Multi-tuner Black and White Video (Intermittent)

[ultar]

I'm posting this here because I've finally solved a problem that has been plaguing me for several months. I was running dual Avermedia 1500 MCE cards (equivalent to the Avermedia m150 card). I even bought a Hauppauge card because I thought the problem might be due to the use of two of the same tuner card.

I have been battling intermittent black-and-white video with my secondary video card. A post here, 5 pages deep into a thread finally clued me in to the problem. About half my recordings have been in black and white due to this problem. I have also had issues with audio clarity. This turned out to be a Snapstream software issue.

The problem: When BTV uses the second tuner card the video is sometimes, but not always, black and white.

Engaging tech support was not helpful. I only received inane suggestions to do things like change the recording quality and even format my hard drive and reinstall Windows and BTV.

It turned out to be an issue with BTV software, as I had initially maintained. While the setup wizard asks you to identify signal source, and I had selected a digital cable box for both tuner cards (and used two serial cables to tune them), somehow a setting that was inaccessable via the setup wizard was causing problems.

The resolution was found in Web Admin. There is an additional setting available ONLY in Web Admin for the signal source. It was set to "Cable, no box" even though I had indicated a digital cable box as the signal source in the setup wizard.

Would be nice if Web Admin was easily accessible, as it was a year ago. I've had to look up the method to reach Web Admin on the help site in the past. It disappeared with a release several months ago.

So, even though I had configured my cards correctly in the setup wizard, there was a second, "secret" setting for signal source in Web Admin. My guess is that, given the inherent delay in changing channels on a digital box, BTV acquired the signal before the signal was fully available.

Has anyone else experienced this problem? I'm really annoyed that releases of BTV did not provide explicit access to Web Admin when its removal from the interface clearly made several parameters inaccessible to new users. I bought BTV just before access to Web Admin disappeared. I assumed it had been removed from the application.

I seriously spent at least 50 hours trying to resolve this problem. I also lost many saved shows because I formatted my system hard drive and reinstalled my early version of Windows XP, which couldn't deal with the 200 GB hard drive storing the shows.

I love BTV. There is nothing better out there. But there shouldn't be undocumented and secret settings that may cause the application to be unfit for its intended purposes. If the problem had been resolved in a month or two, I wouldn't be so upset. But it has been nearly a year...and I just stumbled upon the solution.

I described this solution to tech support more than a week ago. I waited to see if a tech support document was created before posting here.