NVIDIA DualTV MCE - only one coax required

[95TBird]

Well, I got both my cards today & unfortunately, I can only get one to work at a time in Sage. Both install in XP Pro with no problem & look fine in Device Mgr, but when I try to add the 2nd card as a Video source, as soon as I try to display video (either from Tuner or s-vid) I get an error from Sage telling me there was an error displaying the video. I've tried changing IRQs etc, but no joy... Well, hopefully this is just a minor bug in the current Beta of Sage & it will eventually get straightened out. If anybody else has this working... please let me know what the trick is !!!

Thanks!!

Bruce

[SHS]

So Bruce what you think of it?.

[ToxMox]

I couldn't resist. I ordered one to replace my last 250. Now I'll be running two 500s, a pvr-usb2 and this one. Should be fun. The single IRQ did it for me along with the glowing reviews. I am also happy to rid my system of the last egg cooking card I have
I had no need running 6 encoders but I've now had times where 7 shows need to record at a time and I'm moving in the summer and will be more likely to use my clients more often so it doesn't hurt having extra tuners.

[Polypro]

Originally Posted by 95TBird

Well, I got both my cards today & unfortunately, I can only get one to work at a time in Sage. Both install in XP Pro with no problem & look fine in Device Mgr, but when I try to add the 2nd card as a Video source, as soon as I try to display video (either from Tuner or s-vid) I get an error from Sage telling me there was an error displaying the video. I've tried changing IRQs etc, but no joy... Well, hopefully this is just a minor bug in the current Beta of Sage & it will eventually get straightened out. If anybody else has this working... please let me know what the trick is !!!

Thanks!!

Bruce

I don't know if this is the same thing, but...

Sometimes when I re-do my PVR500's or Fusion...when I get to the part of Sage where you add the tuner and a small preview window is supposed to play...I won't get video or sometimes get an error. What I do is wait for about 5 seconds and then click continue (not sure of the exact wording) anyway. I've always had them work, I think that part of Sage is a bit flakey. The only other thing I could suggest is adding it to the properties file...but encoders have a lot of info and I don't know what would be unique for each card.

P

[spike5884]

What about support for the Nvidia DualTV card under the Linux version of SageTV???

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by 95TBird

Well, I got both my cards today & unfortunately, I can only get one to work at a time in Sage. Both install in XP Pro with no problem & look fine in Device Mgr, but when I try to add the 2nd card as a Video source, as soon as I try to display video (either from Tuner or s-vid) I get an error from Sage telling me there was an error displaying the video. I've tried changing IRQs etc, but no joy... Well, hopefully this is just a minor bug in the current Beta of Sage & it will eventually get straightened out. If anybody else has this working... please let me know what the trick is !!!

Thanks!!

Bruce

You just need to continue thru the setup. I never got the video preview window. I just chose it and continued. You should try that.

Gerry

[SHS]

spike5884 I kind don't think that happiing any time soon if ever but then agine you never know.

[Enormous]

Does anyone have a link to more information about the remote that comes with the $219 Dual MCE package? Is it anything special, or just a regular MCE remote?

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by 95TBird

Well, I got both my cards today & unfortunately, I can only get one to work at a time in Sage.

No one has commented on one possibility yet: since the card is fairly new, perhaps the drivers have a problem when multiple cards are installed. (The Plextor ConvertX tuner had that problem when it first came out.) If that is the case, you would have to wait for a driver update that supported using multiple cards. You could see if NVidia has comments about this.

- Andy

[95TBird]

OK, I'll drop it back in there this weekend & try just skipping the video preview part, the other odd thing that I did not mention is that when I had the 2nd card in, Sage actually showed 6 total tuners. something like NVIDIA capture, NVIDIA capture 2 (for the 1st card) then NVIDIA capture #2, NVIDIA capture #2 2 & then 2 more that were something like NVIDIA YUV capture & NVIDIA YUV capture 2.

Gerry, Do you actually have 2 cards installed & working?? I love the picture quality on these cards, I can really see the difference, Right now I just have 1 installed & I put my 150 back in so none of the Ws shows would miss being recorded.

I'd love to get them both working!!

Bruce

[Narflex]

I've updated my original post after doing some testing:

http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthr...5&postcount=13

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by 95TBird

Gerry, Do you actually have 2 cards installed & working?? I love the picture quality on these cards, I can really see the difference, Right now I just have 1 installed & I put my 150 back in so none of the Ws shows would miss being recorded.

Bruce

Sorry-no. Right now I just have the one and didn't get around to ordering the second one. I just wanted you to know I didn't get the preview but just went thru it and installed and everything works. (1 x nvDualTV and 2 x PVR500)

Gerry

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by Narflex

IMHO you get about the same quality at about half the bitrate).

EDIT: I no longer stand by the statement I made here regarding bitrate. This was based off previous results I had seen with some reference design boards a few months ago. Testing with an actual DualTV board vs. a PVR250 is not giving me the results I'm expecting. While the DualTV quality is great. I am NOT seeing the same quality at half the bitrate. Actually, at lower bitrates, the PVR250(Conexant) is somewhat better (sub 2Mbps). My sincere apologies for this information being inaccurate. I'm going to look more into this to see what the results really show.

And maybe it's a driver thing. Using graphedit I could not see any of the "advanced" features/settings you see with other card's drivers. Definitely nothing referencing the "Mediasqueeze" so maybe that isn't really "active" yet. But definitely a better picture quality.

Gerry

[SHS]

Well Gerry the ATI 550 has the same problem as well which didn't work well at lowrate.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by SHS

Well Gerry the ATI 550 has the same problem as well which didn't work well at lowrate.

Well, maybe you can't have your cake and eat it too. Maybe to have the better picture at a higher bit rate you have to sacrifice quality at the lower bitrate.

Gerry

[Bandit]

Well, after all the good comments I ordered one last night, then saw NarFlex's edit, grrrr. Actually, his edit only says filesize comment he made was incorrect, so I should still be very happy with the quality from all the other posts. This will give me a total of 5 tuners in my setup and I only need 3, as I record way to much crap to keep up with already. My problem now is which of the other 3 do I remove. I'm thinking the PVR-USB2 and the Win-TV-GoPlus. Definately the later as it isnt a PVR card and probably the USB2 so my 3 tuners are all internal and less wires. Does anyone have a reason I should keep the USB2 connected and instead remove the PVR250?

[SHS]

No we really shouldn't not have to a sacrifice quality loss at the lower bitrate to the point where we see odd artfact like microblocking, mosquitoes and strange patterns things like that like, you can produce good looking yet small SVCD or CVD and DivX footage both in Hardware and Software at 2.0 MBit/sec so the point is if it can archive great visibility at high bit rate then should be able to archive great visibility at low compression with out produce artifacts. why do think a lot people want Hardware ver H.264 in the first place to be able archive much better quality much lower compression.
Beside that wasn't the point of my post in the frist I was just saying NVTV not only one that has the problem and we can only hope that NVIDIA can fix it by Improved the Firmware coding codec so that it handle it properly after all we all know that the PVR 150/250/350/500/USB and USB2 dosen't handle MPEG-1 encoding properly vs some like the Winbond W99200F Hardware MPEG-1 Encoder.

[Homebuilder]

Hi Narflex,

Do you mean the reference design boards were pre release versions of this card? And the prerelease versions were actually better?

I read elsewhere in this thread about possible options being disabled in this card.

Curious, how did they change the board for final release? What did they disable? or turn off?

I was very interested in this board when I first heard of it 6 months ago, thought they said then it hardware recorded in mp4, is that true?

Any info is much appreciated!

Originally Posted by Narflex

This card works with V4.1.6 Beta or higher. Just tested it today. Video quality is superb (it's got a ViXS chip which does MPEG2 encoding at much better quality than the Conexant chips, IMHO you get about the same quality at about half the bitrate).

EDIT: I no longer stand by the statement I made here regarding bitrate. This was based off previous results I had seen with some reference design boards a few months ago. Testing with an actual DualTV board vs. a PVR250 is not giving me the results I'm expecting. While the DualTV quality is great. I am NOT seeing the same quality at half the bitrate. Actually, at lower bitrates, the PVR250(Conexant) is somewhat better (sub 2Mbps). My sincere apologies for this information being inaccurate. I'm going to look more into this to see what the results really show.

[ToxMox]

I just installed my DualTVMCE yesterday and I like it so far. I record everything at "Great" quality and the file sizes for 60 minute shows are around ~1.87 GB vs ~2.02 GB for my Hauppauge tuners. I thought that was interesting.

[Bandit]

Well, got my card yesterday and went to put it in today. Went in fine, now I went to install PureVideo decoder and bam..."please enter your activation code"...well, I would had I ever received one. Did anyone else have trouble receiving your activation code? They say on their site to use the store to find lost keys, but I must be blind on where to find that.