PVR500 Tuner 2 Receives static - help?

[nurowolf]

Hi

I am new to Sage and am currently on the product trial period.

I am having trouble with the initial install and setup.

I have a PVR500MCE card, I live in Hong Kong. My TV comes from 2 sources (1 Free Over the air, & 1 STB Cable Box) Both feed their signal to the PVR500 through the single Co-axial RF Cable.

I am also using XMLTV for my guide information.

I go through the install process for Tuner 1. Install the XMLTV file and import using the XMLTV importer. This is successful and I have Free To Air TV

Then I install/Configure Tuner 2. I configure it to use the Tuner & External STB for channel change (I use External Exe Channel Change plugin - which I have confirmed works). SAGE asks me which RF channel to tune to for the Cable Broadcast. This is Channel 59. I go through and import the XMLTV data file 2.xml for lineup 2.

All looks well. The guide imports the Channels correctly. Free to Air works perfectly. However, when I select a cable channel - the following occurs
1) Channel Change is sent to Girder and channel is changed on STB
2) SAGE shows channel - but it is static.

I have confirmed that 59 is the correct channel (did this by removing all sources and adding only one that used channel scan to get available TVs channels & Cable broadcast was on 59).

I am stuck. How do I get the second Tuner to not receive static? Please advise? Are there any logs I can look at for guidance on this.

Regards
Mark

[ke6guj]

it sounds like you have 2 separate feeds coming into the PVR-500 on one cable. Is that correct?

I don't know if Sage would work in that configuration. having 1 coax supplying 2 tuners with 2 different feeds.

Have you tried to reverse them, set up the stb as tuner 1, and Free-to-air as tuner 2? make any difference?

[nurowolf]

Yes that is correct 1 feed to 2 tuners. This is the way the the PVR 500 is meant to work. The card is meant to be smart enough to treat the single cable as 2 logical cables for the Software layer (or so Hauppage have said).

This seems to be the way that it works in GBPVR.

No I haven't tried it the other way around yet. Will give it a try tonight. I gues the other option I could use is to go through the Composite Video feed, but I would expect that the Coaxial RF feed is a higher quality image.

What I have tried is to make both tuners free-to-air, but scanning for available channels on the 2nd tuner recurns nothing. It is like there is no cable there for the second tuner.

BTW - thanks for the post.

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by nurowolf

Yes that is correct 1 feed to 2 tuners. This is the way the the PVR 500 is meant to work. The card is meant to be smart enough to treat the single cable as 2 logical cables for the Software layer (or so Hauppage have said).

Did they actually say that you can have 2 separate and different feeds coming in on one cable? If so, thats cool, didn't know that. I did know that it could take 1 feed and split it internally to 2 tuners. But that it could take 2 feeds and have the card run one feed to each tuner through a single coax, wow.

[nurowolf]

Sorry

I misunderstood your question.

It is a single feed that is split. The feed comes from the STB and contains the feeds for free to air + plus a fixed channel for the STB

Tuner 1 - no fixed channel. Tuner changes channel

Tuner 2. - Fixed channel (59). Girder changes channel.

[nielm]

but scanning for available channels on the 2nd tuner recurns nothing. It is like there is no cable there for the second tuner.

Sounds like there may be a problem with your PVR-500, but then you say tuner2 works and picks up all the FTA channels with the same cabling in GB-PVR

Have you also tried setting up:
Tuner 1 - no fixed channel. Tuner changes channel
Tuner 1 - fixed channel 59/EXE tuner plugin
Tuner 2 - no fixed channel. Tuner changes channel

(I believe Sage can do this -- ie use the same input for both FTA and STB channels)

A side point: why don't you use the composite or S-Video out of your STB -- if it has it -- the quality should be a lot better than using UHF...

[nurowolf]

Nielm

I have tried having the following config

Tuner 1 - Free to air
Tuner 1 - Fixed Channel 59 - external STB channel change

Tuner 2 - nothing

Tuner 2 had nothing because I could not get the second config for Tuner 1 to work. I also thought that SageTV could handle more than 1 config per input - maybe I am doing some thing wrong.

As for the Compoiste / S-Video, 2 reasons why I didn't/haven't used it. The first may not be accurate.
My STB only has Composite out - and quite honestly I thought that RF would be better than composite. Not that I have tried it.

The second reason and more legitamet reason. I can't find any spare cables. So need a trip down to the local electronics store to get 1.

[Opus4]

SageTV can handle 2 separate inputs into the same tuner, but only if they share no channels/networks; i.e.: they can't both have something like "CNN". If you add a second source for an already-used input, you have to make sure that any duplicate stations are disabled in Channel Setup or else the first source will be removed from that tuner.

I don't know how much of the rest of this you've done already:

When you have multiple different inputs for any number of sources, you need to make sure they are using different XMLTV listings or else both sources will try to use the same exact channels. The lineups have to be different, or else when you change the channel lineup for one, it will change it for the other also.

If you haven't already done so, I would try configuring only 1 of your sources first, instead of trying to get both going. Make sure you can use a single input configured for the STB using channel 59 before trying to get both working. (It sounds like FTA is already known to work.) If this works, then you can try setting up the same STB input on tuner 2 to see if there is a tuner problem -- I mention that because it sounded like you were not able to get FTA to work by itself as the source for both tuners.

If tuner 2 doesn't work at all even when the same source works for tuner 1, then I would try different drivers. Has tuner 2 ever worked for any source?

- Andy

[nurowolf]

Andy - thanks for the feedback

Maybe it is a driver issue.

I cannot get Tuner 2 to work with a scan or XML.

(I can only use tuner and not the composite inputs as I do not have cables at the moment)

Though Tunder 2 does work under other software.

[nurowolf]

OK. This is just dumb.

Though the good news is that it is fixed

Now for the explanation

Hong Kong has 69 available channels for its free to air frequency range. Channel 59 is being used in my rig as the Cable TV channel from the STB.

For Tuner 1 this works fine. The system only detects 69 possible channels and scans through them.

For Tuner 2 it seems that the system cannot determine what country it is in. On Tuner 2 the RF channel is 316.

Channel 316 is only available on the cable network - which I am not using. There is something a bit screwey.

I only figured this out by slowly typing in new values for my fixed RF channel on Tuner 2.

For some reason Tuner 2 is forced to be a cable connection and not a antenna connection (even though the settings in sage are antenna)

Very weird behaviour. The good news is that it works.

The bad new - I have another cable box coming in 2 weeks so will probably have to go through this trial and error process again.


Now I can get down to testing.