Clarification from Frey wanter concerning 350 and 250 issues

[carlgar]

I am very confused about what I consider to be well known issues concerning the mixing of the the PVR 350 with the newer type 16 PVR 250 cards. I believe, but have no first hand knowledge that this is the same problem as the type 15 PVR 250 with the type 16 PVR 250 card. I mention this only because my manual initialization work around also works with that problem.

Originally posted by Narflex
Why do you need to match it with your 350? The 250 with the 16 chip on it should work fine alongside the 350. I've run that many times without problems.

Click here for source of quote.
Does the above quote refer to having cards in the same system?
I believe this may be referring to a network configuration.

Originally posted by dkardatzke
I've been working with Hauppauge on the problems a few of you have been experiencing running a PVR-350 with a PVR-250. Were still working on some of the issues but here's a temporary workaround if you experience any problems with the video output disappearing from the PVR-350:

Click here for source of quote.
When you say "few" is that because only a few people mix these cards? Did you say "few" because you think most people mixing these cards have no problems?

From the sage store about the 350 bundle it states:

With the upcoming release of SageTV 2.0, the PVR-350 MPEG decoder will also display the On-screen Display and User Interface of SageTV. Using SageTV and the PVR-350 you can pause Live TV, instant replay, record and search for your favorite shows. SageTV also supports multiple tuners so when you are ready to record multiple channels at once, just add a WinTV-PVR-250 or WinTV-PVR-usb2 and you are ready to go with no additional software costs.

Are you stating that version 2.0 will correct all problems with mixing PVR 350 and PVR 250 cards?
Are you able to see the problems listed below in-house or are you just relying on the posted information?

There seems to be 2 distinct problems with mixing a PVR 350 and the newest PVR 250 in the same system.

1. The loss of TV out from the 350 Card. This appears to be Sage TV specific issue. WinTV2000 outputs just fine even when getting the source from a PVR 250. Even though at one time I was able to get this to work I cannot re-create, so no work around is available.

2. After a reboot the recording from the PVR 250 is of very poor quality. I have a workarond which has worked for seval people and I have not seen any post where this work around has failed to work. It can be read at Possible initialization problem with multi-tuner cards
This appears to be a Hauppauge issue because even WinTV2000 shows this problem.

[Gendalia]

I've never seen any reply about this, and I'm interested in this too.

[carlgar]

Narflex did reply indirectly to this post with the following:

I've done every combination of 250/350, 15/16 cards in my workstation and they've always worked flawlessly. I've also seen other PCs that simply would not work with more than one capture card in them (but work fine with multiple USB devices, combined with a PCI card). In my technical opinion, the problem is due to motherboard manufacturers who cut corners and don't fully implement the PCI specification. This allows for *most* setups of PCI cards to work fine, but not all.

It appears that the combination of a 350 card with the newer type 16 250 in a single system is a very rare ( only 4 members).
Two of those members indicate that their systems run properly. One member has replaced the 350 with a 250 card to get around the problem. While I thought I had a workaround Possible initialization problem with multi-tuner cards, I began to see too many failures with with 250 cards. I have now pulled my 350 card from my system.

If you believe you have this problem, I urge you to submit a bug report to frey. The more reports concerning this issue, the higher priority it should get. However, I would not expect a quick resolution. If you are lucky enough to have a network, you should be able to put your 250 in one system and the 350 in another. This appears to be what most members have done.

[danward79]

I would also like to see a definative answer, before I continue to spend money and upgrade my system.

I have a the moment no problems

Dan

[Gendalia]

I don't run windows normally, and while I have a fairly extensive home network, the sagetv machine is the first machine to be more or less permanently in windows, so splitting the 250 and the 350 into separate machines is an annoying proposition. We've tried three different motherboard combinations, a Via board where with the combination of cards in Windows wouldn't come up once the drivers were loaded, one nforce2 (asus) board that suffers from both problems 1 & 2, and one other board that was just too slow to run sage. The nforce2 is my NetBSD development machine, so having sacrificed it for sage is somewhat annoying, but even that doesn't actually work properly, which means another machine would have to be purchased for sage, and I still don't know what the magic combination is to have a working sage box with a 250 and a 350 is, so buying a new machine is a gamble.

What I would like more than anything else is complete speciification of a working system so I have a fighting chance of putting together a system that works.

[carlgar]

Gendalia, since you did see both problems above I think you should report this as a bug. Be sure to ask specifically for a complete specification of a working system. This would give you a much better chance of getting the information you want and add another user to the list of user's than have encountered the problem. If you do not want to do that, you may want to start your own thread with a better title for exactly what you are looking for. I think the best you may get is the exact specification that Narflex has for his workstation. It would be nice to see a list of known systems that do not have a problem and another list of systems that do have a problem. Since it looks like a bios update is available for my system, I cannot state for sure if it is a hardware problem or not for me. I will be updating and retesting my system in January and may have more information at that time.

[Gendalia]

I did submit a bug request to Frey after I posted above, but I didn't ask for a spec of a working system. I have the latest bios updates on my nforce2 & Via systems, and neither update seemed to make a difference in how things worked on them. I think I will start a new thread as you suggest though. Thanks.

[mlbdude]

Unfortunately I have never seen or been able to get a 15 and a 16 version card to work together well. In fact on one box I run a PVR package other than Sage that does not even support dual tuners and just the fact that both are installed their causes problems. Hopefully Hauppauge will get their act together now that the Sage user community is growing and as other software packages also support dual tuner.

[krwren]

Originally posted by carlgar
Narflex did reply indirectly to this post with the following:

It appears that the combination of a 350 card with the newer type 16 250 in a single system is a very rare ( only 4 members).

Make that 5 members. This summer I bought a 250 card. Last week I bought Sage and a second 250 card through Sage. Sunday when I placed it in my system I found that the first card I bought was a 15 and the new one was a 16. I did get it working through the initalation. But his is a pain because I have to do it everytime I reboot the system.

[Deadbolt]

Make it 6...I have a 350 and a 250 and have to use the "initialization" every time I reboot...which really stinks as I have it setup to autoboot into sagetv if it comes back from a power outage....it can't do the initialization itself though so I'm left with bad recordings until I get home to reinit the darn cards