TV FAQ

Deprecated: This content has been deprecated as of current versions and may no longer be valid. Please refer to Television for additional details.

I can get video but not sound

Make sure you set up your audio connection correctly. Most TV cards require a cable connecting TV card's Audio Output to the sound card (Line In for example). When you run Media Center TV for the first time, a dialog window pops up asking you to select an audio mixer device and an audio line. If your TV card requires a physical connection from it to a sound card, then you should make sure the checkbox "There is a physical audio connection from my TV tuner card to my sound card" is checked, and select appropriate sound device and audio line from the two drop-down lists. If your TV card does not require a physical connection to the sound card (an example of such device is ATI TVWonder USB Edition), then you should make sure the checkbox is unchecked.

The dialog window described above will not pop up again for later invocation of the TV program. However, you can still make changes in case you made a wrong selection during the first time, or you have hardware changes after having made an initial selection. In such cases, you can bring up TV configuration property sheet from the right-click menu, by choosing TV Options > Configure TV. The top portion of the first page is exactly the same as the dialog window described above.

How do I record a TV show while watching it?

From the right-click menu, choose TV Recording > Start Recording.

When I start recording, I get a message "Cannot display video to screen while recording. Do you want to continue recording without showing the video?"

Some video capture cards/drivers are not capable of displaying video on screen when you attempt to record in high resolution (640 x 480 or higher), or are not capable of displaying video with high resolution while recording. You can try one or more of the following:

• Reduce the resolution with which you record the video. To do this, you need to choose a Recording Profile with a lower resolution. Create a custom recording profile if necessary. If you record in AVI format, choose a video size of 640 x 240, or 320 x 240. If you record in Windows Media format, choose "Space Saver" quality option.
• Reduce the viewing resolution when recording. To do this, run Media Center TV configuration (see Question 7 above), and choose "Advanced Properties" tab. From the list box, find "Video Preview Pin ..." item, if it exists, and double click on it. Choose a video size such as 640 x 240, or 320 x 240 or lower. You may also experiment with different Color Space format here, but generally, the ones at the top of the list work the best. Note that for some TV devices the "Video Preview Pin ..." is not available from the "Advanced Properties" tab. In such case, the instruction here does not apply.
• Experiment with different Color Space format for recording. To do so, double click on the item "Video Capture Pin ..." from the list box on "Advanced Properties" tab. The default choices are "UYVY" or "YUY2", which SHOULD work the best. So the first thing to try is to make sure your selection is actually one of those. If they do not work well, try others. You should not try setting video size at this place, because the recording video size is set in your Recording Profile (the setting there takes precedence).
• Just accept it and let recording continue without viewing it on screen.

When I start recording, I get a black screen without any video, but recording seems to work, as on-screen message tells recording statistics.

See Question 3 for answer.

I get an error message "BuildCaptureGraph failed. Cannot render video capture stream " when attempting to start recording.

Make sure you have selected the right Color Space format for recording. Edit your recording profile to make sure you are using the correct color space (UYVY or YUY2 in most cases). See Configure TV for Recording.

Where are recorded video saved?

You can customize where the recorded video is saved. The default folder is "<the disk with largest free space>\VIDEO" folder. To specify a folder, display the TV Configuration property sheet, and click Recording tab. You can either type a full path of the folder in the edit box, or choose an existing folder by clicking the browse button on the right of the edit box, or do a combination of both.