Dual Tuner Problem w/ Charter Cable?

[Tsunami982]

I have a Adaptec AVC 3610 dual analog tuner (also branded under HP) that seems to work fine with Time Warner Cable, Cox Comm Cable, and OTA antennas. For some odd reason it will not work with Charter Cable (which is the only company that services the area I just moved to).

Does anyone know why? I tried googling it and couldnt find any answers. I tried putting a wintv pvr500mce and in my htpc and it works fine. I thought it was my Adaptec tuner so I RMA'ed and the replacement had the same issues... worked everywhere except with Charter.

My HTPC is a bit old but fine for an analog HTPC; it is a AMD 2500+ mobile Barton, 2gb PC3200RAM, Windows MCE 2005 fully updated, 2x 200GB Seagates, 6600gt....
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[nullpointerus]

So the PVR-500 works with the same Charter service? Wierd.

Are you sure you selected the right cable service in MCE's guide? Sometimes the names are very counterintuitive.
Have you tried letting MCE tune to channel 3 in its auto-tuning wizard to see if you can at least get a signal?
Along the same lines, can you fire up Windows Movie Maker and see what kind of feed the capture wizard displays?
Are you sure you don't have them running off different jacks w/ fed by different splitter setups?

 

[Tsunami982]

Originally posted by: nullpointerus
So the PVR-500 works with the same Charter service? Wierd.

Are you sure you selected the right cable service in MCE's guide? Sometimes the names are very counterintuitive.
Have you tried letting MCE tune to channel 3 in its auto-tuning wizard to see if you can at least get a signal?
Along the same lines, can you fire up Windows Movie Maker and see what kind of feed the capture wizard displays?
Are you sure you don't have them running off different jacks w/ fed by different splitter setups?

I tried running SageTV and BeyondTV with the same results. I also tried using various splitters as well as running it directly from the wall to 1 input at a time (thinking maybe my signal strength was too low after the split. Still nothing. The only signal I get is so degraded I can't tell what it is (like when you try to tune with no antenna or cable at all, you get a tiny tiny bit of signal but nothing usable). Had the Charter cable guy over and we tried at different setups for at least 2 hours. Replaced all cables with the higher 4x shield cable, used those really nice splitters, checked signal quality. Everything was good with the pvr500mce as well as the built in tuner I have on my LCD TV. I've also taken it to other friends houses with Charter... same result. I've run out of ideas.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Tsunami982

Originally posted by: nullpointerus
So the PVR-500 works with the same Charter service? Wierd.

Are you sure you selected the right cable service in MCE's guide? Sometimes the names are very counterintuitive.
Have you tried letting MCE tune to channel 3 in its auto-tuning wizard to see if you can at least get a signal?
Along the same lines, can you fire up Windows Movie Maker and see what kind of feed the capture wizard displays?
Are you sure you don't have them running off different jacks w/ fed by different splitter setups?

I tried running SageTV and BeyondTV with the same results. I also tried using various splitters as well as running it directly from the wall to 1 input at a time (thinking maybe my signal strength was too low after the split. Still nothing. The only signal I get is so degraded I can't tell what it is (like when you try to tune with no antenna or cable at all, you get a tiny tiny bit of signal but nothing usable). Had the Charter cable guy over and we tried at different setups for at least 2 hours. Replaced all cables with the higher 4x shield cable, used those really nice splitters, checked signal quality. Everything was good with the pvr500mce as well as the built in tuner I have on my LCD TV. I've also taken it to other friends houses with Charter... same result. I've run out of ideas.

It's gotta be setting itself improperly to pick up the cable signals -- but I have no idea why it would be doing that or exactly how to fix it. Either that or your card went bad...

 

[Tsunami982]

Originally posted by: nullpointerus

It's gotta be setting itself improperly to pick up the cable signals -- but I have no idea why it would be doing that or exactly how to fix it. Either that or your card went bad...[/quote]

Tried several different setups and actually RMA'ed the card/box once. The replacement had the exact same thing happen. I tried looking online to see if this specific card required an abnormal amount of signal to properly display, but couldnt find anything regarding that.

What do you mean by setting itself improperly? Do you mean setting-wise?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Matthias99
It's gotta be setting itself improperly to pick up the cable signals -- but I have no idea why it would be doing that or exactly how to fix it. Either that or your card went bad...

Tried several different setups and actually RMA'ed the card/box once. The replacement had the exact same thing happen. I tried looking online to see if this specific card required an abnormal amount of signal to properly display, but couldnt find anything regarding that.

What do you mean by setting itself improperly? Do you mean setting-wise?

There are normally different settings for tuners -- especially ones that can work in multiple countries. If it's set to, say, PAL rather than NTSC, you'll get a badly garbled picture. But I don't know why it would be going to the wrong settings, much less only doing it on one cable network.

 

[Tsunami982]

Does anyone know how one would change those settings? Since it works on other US carriers its probably not the problem Ive tried everything and its definitely worth a shot.