Sage 4.1.7 and Twinhan DVB-T not working

[niz23]

During setup/config of SageTV 4.1.7 when I try to configure my DVB-T
(Twinhan 3020 with BDA driver) to work with Sage 4.1.7 I am unable to configure the card.
Sage detect the card but is unable to scan for channels.
I get error (-2,0x80004005). "There was a problem with a SageTV component. Please reinstall".


My hardware is P4 Celeron with 1GB SATA RAID, MCE2005 RU2.
I have installed Twinhan bda drivers and channel search work in MCE, but not in Sage.
Java version is 1.5.

I live in Sweden so DVB-T or DVB-S is my only choice. All analog TV broadcast is
shutdown in my area.


All help is welcome.
/Magnus

[peterjb]

Magnus,

The problem is more than likely the BDA drivers you have installed for your device. I had similar problem with my Dvico FusionHDTV DVB-T usb device when I upgraded to the latest Fusion HDTV 3.3 drivers. When I reverted to the Fusion HDTV 3.2 drivers all was well.

You may want to try an earlier/later version of the TwinHan drivers to see if they sort it out.

Cheers

Peter

[Ian Norman]

Magnus
Did you stop the Ehome services before running SageTV ????

Is the problem only with 4.1.7. Did it work with 4.1.6 or is this the first time you have tried SageTV

[niz23]

Ian,

Ehome? What´s that? (might be me that´s stupid)
I had the problem .6 too.

I´ll try with an older version of Twinhan.

The installed driver work with MCE.

/Magnus

[Ian Norman]

Magnus
Since you don't know what the EHome services are then that's the reason why SageTV won't tune because XPMCE likes to hog the DVB-T Card and not let anything else use it.
Write a Batch file like this

@ECHO OFF
CLS
ECHO Closing Media Center Services...
net stop ehrecvr
net stop ehsched
CLS

That will stop XPMCE from hogging the DVB-T card and allow SageTV to use it.

Give it a try, I hope it works.
There may be other reasons why it might not work in XPMCE as well.

Cheers

[niz23]

Ian.

thanks a lot.
Will try when I get home from work.

At the momenty I´m evaluating several types of Media Center solutions.
MCE2005 is one of them and I didn´t bother to reinstall with XP to test Sage.
You know, time is a big problem....
I have decided not to use MCE at all most since it does not work as I want
and second of all being tied up to what M$ support and not is another problem.

Do you know of a way to get encrypted channels to work with several tuners in Windows. In Linux it´s much simpler.
What I mean is having one smartcard reader and then decrypt the MPEG stream in software or better in hardware if possible.
I´am well aware of that, this is out in the grey area of being allowed of not.
So if I stepped on anyone toes I apologize.

[Ian Norman]

Magnus
Sorry, I can't help with the encrypted channel stuff. We don't have any encrypted channels on our DVB-T service in Australia only on our DVB-S service which I don't use.

Perhaps someone else has some advise about the encryption issue.

Let us know how the Twinhan goes.

Cheers

[niz23]

Ian.

I didn´t work even after I stopped all MCE related services, so I reinstalled it with XP and Sage 4.1.8. Now I can scan channels. (my frq file gets populated) However I cannot see any video. Sometimes when I try to view live TV it looks like Sage detects something. But after 0,5s I see "no data".

Is there something I miss?
Does Sage have it´s own Transport to Program stream decoder? Or do need to install one.

/Magnus

[Ian Norman]

Magnus
It's not surprising that it didn't work in XPMCE even with the EHome services stopped.

I'm not sure what the "no data" problem is but you could change the following line in sage.properties

mmc/encode_digital_tv_as_program_stream=true

change it to either true or false and see what happens

Are the frequencies in the "FRQ" file correct.
Have you used "scanchannelsbda" to confirm your local frequencies. If not download it and check. just google "scanchannelsbda" for the link.

cheers

[niz23]

Did a scan with the tool you suggested and when I compare the results with what Sage have put into my frq file it is a total mess.
BDAscan detects all my channel at the correct frequencies but Sage does not.

Just to test I made my own frq file from the DBAscan log.
I seems to work better but still no video or audio.
When I change to a channel that I know should work sage complains about being unable to render audio. Maybe a codec problem??

My other problem is with the manual added channels.
Even when I set them to enabled i Sage, Sage keep disabling them when I restart the Sage application.
Look lika a bug.

/Magnus

Have tried bot ts encoding setting. Wioth no luck.

[Ian Norman]

Magnus
Are your channels running AC3 or Mpeg audio ?? That might be the reason for the "unable to render audio" error.
You can select AC3 audio in the Sage setup.
Perhaps you should try another codec and see what happen. PowerDVD might be a good choice.

I don't know why Sage is disabling the channels when you restart.
Perhaps you should delete sage.properties and it's backup.
Make sure the sagetv service is not running in the background.
Resetup the DVB-T card and let it enable all channels.
Then go and disable all channels then enable the channels you have in your FRQ file.

If it still disables them, then it probably is a bug.

Cheers

[niz23]

Ian.
I recreated the frq and properties file and the channel disabling dissapeared.
I also found the audio problem. It was due to a malfunctioning audio driver for my Asus motherboard.

Live TV is now working pretty okey.
But I am terribly dissapointed that iot takes 1-5 seconds to change channel.
My Nokia Settop box does it under 0.5 seconds for all channels.
It might have something to do with my Twinhan card. I dont´t know at the moment.

Thanks a lot Ian for all your help.


So far Sage looks pretty impressive. It´s one of a few apps that can handle DVB-T and streaming (the client).

I´m also looking at Knoppmyth and Plutohome.
Pluto is very impressive. Unfortunately it´s in early beta stage.
It has functions that can only be found in high-end systems.

Do you know if the Linux OEM version is in the same beta stage as the Win version? (does it have the same functionality as the Win version?)



/Magnus

[Ian Norman]

Magnus
Good to hear you got it going.

There will always be a bit of a delay when changing channels as it is timeshifting but I'm sure that issue will be addressed later. It could be the drivers for the Twinhan.

There is no DVB-T support for the Linux version at the moment.
Other Linux apps have limited support as not all DVB-T cards have Linux drivers.

Have you tried SBDARecorder with SageTV.
It works very well.

Cheers