDIA video card.
Since the multimedia class cheduler service starting coincides with the random freezes, I suspect interference from another audio or video device or service, is that reasonable to assume ?

After weeks and weeks of trial and error I am getting pretty desperate about this random freeze and "no signal" problem.
It makes my whole live TV setup unusable for either live TV or recording.
If I can't track the problem down, I will have to dump this card and spend even more money on something different.
The frustration is just getting too much, after spending all that money I am stuck with an unusable system.

[Phaedra]

Is anyone from TBS actually reading this forum ?

[cody]

Is anyone from TBS actually reading this forum ?

hi and yes, we read the forum, but once again i want to mention that there are support e-mail addresses in case you want to be sure you will receive help as soon as possible, because answering to the forum is less priority than direct e-mails. in any case, sorry, that you got the feeling no one is reading your posts or care to help, but please, let's be reasonable - i think response in 72 hours during the business days is quite acceptable - after all we answer in the same order in each the questions are received and as i mentioned direct e-mails to us have higher priority than forum posts.

anyway, first of all as you can read in this thread the similar problem that another customer experienced wasn't related to TBS hardware or drivers at all, but by third-party hardware ("WLAN PCI card") installed in his system and removing that PCI board from his system solved the problem for the customer and thus no one else currently has such problem, which means it's isolated case to your system.

so, if the exact reason for the problem you're experiencing is not pin-pointed and known for sure then even if you "dump this card and spend even more money on something different" can't guarantee you that with the next DVB hardware you won't have the same problems - my point is, please, don't blame wrongly someone before be sure who/what exactly to blame.

also, i don't think your problem is related to:

https://shop.tbsdtv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=179

because it's very specific problem that has something to do with C-band and it's again isolated case to one customer that it's solved when he's using older drivers.

i think the best way to rule out TBS hardware/drivers is to try your card in another computer system. if you try older version of the driver and if with all of them the problem occurs it's just not allow to rule out anything - it still could be something wrong with your motherboard for example that triggers the problem.

BTW, all older driver releases are available for download on the website:

http://www.tbsdtv.com/download/TBS6981/TBS6981Driver_V2.0.0.11.rar

http://www.tbsdtv.com/download/TBS6981/TBS6981Driver_V2.0.0.8.rar

http://www.tbsdtv.com/download/TBS6981/TBS6981Driver_V2.0.0.5.rar

in any case, in my opinion trying the card on another computer is most informative way to test and requires less time to rule out huge part of the possible causes for the problem.

[bsw26]

I have this problem sometimes with a TBS6981 on a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H board and Win 7 32bit. Having Googled the error message I've found that many people have the problem with widely differing hardware so I believe that it is problem with Win 7 not the hardware.

[Phaedra]

Hi Cody,

I apologize if I gave the impression of "blaming" anyone. It is true that my frustration got the better of me, which made me communicate harsher then I really intended.
Basically, I was looking for ideas, pointers, tools to better isolate the problems I have been experiencing.
To prove you right, meanwhile I found out that the freezing of channels is most probably caused by HDD issues, since Mediaportal creates a timeshift buffer files that puts high strain on disk I/O (HD streaming requires around 800KB/sec write AND read I/O).
The sleep/wake problems remain, however, for which I will be looking into restarting the DVB card driver on resume, to see if I can tackle it that way.

Thanks for your reply, and again, my apologies,

Phaedra

[Phaedra]

I have this problem sometimes with a TBS6981 on a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H board and Win 7 32bit. Having Googled the error message I've found that many people have the problem with widely differing hardware so I believe that it is problem with Win 7 not the hardware.

Hi,

to counter that, I have heard people having the same problem on Windows XP, but also with a variety of DVB cards.
Hard to tell what exactly is the source of these problems.
My theory is that it is a conflict with other hardware, but this is hard to prove or detect.

[cody]

hi All,

@Phaedra

do you have freezing of channels only in Mediaportal? in any case you can test if the card is receieving the data properly (without errors) with TransEdit - for example collect 5 minutes statistics with TransEdit (select transponder, then hit "Analyze button"), you can post the screenshots here.


@bsw26 and Phaedra

do you mean "no signal" error message in Windows 7 Media Center? do you get that only after resume-from-sleep?

several driver releases ago all resume-from-sleep issues with Windows 7 Media Center (W7MC) were resolved - we can't simulate any problems with 2.0.0.14 on our internal tests. so, it's very reasonable to assume they are because of something else. if you noticed something, maybe we can find the root cause. except your complains i'm not aware of any other customer is experiencing such problems and i know really a lot of W7MC users. i think any information about it including those other reports you saw could be very helpful.

[bsw26]

Hi Cody,

I mean the message that say something like "No tuners are available to service your request". It seem only to happen when the machine has been to sleep. The only way I've found to resolve the situation is to go into the Services and stop and then restart the Media Center Receiver Service ( ehRecvr). This is not always convenient and a solution would be welcome but as I said before I don't think the problem is confined to your cards.

I do have another problem which you may be able to help with. In Win7 MCE if I go to Edit channels, View source, I can see the transponder details OK but the quality is always shown as 0% even for channels that have an excellent picture. I am using the latest driver (2.0.0.14). Any thought ?

bsw

[Phaedra]

Hi Cody,

I only use Mediaportal (and in the recent past, DVB dream as comparison tool) for the moment, no MCE.
I did a complete uninstall of everything DVB related, and a clean install of Mediaportal. After some tweaking, with the help of the MP forum guys, everything seems to be quite stable now.
I still have to see in long term - because the resume problem only appeared after a few cycles of sleep/resume - how things work out, but anyhow the system is way more stable in behaviour then before.
I've had a few clent startup problems, but that seems to have been a codec problem as far as I can see now.

Thanks again for your help and info, I will do my best to report back my experiences in longer term.
To compensate for my previous whining, I want to express my appreciation for the ungrateful work you guys are doing. You only hear from us users when things are not going as expected, and we tend to forget that in the remaining 99,999% of the time everything is working perfectly.

Thanks again,

Phaedra

[Phil]

Hi

Do you have VirtualBox installed on Windows 7? If so, try uninstalling it, as I found their virtual network card, even when disabled in Device Manager, caused the problems you describe along with (after resuming from standby\hibernate):
- taking ages (~40-50secs)to re-establish network connection
- often failing to re-establish network connection

I didn't experience these problems under XP, so I suspect it's a compatability bug with VirtualBox's software when used in Windows 7.

Cheers
Phil