Anybody try yet the AverMedia A188 Duet digital tuner?

[mkenyon2]

I'm comparing them:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Productcom...815100044R

Probably go w/ the White Box. But have you used this card? What are your thoughts?

I had an Avermedia 150 Analog as my first tuner, and it worked good for a couple years, then burnt out. Worked fine while it worked. Could have been my hot box.

I'm not even sure if I can get many channels w/ Comcast in this area, so I don't know if I want to spend the extra $$ on a Hauppauge yet.

[mikeh49]

I've had one for about a month on clear QAM and seems to be mostly OK. I got the retail version but only installed the latest downloaded drivers, not the media center app. I installed on a 2 week old Win7 upgrade from XP, so that is lurking in the background. The only hardware-like problem I've seen is the machine "lost" the card once, a reboot fixed that. (It appears that Win7 needs a periodic reboot just like XP.)

I've had a few problems with 0 byte recordings, but I'm not sure that's the fault of the card. The logs show low signal strength, so I need to check my splitters. I don't know how the tuner of the Duet compares to the 2250.

You may need to edit the bda.ini file to get the right description for the card. Compare the results of filtercheck.exe to the ini file and adjust the ini as needed to match the description of the Duet.

[mkenyon2]

I was reading reviews on Newegg...
It seems this card gets 'lost' by Windows when it goes into S3 mode. (Sleep or Suspend, I forget which it is.) There is supposed to be a new version of the card that fixes this.

I don't let my system sleep. I'm on XP, and I've had issues w/ sleep/suspend in the past.

For the price, and the reviews... I think I'll get it. But I'll refer to what you said about bda.ini. I don't think I've played with that yet.

I'm currently re-installing everything on this box.

[mikeh49]

I'm using Standby on Win7 since that's what it wanted to do out of the box, and seemed to work OK. Very quick to restart. I used Hibernate in XP and had no problems with that. I think Hibernate does a hardware reset on exit from Hibernate, so that may fix the "lost" problem, especially if you don't need a fast startup. So far, I haven't found how to change Standby to Hibernate in Win7.

There's a thread in the Wishlist forum about the bda.ini settings for the Duet. Should include what you need to do. Filtercheck.exe comes with GBPVR and is in the GBPVR folder.