Will Sage going to support HDTV cards (QAM)?

[metropole]

I was wondering if Sage has any plans to support HDTV tuner cards? QAM?

[jptaz]

Ummm....

SageTV Already Supports a rather large list of HD Tuner Cards for Over The Air (OTA). I have 3 working well with the latest beta.

In terms of QAM support there has been no official word.

John

[stanger89]

There's a significant lack of driver support for QAM tuning right now.

[metropole]

What is the issue with QAM? Difficult to do or some legal issues?

[stanger89]

I don't really know why, but nobody is releasing "public" drivers with QAM support, the only cards with QAM support (the MyHD and Fusion) have QAM tuning burried in their proprietary drivers, they don't expose QAM on the BDA interface.

[Stealth1971]

Yeah - Stanger is right - MS doesnt support it in their BDA interfaces right now. The funny thing is - the linux world has QAM working for all of the cards that can support it (which is most of them) i.e. A180...

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Stealth1971

Yeah - Stanger is right - MS doesnt support it in their BDA interfaces right now.

The wierd thing is, I'm pretty sure QAM is in the BDA spec.

[Stealth1971]

Yeah - I thought that too - but if I remember correctly the structures were there, but when you queried for a QAM device (they called it something different like digital cable) it was an unsupport device... (It was awhile ago, I cant remember which COM factory it was)

[metropole]

It would be nice if Sage could make a statement here. BeyondTV is supporting this...

EDITED: This is not true. BeyondTV does NOT support QAM.

[Stealth1971]

Originally Posted by metropole

It would be nice if Sage could make a statement here. BeyondTV is supporting this...

EDITED: This is not true. BeyondTV does NOT support QAM.

Oops I was just about to make a point about this before I noticed it was just edited

- I am wondering how they will pull it off considering that the MS states that BDA can't support QAM yet (I believe they are leaving this for Windows Vista - to be included with the CableCard access)

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/e..._0915_MCE.mspx

RobertSchlabbach-MVP (Expert):
Q: Probably this has been asked many times before. When will the BDA architecture be upgraded so that MCE can support QAM (unencrypted) & DVB-S reception ?
A: BDA itself is actually somewhat useable for DVB-S reception (no support for DiSEqC, though). QAM is a bit of a problem, as BDA currently only recognizes QAM cards as DVB-C cards, not at OpenCable cards. To keep up with the latest BDA architecture updates, looking at the latest Windows Vista Driver Developer Kit releases is probably the best bet.

[metropole]

Sorry about this. Looks like someone misinformed me and I didn't double-check...

If you read this, I have to admit they don't state BeyondTV QAM support, but very misleading%3

[Dekard]

Any updates to this?

[simonen]

I contacted DVICO who makes the FusionHDTV brand of tunes and here is the reply they sent to me:

"Thanks for your suggestion.
We're supporting the BDA driver for 3'rd party program.
But DBA driver of MS doesn't support the digital cable.
So MCE doesn't support teh digital cable.
But our software are supporting the clear qam channel.
We think it's is something to do with BDA driver and 3'rd party program.
We'll try to consider to find the solution in the future."

This response is 6 months old and nothing new has been accomplished on their end, of course...but their response seems to imply the DRV software as the problem, but they could be trying to pass the blame.

[stanger89]

The issue is (basically) that MCE doesn't support QAM tuning via the BDA interface, thus no hardware manufacturers are offering QAM via BDA.

MS (for whatever reason) has decided that they would not offer QAM in MCE without CableCard and that won't happen until Vista and PVP-OPM.

Asside from getting an SDK from DVICO and writing specific support for the Fusion's native interface (assuming it's possible), there's not much Sage or any 3rd party software can do about QAM.

[Orthogonite]

Hmmm, I kniow that Frey has at least looked into supporting QAM on the DVICO cards since one of their developers was using my machine as a debug/test setup, but last i heard they were not able to obtain the SDK for the cards.

I am confused about the "lack of BDA driver support" comment, sicnce I see this on DVICO's release notes for their FusionHDTV software 3.41.00:

"
< Minor bugs have been fixed >
1. Fixed the problem that the BDA driver doesn't install in windows ME.
"

I am personally really interested in seeing QAM support since I have several local stattions that broadcast in the clear over my local cable provider. My fusion card is largely sitting unused at this point

[Stealth1971]

DVICO does use BDA driver model for ATSC (8SVB modulation / OTA). So that was probably their BDA reference. However, Microsoft does not currently support QAM for the BDA interfaces.

However, this does not mean there isnt a way to get QAM in your PC Look for announcement from me in the next few weeks.

[Stealth1971]

This has taken way more time than I had originally thought (and more $$$) - the release should be interesting.

BTW - let me say that QAM broadcast streams are waaaay more loosely constructed than 8VSB. The cable providers feel that they have a "closed system" so they dont have to make their packets look as nice as the OTA packets. So a lot of work has to go in to cleaning up the broadcast streams. i.e. Their (Comcast's) AC3 streams are really goofy so far. Their TS stream PIDs are oddly numbered also. (ranting...)

[Kirby]

Originally Posted by Stealth1971

Their (Comcast's) AC3 streams are really goofy so far. Their TS stream PIDs are oddly numbered also. (ranting...)

You like that huh? Charter does it too.

[Orthogonite]

Originally Posted by Stealth1971

Look for announcement from me in the next few weeks.

Excellent! I look forward to it! I am curious though, shouldn't my Fusion card still work for SD cable tuning? I still see no signal strength on any channel during setup.

For what it's worth, here's the last response I recevied from Sage regarding built-in support for QAM and the Fusion tuner:

"We run into a wall that Divico doesn’t release its QAM API to us for some reason. just little step there we can penetrate the barrier to watch QAM channel. "

[Llamas]

Originally Posted by Stealth1971

However, this does not mean there isnt a way to get QAM in your PC Look for announcement from me in the next few weeks.

I don't suppose I can get a hint about this... I'm setting up from scratch, including a couple of A180 tuners, and if a Linux-based install versus an XP-based install will make a difference in any upcoming QAM goodness, it would be good to know now, and save me some time later.

Thanks!

--Mike