BBC HD stopped working

[technodevotee]

I have two Hauppauge WinTV Nova-HD S2 cards in my Living Room PC and I receive TV from three satellites on them using a dish with multiple LNBs.

I went away for a few days in November and when I returned, nothing had recorded on any of the BBC HD channels. Despite trying everything I could think of they still weren't working until a few minutes ago when I discovered that one of the settings in the registry needed to be changed.

For those not familiar with these cards, the driver uses settings stored in the registry to set the tuning parameters that cannot be configured in Media Center. It takes the form

Code: Select all

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\hcw88bda\DVBS_Params\10847000]
"unique_key"="28.2E ASTRA 2, EUROBIRD 1"
"symbol_rate"=dword:015ef3c0
"modulation"=dword:0000001b
"fec_inner"=dword:00000003
"polarization"=dword:00000002
"pilot"=dword:00000000
"rolloff"=dword:ffffffff
"broadcast_type"="DVB-S2"

The problem I found on the affected transponders was that fec_inner was set to 2 and it needed to be changed to 3.

I spent days and days looking for this, restored the system from backup, put the cards in a different PC, reloaded Media Center from scratch etc., etc., so hopefully this information will save someone going through the same heartache.

EDIT: I forgot to say that this is not specific to Windows 10 and also affects Windows 7.