The Linear Canvas

I bought a Pinnacle PCTV HD Card (800i)PCI TV card several months ago. I liked it so much, I took it back and got my money back.

I looked around for another card or a USB tuner. The price kept me away from the USB tuners although some of them had features like internal memory that made them somewhat attractive. All HD tuners had the S-video inputs, plus NTSC and ATSC tuners. Still, there was the main deal breaker for me, a lack of clear-QAM support for unencrypted digital cable reception.

Pinnacle is the only manufacturer that currently has a clear-QAM High Definition TV tuner, in my price range. The USB tuners in the Pinnacle line were basically the same product as the PCTV HD Card because of the software, except they were external. Against my better judgement, I bought another PCTV HD Card. It was cheaper.

I didn’t have any problems at first. I immediately updated to the beta version of the software that allowed clear-QAM reception. Besides the fact that I never watch TV, everything was fine. Then came an upgrade from Pinnacle that promised to add features that would have been very helpful. I tried to upgrade but it failed. That time I was able to revert to the previous version.

I had some trouble along the way and had re-scanned all the digital channels on my cable. It left me with several hundred blank channels and the software was acting up when I would edit it. So I decided to update to the latest version of TVCenter Pro. What happened next was a lot of work and never a reward, until yesterday.

The beta software I was using was version 4.94.1616 and it worked well enough. It had a few weak spots, but it did install and function, originally. After the upgrade, I couldn’t go back to it, because both the default and custom installations in v4.94.1616 said I didn’t have enough disk space now to complete the install, which was not true. That didn’t happen originally when I first installed it. It also happened on the latest version, 4.98.1903, on the default install. But it did allow me to at least proceed (or is that pretend?) to install it using the custom install option but then it would crash with the error:

TVCenter Pro Unhandled Exception!!!
Failed to initialize application, error code is : 0xA3040210

I got the “Unhandled Exception” error at the very end of the installation and any time I tried to run the software. I thought at the time that the OS, Windows Vista Ultimate, had changed in some way that was causing TVCenter Pro installation to fail now. The 800i card seemed to function properly. The software seemed to be the issue, at least in Vista Ultimate. That turned out to be the correct answer, but I wasn’t sure where to begin fixing it. I had updated and changed every driver and program I could that seemed to have anything to do with video or audio. But nothing worked. I was out of ideas.

I have used Cakewalk Pro Audio v9 for years as a software audio recording system. I tried to load it on my new computer that runs Vista Ultimate. I can’t remember why, but I wasn’t happy with it for some reason and uninstalled it. Recently I got a good deal, although a very suspicious one, on eBay for the latest copy of Sonar 7 Producer. It is the same software that was Cakewalk Pro Audio, renamed and ten years newer. I received it in the mail and installed it the first chance I had. It was a rather long installation, so I just started it and came back later.

When I had a chance, I returned to find that there was an error message on the screen. It said:

The Program is not properly installed. Please reinstall from the original CD.

I was shocked. I immediately started running through the possibilities, all bad. Was it a bad disk, bootleg software, or an incompatibility? I panicked and fired off an e-mail to the vendor who had sold me the program. My next coherent thought was “Why don’t you check the Cakewalk web site and see if any one else had this error?“. I did and typed in my error into the site’s search box and immediately found this web page.

http://www.cakewalk.com/support/kb/kb20071207.asp

It began, “This error has been noticed on a few Windows Vista OEM machines, where the operating system was installed and configured by the manufacturer. The first thing to try is rebooting your computer and reinstalling from the program disk. If that fails to resolve the issue, it may be a case where the following registry location is not defined on the OEM Windows installation...”

Then it gave the registry entries that it said were not defined. I downloaded and ran the program that it provided. It was supposed to detect any lack of the existing definitions and insert the newly defined locations into the Windows Vista registry. I reinstalled Sonar and it worked!

I thought about it for moment and I thought this seemed like a similar problem to what I was having with TVCenter Pro. It just seemed like the installation was not finishing for some reason. I reinstalled TVCenter Pro and it also worked! It seemed to fix the problem that caused the software to tell me that I didn’t have enough disk space. I chose the standard install and it went right ahead and installed the software.