SageTV and HDTV capture cards

[w2jo]

I am presently using BTV for HDTV and analog TV recording and am considering SageTV software as an option. I presently have one Dvico Fusion HDTV5 Gold tuner card and one ATI HDTV WONDER card in my system. I am wondering what sort of support SageTV has for these cards.

Specifically, Can SageTV make use of the two ports on the HDTV Wonder card? There is a CATV port and a separate OTA port that can be used (not at the same time). I am assuming SageTV does support HDTV tuners. Please enlightnen me about tuner card options specifically for HDTV recording.

Thanks!

[GKusnick]

There's a list of supported tuners on the requirements page. Both of the cards you mentioned are on the list. I personally have not used the ATI card, but my impression from reading the forums is that it's somewhat problematical. If I'm not mistaken, that card is no longer manufactured (I'm seeing them in remainder bins at a lot of computer stores), so you're looking at legacy driver support if you want to keep using it.

I have successfully used FusionHDTV5 RT Lite and VBox USB-A 3560 tuners with SageTV. The AVerMedia A180 also seems to be pretty popular.

There's also support in the works for QAM HD tuning. The AutumnWave OnAir GT is supported in SageTV V6 (now in beta). Plus there's rumor of a forthcoming SageTV add-on for the HDHomeRun.

And on the high end, the R5000-HD supports satellite HD tuning, at a price. (I have one of these too and it works great.)

[w2jo]

THANKS for all the useful information!

Here is a CAUTIONARY NOTE I will pass along about the Dvico HDTV5 Gold and Lite cards. This from my own experiences.

I think a cautionary note should be added to the compatible tuner listing for Dvico. While some few people report that MULTIPLE Dvico Fusion HDTV (Gold/Lite) tuners can be used in a system, I have tried combinations of GOLD/GOLD, and GOLD/LITE cards in dual tuner configurations in THREE different motherboards and could not get the pairs to work. Just ONE card in any of the systems works beautifully. I ended up with one Fusion HDTV5 tuner card and one ATI HDTV WONDER card in my system and these two work just fine together. Driver and IRQ conflicts with the Dvico cards are what prevented them from working properly in pairs. This with the Dvico 3.41 and earlier drivers.

The MBs that I tried dual Dvico tuners on and found they did not work were:
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium with AMD dual core CPU
ASUS P4P800-E with P4 3Ghz CPU
Intel D865PERL with P4 2.5Ghz CPU

[bcjenkins]

I am using a Fusion 5 Lite and 5 Gold RT in one system without issue. You need to run a channel scan on each board.

P4 2.8 HT 875P chipset ICMax3 ABit board

B

[GKusnick]

I currently have three RT Lites running without issues in an A8N-SLI mobo using 3.41 drivers.

[w2jo]

Great! I only report my experiences!

When I tried to use more than one PCI style Dvico Fusion HDTV5 (Lite/Gold or GOLD/GOLD) neither the fusion software setup nor the SageTv setup nor the BeyondTV setup could successfully operate more than ONE of the cards. And.. I do know by now how to use the channel scanning setup feature on the several software packages.

I do acknowledge that SOME LUCKY OR VERY TALENTED people are able to get two Divco cards to work on one MB. Just not me!