Pinnacle HDTV PCI card 800i and QAM

[booga]

I previously had managed to successfully tune cable channels through the analogue tuner, which I have to say looks a lot better than analogue through the hauppauge pvr500!

I've scoured the internet looking for information about how to set this tuner up but a lot of the posts here and in other forums say tuning QAM in Sage with the 800i cannot be done (except there was one useless post here saying that QAM was finally supported but with no explanation on how to do it).

Now I'm currently staring at my set up which has just finished scanning and has pulled in quite a few channels that which I'm assuming the majority of are scrambled.

I've gotten this far by installing the latest pinnacle drivers and sage beta. I should also note that Sage reports no signal from the pinnacle digital tuner unless the pinnacle tv app is open before launching Sage.

Has anyone else been here?

Any sort of tips as to what to do now would be appreciated.

[Wirenut]

I have mine laying around and haven't tried it since like August. I was able to tune QAM with their PCTV software but couldn't get Sage to work with it.

Sounds like you've got further than I ever got. I couldn't get Sage to scan anything.

I'm waiting for the 6.5.6 beta to become a Release and then I'll try it again. I also haven't tried the new pinnacle software and drivers yet either.

I will be watching this thread.... but unfortunately have little to offer for help.

Peace,

Wirenut

[daveatl]

I did the same thing you described and was able to watch one single channel. I got GPTV (Georgia Public Broadcasting); so as you can imagine that's not exactly what I want to watch. It was HD though which is nice. So it seems like the technologies of the card and Sage are succesfully talking to each other; it just needs some tweaking. I think what they are missing is a way to scan for all of the channels. Right now it is trying to scan and map them at the same time. So we need to be able to scan the spectrum of channels to pull everything with a signal (ie 208-11, 98-1, 11-2, etc) and then map them to NBC, ABC, etc.

Sage Guys, can you please make this happen? I will be happy to pay you for this. Name a price tag. I really really really want to watch TV in HD.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by daveatl

I did the same thing you described and was able to watch one single channel. I got GPTV (Georgia Public Broadcasting); so as you can imagine that's not exactly what I want to watch. It was HD though which is nice. So it seems like the technologies of the card and Sage are succesfully talking to each other; it just needs some tweaking. I think what they are missing is a way to scan for all of the channels. Right now it is trying to scan and map them at the same time. So we need to be able to scan the spectrum of channels to pull everything with a signal (ie 208-11, 98-1, 11-2, etc) and then map them to NBC, ABC, etc.

Sage Guys, can you please make this happen? I will be happy to pay you for this. Name a price tag. I really really really want to watch TV in HD.

If you're happy to pay why not buy a supported tv tuner for HD? Like the HD HomeRun. Or a HVR2250 or a HD-PVR?

Gerry

[Wirenut]

I bought an HDHR and love it. It's great.

I did submit a request for support for the Pinnacle 800i card last summer. Maybe you could drop one in there too. Ya never know.

The 50 dollar 800i card did have a great picture when used with their crappy PCTV software... so... it seems like it'd be cool. Although I used it for clear QAM, so not sure about the analog side of things... but there is no encoder on that card... just tuners. So it'd be software encoding.

I would use it for QAM in Sage if I could

Peace,

Wirenut