5. A Rough Install

All of this sounded good in theory, but as I begun to unpack and plug things in, the first thing I realized was that this setup was going to be a bit cumbersome. In addition to the four individual parts to my new home-brew PVR, there were going to be three power cables, two remotes, seven A/V cables and two USB cables.

Another issue was that everything needed to be positioned so that it had the required connectivity. The A/V cables had to reach my satellite system, my TV and my laptop, and the IR blaster had to be positioned so it could both send and receive commands. And to top it off, my laptop only operates with the lid open, so it would need a good deal of space. But disregarding the clutter from all the parts, I connected everything up and started to install the required software and drivers.

Installing the software was straightforward - all of the drivers appeared to install properly, and the devices were recognized by my Windows XP system. But when I went into the Beyond TV setup process, I got the first hint of things to come, as the program locked up. Taking the approach I'm familiar with on Windows systems, I force-killed the Beyond TV process and did the first of many reboots of my laptop.

When my laptop came back up and I restarted the Beyond TV program, I got a message indicating that my Instant TV Deluxe device wasn't connected. So I stopped the program, unplugged and replugged the USB cable from the device and restarted. No change. Once again I stopped the program, but this time I cycled the power on the box. Then, instead of trying the Beyond TV application again, I tried another included program: the "Capture Wizard". But there was no joy to be had there, either.

This is when I really, really wished there was an on/off button for the box. I got very tired of having to reach behind the unit to remove and replace the little power connector every time I wanted to try it out. And, of course, I didn't have a switched power strip handy! Time to call in the experts from ADS.

To make a long story short, in spite of two long debug sessions with a polite, patient ADS engineer, we were unable to get things working reliably. The final diagnosis was that there was an issue with the USB 2.0 driver on my system. To work around it, the ADS engineer had me disable the high-speed driver, which caused Windows to revert to a USB 1.1 driver. This appeared to make the device happier, with the downside being that my high-speed USB ports were now low-speed ports that in turn supported only low quality video. However, the device always reverted to unstable behavior no matter what I tried.

After several go-arounds with ADS, the company finally offered me a replacement unit, which arrived a few days later accompanied with a USB 2.0 PC Card for my laptop. Initially, I decided to try the new unit without using the new PC card, to see if the problem really was with my USB driver. When I hooked it up and tried out the Capture Wizard again, I was greeted with video! And it worked every time. Now I was getting somewhere.

A bad Instant TV Deluxe unit had evidently caused my problems; the issue had nothing to do with my USB drivers. I should have trusted my initial instinct and not relied on the diagnosis of the ADS technician. I really didn't think that my USB driver was the problem since I had never had any issues with my USB subsystem, and I was using new, commonly available hardware.

This is one problem with trying to assemble a system using components from different manufacturers - it's all too easy for a vendor to blame the other components when something goes wrong.