Current state of HD support 3.0.7

[dfitz43]

Hi all,
I've read through the 3.0.7 beta thread and I'm still utterly confused as to whether 3.0.7 is working well for people with ATSC cards (particularly fusion varieties).

I have both the Fusion 5 Gold and 5 Lite; ultimately, I'd like to have a 2-tuner ATSC-only setup with Sage.

For now, I'd settle to get one of them working (presumably the 5 Gold, as this is officially supported).

I have the latest Fusion drivers that were posted, and my Fusion card works just fine with the Fusion software to view ATSC signals from all available channels in my area (Raleigh-Durham).

In the Sage source setup, it finds my card as a Fusion WDM digital tuner. However, it locks up when I try to scan channels (stays decidedly put on channel 2) and when I hit the test button, it fails.

Am I missing something incredibly obvious here? (Newbie to Sage, been using HTPC/MyHD for a couple of years now.)

I understand that you have to turn off the Fusion agent from the systray, and also that the two Fusion card setup is currently problematic (or at least people have posted to that effect).

I waited until 3.0.7 for the OOB HD support, and am still excited about the Sage frontend, but it's been incredibly frustrating trying to make the Fusion work.

Please tell me I'm missing something moronic here--that would make life easier. Thanks in advance for any advice.

cheers,
Dave

[Fluffdaddy]

Getting info on how other people HD set-up's are working in Beta v 3 is like pulling teeth here..................

My 2 250 pvr and 2-tuner ATSC-HD setup with Sage is working.............but "just" working. In my case things could be ruining smoother.

The thing is I don't know if its because my box is under powered or the beta is still not running on all cylinders just yet. And not many folks are talking about it. Maybe the guys that are 100% happy are watching TV and not posting about their HD-sagetv HTPC's. I don't know.

But so far the only thing better about my home made 2-tuner HD-ATSC DVR then comcast's is I'm not paying 10 bucks a month for it.

To be fair I really have a 4 tuner dvr........That's better then comcast

AMD 2600+ XP...........soon to be 3000+
1GB System RAM
ATI 9800 Pro

[berniec]

I just got done setting up a sage box w/ two Fusion 5 lite cards, and 1 WinTV PCR250 in it. All of the tuners worked fine in my initial testing at least. I needed to download the newest drivers from Fusion, and then the latest beta of sage and then delete and re-add all my tuners and everything worked flawlessly.

the box is a P4 3.0/1GB/Radion 8900 video

[redefsen]

I am also having the same issue with a ATI HDTV Wonder card. The pvr-350 card works but the HD card will not do a channel search. The HD card works in the ATI software.

Thanks.

[jkoutrouba]

I can't remember if mine worked to scan the stations or not. I think it did not. I skipped the step and just loaded the EPG and went for it. I've been very happy with the stability to date. I'm using an A180 and 3.0.7b.

[jkoutrouba]

Originally Posted by redefsen

I am also having the same issue with a ATI HDTV Wonder card. The pvr-350 card works but the HD card will not do a channel search.

But does it work if you try to tune a particular channel?


-JK

[redefsen]

The HDTV card does not work at all in sage. It gives me the option to pick it as a source. It does work in the ATI software. Is there an ATI service that has to be stop or removed for sage to be able to use it?

[jkoutrouba]

Originally Posted by redefsen

The HDTV card does not work at all in sage. It gives me the option to pick it as a source. It does work in the ATI software. Is there an ATI service that has to be stop or removed for sage to be able to use it?

I believe you can skip the step where it scans for channels and tests the card. Assign the digital channels to that card (or to simplify, just choose one), then go into the channel guide and see if they work. (For troubleshooting, I would remove the other sources so you can be sure that whatever comes up is from the HD card.) I seem to remember that mine would not scan, but they all work just fine.

I don't know anything about the ATI software, sorry, but I would assume you would want to stop any processes that are using the card.

[Fluffdaddy]

Originally Posted by jkoutrouba

I can't remember if mine worked to scan the stations or not. I think it did not. I skipped the step and just loaded the EPG and went for it. I've been very happy with the stability to date. I'm using an A180 and 3.0.7b.

Could you please post the hardware you are running with.
CPU s
Ram
Video card
and PCI cards

Thanks

PS: It would be nice if everyone does the same. Then maybe everyone can get an idea what setup works best

thanks again

[AMCooper63]

I can't get my Fusion HDTV 5 Gold to work with SageTV V3.07. When it comes to setting up the card, I see I have two choices, Digital TV tuner and TV Tuner.

When I pick TV Tuner everything seems to setup fine, but it won't tune channels. I get "Watch request failed"

Picking the Digital TV Tuner, I can't pick the onboard tuner for tuning.
Picking "Don't configure tuning." causes the same error as above "Watch request failed"

Anyone have any idea how to setup this card?

Is any of the Fusion software suppose to be running while SageTV is running?

What about the Fusion Agent?

[jkoutrouba]

Originally Posted by AMCooper63

When I pick TV Tuner everything seems to setup fine, but it won't tune channels. I get "Watch request failed"

Had you just clicked "View" before that error came up? If so, I'm guessing your problem is that you are trying to tune a QAM channel, not an ATSC channel. The QAM functions are not supported, as far as I know. You need to plug in a regular antenna and start receiving normal OTA broadcasts; you can't tune the channels that are broadcast over cable.


-JK

P.S. Nice job on the screenshots. That makes things much easier.

[jkoutrouba]

Originally Posted by Fluffdaddy

Could you please post the hardware you are running with.
CPU s
Ram
Video card
and PCI cards

P4 2.8, 1GB, Radeon 9600, A180. Additional bit of information that is highly relevant: NVidia PureVideo decoders.

Sorry if I made this sound easy. I've spent lots of hours tweaking things to get this all working. I still have problems, but almost all of them are related to the fact that I am trying to use this system as a normal desktop system in addition to my HTPC. I run dual monitors with my Infocus 4805 on DVI and an analog LCD on VGA. Since I can only get HDTV to run in Overlay mode with my video card (otherwise I get stutters, etc) I have to make the projector my primary monitor. Many applications, however, don't like to run on secondary. So I end of switching them all the time. When you do this enough, things start to get flakey. I am very close to buying a second system to serve as desktop and dedicating this one to HTPC duty.

-JK

[Fluffdaddy]

Hummm I will look into NVidia PureVideo decoders. Thanks for the tip.

This is the kind of tweaking info many of us are looking for.

[jkoutrouba]

Originally Posted by Fluffdaddy

Hummm I will look into NVidia PureVideo decoders.

Lots of people use them (the decoders Formerly Known As NVDVD.) I'm not really sure they make all that much difference, honestly, but I bought them as part of a package deal so I'm going to use them. You can try them on a trial basis before you buy. And I don't exactly consider them easy to work with. Especially for the audio setup. Most of the time I cannot get the audio tab to appear in the decoder control panel. The only way I've found is to set everything in Sage to default rather than specifying a certain decoder. Unfortunately, doing that sometimes means that following a reboot, things don't work like I expect (or like they were working prior to the reboot).

But I was pretty happy when I successfully pulled off movie night and had no lockups.

-JK

[AMCooper63]

Yes, they are all the digital channels are QAM. Some 256 and some 64. I've missed that point. Thanks. However that doesn't explain the fact that the analog tuner does the same thing.

[jkoutrouba]

Originally Posted by AMCooper63

Yes, they are all the digital channels are QAM. Some 256 and some 64. I've missed that point. Thanks. However that doesn't explain the fact that the analog tuner does the same thing.

You'll have to bear with me. I'm having a little trouble getting all of this. Let me start from the beginning and tell you what I understand, and you can correct me if I don't have it all straight.

1. You start the configure source wizard, pick the Fusion card, and get to the screen that you posted where you need to choose what input source you want to use on that card.

2. If you choose the digital tuner, it only allows you to control an external device or not configure the tuner.

3. If you choose straight TV tuner, then you can continue. The next window should ask if you are tuning over the air, cable, satellite, etc.

Question 1: Are you selecting Over the air (Antenna/broadcast)?

4. It'll then ask you which EPG data to use, I assume you want xml.

5. It then asks if you want local broadcast (over-the-air) or cable/satellite.

Question 2: Are you selecting over the air? I assume not considering your posted screenshot.

6. You select your location.

7. You set up channels to tune.

Test 1: When you get to this point, try setting up a single digital channel and disabling all other channels. I just want to see what happens when you try to watch that channel. Also, you need to have an antenna plugged in.

To answer your direct question, I don't know why it wouldn't work with analog. Perhaps your cable is only digital, and that causes problems (the analog tuner wouldn't be able to tune channel 702, as that is above the maximum for UHF.) Are the lower channels analog in your cable system? Have you tried one of them? Is there an analog tuner on the card? My A180 does not have one (but the choices for input also reflect this.) Can you test it with a composite or s-video input to see if the card does anything (dust off the VCR...)

I'm a little hesitant to try to figure out why things haven't worked for you to date because your screenshots reflect attempts to do things that should not work. If you try something that should work and it doesn't, I am willing to try to troubleshoot from there.


-JK

[davey_fl]

I didn't think there were any HDTV cards able to decode QAM (assuming the cableco has encoded it to squash it into their bandwidth). Or are we talking about non-encoded QAM? In the case of encoded QAM, is the only option to have your HDTV card externally tune and accept, say, s-video, which overall would allow the cable box to decode but might possibly result in better PQ?

Am I just confused??

[jkoutrouba]

Originally Posted by davey_fl

I didn't think there were any HDTV cards able to decode QAM (assuming the cableco has encoded it to squash it into their bandwidth). Or are we talking about non-encoded QAM? In the case of encoded QAM, is the only option to have your HDTV card externally tune and accept, say, s-video, which overall would allow the cable box to decode but might possibly result in better PQ?

Am I just confused??

I'm no expert, but as far as I know there are no cards that will decrypted encrypted QAM, and unencrypted QAM is not supported in Sage. As far as I know, it's a losing proposition all the way around.

The s-video thing, at least for high def programming, should result in dramatically worse PQ because you'd be giving up a whole lot of pixels.


-JK

[AMCooper63]

You are correct. I get the Cable, over the air, satellite and It allows me to pick cable, I can pick my zip code and my service provider. I've already got three other cards setup the the same way. I don't know anything about XML EPG.

I get the my cable system has both analog and digital channels. The other three Haupauge cards work just fine. It's the Fusion HDTV5 card that doesn't work. There certainly seems to be two tuners are the card. I get both to choose from. I get the same error if I use the digital tuner or the analog tuner. I've been told that SageTV doesn't do QAM tuning. If so, then I'll never get HD from this card.

The card works fine in its own software that comes with the card.

[jkoutrouba]

Originally Posted by AMCooper63

The card works fine in its own software that comes with the card.

I checked a few other forums and the Dvico web site. This card does not appear to have a hardware mpeg2 encoder, so it will not work in Sage for analog TV. I don't think the QAM functions are supported in Sage, so your only hope of getting HD is to hook it up to a regular antenna and get OTA signals.

-JK