AverMedia tuner failing?

[sebaz]

I have had an Avermedia A188 dual ATSC tuner since 2009 and used it relatively free of trouble. It's being used with Vista Home Media Center in a separate PC that serves only as a DVR.It was working fine until about a month ago, when I noticed that Jimmy Kimmel Live showed up on the list of recorded programs without any picture, and when trying to play it it would give me an error telling me that the file was not compatible. So after seeing that all the recordings of that show were like that day after day, I switched to live TV and the only channel that was available was NBC17 (Raleigh, NC). The other local affiliates would show nothing or at best they would show a second of signal and then freeze and mute, and do the same thing over and over.

That lead me to think that something had happened to the antenna or the cabling, but just in case I unplugged the coax from the tuner card and plugged it directly to the TV set. All the channels were working fine, with no interruptions. I even did an auto search and all those other garbage channels (religious, secondary and so on) were showing fine. Unfortunately my TV set doesn't have a feature to show signal strength, but all the channels were showing without pixel explosions or other glitches, so I assume it is strong. But just in case, I went to the attic to check that it was in good shape and it was, and although I haven't checked the full length of the cable, only a few feet go outside the house and that is in good shape, it's thick cable about a year old.

Next thing I did last Monday was to take out the tuner card from the computer and take a look at it. There was a screw that wasn't totally tightened, so I fixed that and put it back. After booting up and launching MC, NBC, CBS and ABC would show without problems, but FOX would still freeze every couple of seconds. But, next day, Fox was working fine.

So I thought that the problem was fixed, but today I went to the Recorded shows and I see that the last Kimmel is again not showing a thumbnail, unplayable, and when going to Live TV I'm back to only being able to see NBC17, CBS and ABC don't even show a bit of signal and Fox comes and goes.

Signal on the TV by itself is still perfect. I'm about to spend a hundred bucks on a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 but I would prefer not to, obviously. Has anybody else experienced something like this?

[Mike88]

I recently started using Avermedia A188 Duet cards & so far everything is OK. I have two white box versions. These have been recently discontinued so I ended up getting a second one from ebay for $51 that was supposedly a month old. it came in the original box with all the original materials & it works great. I mention this because you might want to try ebay also. Some people are asking $80+. But I did see a new one for $50 with free shipping but someone beat me to that one. Just keep checking. I too thought about the Hauppage 2250 but did not want to spend $100. The Avermedia was half that.

[pduncan1963]

I have am AverMedia A188 also purchased in 2008. It worked fine for almost two years, then I started getting pixilation on all reordered shows. At the time I was using an antenna and thought that was the problem. Now I am on Comcast cable and the exact same problem happens. When I watch a show that was recorded using one of these tuners, it is mostly unwatchable. since I also run a Ceton Infinity 4 tuner that gives me perfect pictures, I know that the problem is the AverMedia.

I checked to see if the AverMedia has the latest drives which it did, and insure that the cable was running directly from the distribution amp, which it was. Evidently there is a bug somewhere in the cards. Its' a shame.

[Mike88]

So they only last a few years - wonderful. Maybe that's why they discontinued selling them.