Hauppauge HVR-2250 & HVR-950q

[kberg31974]

I've been running SageTV with a HVR-2250 to pick up QAM channels over Comcast for quite some time, recently added a HD-200 unit and the family loves it! Now I'm trying to have everything run through the Sage network so even our Comcast STB (SD version) is connected. As to not sacrifice my dual-tuner HD QAM, I'm trying to add a USB HVR-P50q into the mix connected to our STB using MultiDTVTuner to change channels via a serial connection. Whenever I try to add this to my SageTV setup, it hangs on the video preview (using either Tuner or Composite inputs) and/or the video preview is black. WinTV7 seems to work fine and MultiDTVTuner is communicating with the STB fine. I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. I'm a computer tech with my own business and I'm stumped. Anybody have any suggestions?

[paulbeers]

Ignore the preview. Try checking out the resultant video from the program guide.

Secondly, the HVR950 is a really poor choice for SD capture as it doesn't have a hardware MPEG2 Encoder. You would be better off sacrificing one of the tuners from the HVR2250 and use the HVR950 for QAM tuning only.

[kberg31974]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

Ignore the preview. Try checking out the resultant video from the program guide.

Secondly, the HVR950 is a really poor choice for SD capture as it doesn't have a hardware MPEG2 Encoder. You would be better off sacrificing one of the tuners from the HVR2250 and use the HVR950 for QAM tuning only.

Unfortunately, my HVR-2250 has an internal splitter for the dual-tuner ability, so I'd give up dual QAM tuners for a one SD STB. I might just have to lower my WAF and buy a second internal tuner card. If I did that, I could make sure it came with an IR Blaster so I could use our HD STB instead.

[paulbeers]

So are you using the coax out of yoru STB? Why wouldn't you use the Svideo or Composite? Those will give you 2x to 3x better image quality....

[kberg31974]

I've tried all of them on the 950q. On the 2250, can it record from both tuners and the S-Video at the same time?

[Fuzzy]

The 2250 can record 2 programs ag a time. That's it's only real limitation. Where those cme from, is felxible. You can record from two tuners, or two s-video ins, or one of each. Sage is smart in regards to this though, and will work with all four inputs set up. You could use two STB's to two S-Video inputs, and QAM to the two tuner inputs. As long as the channel maps are set up properly, and you set the merits correctly (QAM having higher merit than teh STB) it will prefer recording from the QAM tuners, unless the channel is unavailable there.

[MXMike]

Originally Posted by kberg31974

...Whenever I try to add this to my SageTV setup, it hangs on the video preview (using either Tuner or Composite inputs) and/or the video preview is black. WinTV7 seems to work fine and MultiDTVTuner is communicating with the STB fine. I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. I'm a computer tech with my own business and I'm stumped. Anybody have any suggestions?

I was having similar problems settingup my 950q tuner and fixed it by updating the drivers. With the original drivers (which I thought were the latest version but turned out were not), setup would wither hang or show a black video preview and fail the channel scan.

See my post here to see where I found the latest drivers:
http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...ad.php?t=46938

[kberg31974]

Thanks everyone for the input! I've run across other posts online that seem to indicate that Windows 7 (at least on some machines) "breaks" the analog inputs on the 950q. That seems to be the case here, so I've decided (once I get a S-Video cable) to connect cable directly to my 950q and my 2250, plus connect my STB to the S-Video input on the 2250. That gives SageTV the choice of 3 QAM tuners or 2 QAM tuners and the STB. How do I tell Sage to give QAM priority on shows?

[Fuzzy]

Search for 'Encoder_merit'.