Has my HVR-1600 bit the dust?

Tony0945 · Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2020 1:17 am Post subject: Has my HVR-1600 bit the dust?

For many months it has taken a long time to initialize.
Now, it won't at all.

Jaglover · Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2020 2:14 am Post subject:

I once resurrected an old nVidia card by replacing some capacitors ... that said, eBay has lots of these cards. Do you really need the analog part of it?
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Tony0945 · Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2020 3:16 am Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2020 11:09 am Post subject:

Tony0945,

Its always worth trying to reseat the card and a fresh copy of the firmware.

As Jaglover says, while the card is in your hands, give it a going over with Mk1 eyeball to check for failed or failing capacitors.
If its a surface mount card, its not trivial to work on.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Tony0945 · Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2020 3:37 pm Post subject:

Jaglover, Neddyseagoon: Good advice! My manual dexterity is really failing. I also have a video card where the fan failed. There is even a youtube video showing how to replace the fan. Too little room for my thick fingers. But I do have a daughter who got straight "A"'s in her two year curriculum leading to Associate degree in "Electrical and Electronic Technology". she is great at soldering and wiring. Well, she always had more manual dexterity than her Old Man. It doesn't make sense to mail an old card about but I'm a pack rat by nature.

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21715

Hold onto the card for the next time she comes home on vacation / holidays, and ask her to look at it then?

Tony0945 · Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2020 3:56 am Post subject:

Tony0945 · Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2020 10:35 pm Post subject:

Reseating the card didn't help. Got a used card from e-bay, Same model name but different sub-model. Some physical differences. Put it in and machine booted but then the screen went blank and the keyboard went unresp[onsive. I had to power it off by button. Re-booted with sysrescuecd (last gentoo version) CD. Booted OK but when I chrooted into my install, it froze again.
Couldn't exit the chroot and had to power off again. Booted into sysrecuecd and this time just mounted my install as /mnt/gentoo and "touch /forcefsck", unmounted and shutdown. Pulled the card out. Rebooted and fsck ran and fixed files.
Interestingly, the old card was marked "copyright 2010" and the new (used) card "copyright 2006". I had an old card on the basement shelf. My recollection was that something was wrong with it and I was saving it for parts. It is marked "copyright 2006" but is physically identical to the "copyright 2010" card. I installed it and the machine booted quickly with no errors. In fact, dmesg starts and ends at 0.0000." And the card works! However playback is jerky and intermittent. My SageTV software shows my strongest channel at 23% Well there is a Spanish channel at 47% but I am unilingual and that channel freezes too.

At least the machine is booting well. I had a PCIe Quad card on order. The manufacturer says that shipments are delayed until March (there were supposed to have been five in stock) but they have the USB 3.0 version ready to ship. Sounds like the cards are made in Wuhan not upstate New York. Supposedly there is an Ubuntu driver. My experience with USB 3.0 is not good, i.e. extremely slow. Maybe I'll just cancel the order.

As for the used card. On another day, I'll put it in a Win 7 machine and see if it chokes.

Tony0945 · Posted: Fri Feb 28, 2020 3:47 pm Post subject:

[Moderator note: a new user posted an excerpt of a Hauppauge product page as if it were a legitimate post. That post was split out. This post is a response to that one, but this post is legitimate and interesting, so it was not moved. -Hu]

Yes, I have a rooftop antenna mounted in the attic which works fine for the TV sets. I have another old HVR-1600 in a Win 7 computer that is working fine. I had a Quad PCIe that is currently not installed. It's destined for a dedicated box that's under construction.
I did receive the USB Quad. It's powered off the USB port (no wall wart) and the manufacturer warns USB 2.0 can't supply enough power. That's true, I initially plugged it into the wrong port and it was comatose. My sole USB 3.1 port was plugged into the BACK-UPS battery box. Hardly needed there so I switched that to a USB 2.0 port. I'm currently reviewing it on the SageTV forum and will recapitulate here when I'm done. Since the latest USA TV station realignment (and power restriction) signals have been week. I completely lost both CBS stations on the real TV's. I recently read that over 90% of US homes have cable TV. I did for decades. Then I noticed the 99% of my watching was on free OTA TV. So I bought the antenna ($100, the cost of one month of cable) and dropped cable (actually switched to internet only).