TITAM - Technical issues that affected me

Credit to "Geoff" for this post - read it for a summary of the error.  Seems I'm not the only one who runs into strange errors. Naturally, this error is a real bitch.  Windows fails to tell you WHICH audio device changed, making it a trial-and-error approach to debugging.  I hate that, as they could have easily mentioned which device was causing the offense. Plus it takes about an hour to re-create the error, making troubleshooting very slow. For my part, here is what did NOT fix the error: 1.  Disabling Windows driver signing enforcement.  My Hauppage WinTV-PVR-150 cards were listed as "Sound" devices in Device Manager, making them (possibly) "audio" devices to Windows.  They had yellow exclamation points in Device Manager only because the drivers are not signed for Windows 7.  So they worked, but they could have run into some kind of driver checking BS that caused the error sporiadically. However, turning off the driver checking using the ...

As the title says... A little background: My old - actually, ancient - Shuttle-based PVR system decided to more or less give up on me.  It still worked, but the old Shuttle case had a poor habit of overheating.  An easily predictable consequence of the form factor, no doubt, but let's not forget the poor old thing was merrily cranking away recording live TV and playing back edited videos for many, many years. Time to upgrade.  I figured, if a lousy old Shuttle SS54G could handle it, who knows what I could do with a modern Core series processor and an SSD? So I go get a little system built, scavenging the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 TV capture cards out of the old Shuttle.  Hell, they're perfectly good, and they're on the BeyondTV compatibility list.  They have hardware encoding and do a fine job.  Anyone who tells you that you need uber-great hardware to code NTSC TV is crazy.  (HD is another story, maybe.) The old system used SageTV, which has ...