HD Home run and other tuners

[pat_smith1969]

I have a Hauppauge tuner card in my server, I also use the HD HomeRun HDTuner.

I setup my Hauppauge first and it worked great. Then I setup my HD Homerun. I followed the directions and got it working I can watch HD tv with Sage.

My problem is that there seems to be no way to say that channel 25 is for the hauppauge and channel 251 is for the HDHomerun.

The reason I say this is that if I am watching a HD show then go and try to watch a SD channel it cannot find the tuner. I can try to go to several different channels, finally one will tune in then the rest of the channels will tune in. After that I will be unable to watch HD channels, it wont be able to tune in.

What it looks like to me is that it never switches from the HDHR to the Analog tuner. It seems to get stuck on one tuner and will be able to tune into any channel that particular tuner can tune to.

I went into video sources and selected the HDHR and removed one channel I know it cannot recieve (channel 29). But that removed it from the channel list for both tuners, so that neither the HDHR or the Hauppauge can see that channel.

I thought that Sage maintained a different list for each of the tuners and it would pick the tuner that it needed for a given channel. Did I do something wrong?

[mikesm]

Are you using the same cable lineup for both tuners? That is, the same cable system selection after to give it the zipcode in source setup?

Thanks,
Mike

[NEOSG]

you need to pick different EPGs for each of the tuners, if they are going to have different channels that they each receive.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by NEOSG

you need to pick different EPGs for each of the tuners, if they are going to have different channels that they each receive.

Right, this is because of the problem with how sage does lineups and channel mapping. It's a PITA but generally you can work around it.

Thanks,
Mike

[pat_smith1969]

I did give them both "Digital Cable" and put in my county and zip.

SO what you are saying is that I need to tell it the Hauppauge has "Basic Cable" for my county and zip. Then tell it that the HDHR has "Digital Cable" for my county and zip?

OR

Tell them that the Hauppauge has the lineup for one county over and "Digital Cable" and the HDHR has the lineup for my County and "Digital Cable".

[mattdcknsn]

Originally Posted by pat_smith1969

Tell them that the Hauppauge has the lineup for one county over and "Digital Cable" and the HDHR has the lineup for my County and "Digital Cable".

This should work. I had to do this and so far so good.

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by pat_smith1969

SO what you are saying is that I need to tell it the Hauppauge has "Basic Cable" for my county and zip. Then tell it that the HDHR has "Digital Cable" for my county and zip?

OR

Tell them that the Hauppauge has the lineup for one county over and "Digital Cable" and the HDHR has the lineup for my County and "Digital Cable".

Yup, whatever combination of lineups that you can find so that each "source" matches the available channels that the tuner will receive. I use 3 lineups, one Basic Cable and one Digital Cable from one city, and another Digital Cable from a neighboring city.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by ke6guj

Yup, whatever combination of lineups that you can find so that each "source" matches the available channels that the tuner will receive. I use 3 lineups, one Basic Cable and one Digital Cable from one city, and another Digital Cable from a neighboring city.

I need to use 3 lineups too. I wish the Sage folks would fix this.

Thanks,
Mike

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by mikesm

I need to use 3 lineups too. I wish the Sage folks would fix this.

Thanks,
Mike

Keep in mind other products can't even do multiple lineups. They're stuck with one for all of their tuners.

Gerry

[Wheemer]

We expect more from SageTV then the rest... This seems like it should be such an easy thing to add. I really hope the next version of sage has this... Without it HD setup is far too painful.

You end up with too many lineups to manage. With Sage randomly adding new channels in the on state, I`m constantly getting the wrong recordings. I know you can `manage`HD in sage, but I would like to master it.

[zz5]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Keep in mind other products can't even do multiple lineups. They're stuck with one for all of their tuners.

Gerry

Which products don't let you do mulitple lineups???

BeyondTV lets you do multiple lineups. MythTV lets you do multiple lineups.

BeyondTV will even let you choose which tuner to use and let you choose which drive to record to.

That's all we would need for a workaround for this problem. The fact that Sage won't let us do this is stupid. There's no other word for it. There's no programming obstacle to doing this. Any programmer could do this in a day. They just don't care about this for some reason.

It looks like Sage would at least tell us they're working on it or something. It looks like they would take a moment and occasionally jump in on one these discussions and at least acknowledge the problem. I mean, we see one of these topics started by someone who has bought an HDHomeRun twice a week. You just can't use an HDHomeRun properly with most other sources if you have cable TV.

[hemicuda]

Not to muddy the waters here, but I must be one of the lucky ones. Comcast in my area puts all the HD channel numbers above the regular analogs. TV is in the 400s and music in the 800s. Took me all of 10min to get things mapped once I had the channel/program info from the setup software.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by hemicuda

Not to muddy the waters here, but I must be one of the lucky ones. Comcast in my area puts all the HD channel numbers above the regular analogs. TV is in the 400s and music in the 800s. Took me all of 10min to get things mapped once I had the channel/program info from the setup software.

This isn't the issue people are talking about. If you use an HDHomeRun or any other QAM tuner, and enable only a subset of channels in a lineup, then you can't use that same line up for a PVR-150 or the like hooked to a STB that covers all the channels.

This is not just an HDHomeRun issue, it all QAM tuners coupled with tuners that have all the channels enabled.

And I agree, it's stupid this is an issue. Granted, QAM tuners that get on subsets of channels have exacerbated a problem that was less serious when everyone just had analog out from MSO STB's. But HD was a problem too when you had some STB's that did HD and others that didn't.

I don't think it's just a day's work from what I can tell about how Sage keeps track of stuff, and you would have to test it, etc... But given that QAM tuners are here to stay, and are getting more an more popular, this needs to get fixed, if for no other reason that people having to deal with this question on the forums all the time.

The issue is, as you can tell from this thread, people have a hard time identifying they have the problem. It always takes a couple iterations in the discussion before the issue is flagged as the Sage channel line up problem.

Have folks submitted bug reports to them on this? Maybe if bunches of us did , they would take action. It's PITA that shouldn't be a problem.

Thanks,
Mike

[hemicuda]

Mike,

oops I see your point now. Didn't catch the pvr-hooked-to-HDstb detail. I agree that Sage should have done something about this long ago. We're at v6.x now after all.

[flavius]

I think Sage was designed with a different concept in mind - at least I hope that is the reason - Sage ultimately wanted to facilitate an *appliance*-type setup - where you don't have to care what you tuners do, after setup, and where you couldn't care less where the recordings go, since you don't have to manage individual locations.

I remember very well such discussions a few years a go when I was using BTV, well what do we do when that drive is full? Not sure how BTV is handling that today, but IMHO Sage's approach is superior.

Having said that, I suspect that allowing to use a specific tuner would be a significant challenge.

Enabling channels per tuner would be cool, though.
Edit: How about using a *virtual* lineup for recordings purposes?

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by zz5

Which products don't let you do mulitple lineups???

BeyondTV lets you do multiple lineups. MythTV lets you do multiple lineups.

BeyondTV will even let you choose which tuner to use and let you choose which drive to record to.

That's all we would need for a workaround for this problem. The fact that Sage won't let us do this is stupid. There's no other word for it. There's no programming obstacle to doing this. Any programmer could do this in a day. They just don't care about this for some reason.

It looks like Sage would at least tell us they're working on it or something. It looks like they would take a moment and occasionally jump in on one these discussions and at least acknowledge the problem. I mean, we see one of these topics started by someone who has bought an HDHomeRun twice a week. You just can't use an HDHomeRun properly with most other sources if you have cable TV.

Windows Media Center (MCE)-take your pick which version.

And I have a HDHomerun and 2 nVidia Dual tuners connected to my cable and have no issues recording from all of them. I have two lineups from Comcast and don't have to manage anything with it. HDHomerun is set for the clearQAM locals-channels 200 and above and the nVidias get the basic analog line up 1-99.


Gerry

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by flavius

I think Sage was designed with a different concept in mind - at least I hope that is the reason - Sage ultimately wanted to facilitate an *appliance*-type setup - where you don't have to care what you tuners do, after setup, and where you couldn't care less where the recordings go, since you don't have to manage individual locations.

I remember very well such discussions a few years a go when I was using BTV, well what do we do when that drive is full? Not sure how BTV is handling that today, but IMHO Sage's approach is superior.

Having said that, I suspect that allowing to use a specific tuner would be a significant challenge.

Enabling channels per tuner would be cool, though.
Edit: How about using a *virtual* lineup for recordings purposes?

This isn't addressing the issue. You don't have to be that dramatic in fixing it.

Sage's ability to handle tuner scheduling automatically is awesome. It's one reason I love it.

The fix is pretty simple. You pick a line up for a given tuner, and any mods you make to the line up, disabling channels, remapping physical channels etc... are done specifically to the tuner's line-up, and do not affect the original line up.

So let's say you have a QAM tuner. You select the comcast san mateo digital line up as an example. You enable only those channels that are unencrypted and then physically remap them. Sage in my design would store these alterations to the master line-up on a per tuner basis. The master lineup for comcast - san mateo digital is unchanged. These changes only affect that QAM tuner.

Next I add a Theater 650 tuner that is connected to a DCT6200 STB. I again select the Comcast San Mateo Digital lineup. It's got all the channels in it, not just though I enabled with the QAM tuner. I enable all channels, and now I'm done. Same Comcast San Mateo digital line-up.

Since Comcast is running a promotion giving away free DCT700 non-HD STB's, I get add one of those to a PVR-150 tuner. Again, I select the comcast san mateo digital line-up, disable all the HD channels (since the DCT700 can't decode them), and then I'm done.

In this example, I use the same line up (Comcast San Mateo Digital) for all three tuners because that's the real system all my tuners are connected to. If I have to customize the lineup to deal with STB's that are non-HD, or QAM tuners that can't pick up encrypted programming, the master San Mateo digital line-up doesn't change - the customizations are stored by tuner, not in the master line up.

Right now, I have to use the San Mateo digital line up for the first one. Palo Alto digital for the 2nd one, and Foster City digital for the 3rd one because any customization made to a line-up affects all tuners, and that's why this is a PITA.

This doesn't hardcode a given program to a specific tuner, etc... It just affects how the EPG data for a given lineup is mapped to a tuner.

Is this really that much to ask?

Thanks,
mike

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Windows Media Center (MCE)-take your pick which version.

And I have a HDHomerun and 2 nVidia Dual tuners connected to my cable and have no issues recording from all of them. I have two lineups from Comcast and don't have to manage anything with it. HDHomerun is set for the clearQAM locals-channels 200 and above and the nVidias get the basic analog line up 1-99.


Gerry

Right. You aren't trying to use the same line-up for different kinds of tuners. You don't have the problem. But, if you add a digital STB and want to use it with one of those nVidia tuners using the digital line-up and not the analog line up, you would run into exactly the same issue the rest of us are.

Thanks,
Mike

[Sagebrush]

I'm thinking it's NOT a lineup issue (I've tried several), but a problem when a station's call letters (e.g. KPIXDT) identically matches both an over-the-air and a cable (QAM) transmission.

Since adding an HDHomeRun for QAM to my two Fusion OTA tuners, I'm now forced to chose either the OTA Fusions OR the QAM HDHRs for each HD channel, but not both.

Although the Sage Channel Setup lets you alter both the logical and physical channel numbers, neither of these seems to solve the problem.

I looked for lineups that might use different call letters for the same station, but had no luck.

One more data point: In my area, there's a PBS station, KQED, that broadcasts HD OTA on KQEDDT and also sends an often identical HD QAM cable signal on KQEDHD. Since the call letters are (slightly) different, both of these show up in the Program Guide.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by Sagebrush

I'm thinking it's NOT a lineup issue (I've tried several), but a problem when a station's call letters (e.g. KPIXDT) identically matches both an over-the-air and a cable (QAM) transmission.

Since adding an HDHomeRun for QAM to my two Fusion OTA tuners, I'm now forced to chose either the OTA Fusions OR the QAM HDHRs for each HD channel, but not both.

Although the Sage Channel Setup lets you alter both the logical and physical channel numbers, neither of these seems to solve the problem.

I looked for lineups that might use different call letters for the same station, but had no luck.

One more data point: In my area, there's a PBS station, KQED, that broadcasts HD OTA on KQEDDT and also sends an often identical HD QAM cable signal on KQEDHD. Since the call letters are (slightly) different, both of these show up in the Program Guide.

I'm quite my problem is a line-up problem, as I have no OTA tuners, everything is driven from cable. And it's a single cable line-up I want to use, but it doesn't work because of the issues in editting the line up.

I don't quite understand your problem, as lots of folks here run QAM and OTA tuners. You select a different line up for each, and Sage will give you an integrated program guide. You won't see the OTA and QAM channel displayed seperately in the EPG, but Sage internally will use both intelligently. For exmpale, if the QAM tuner picks up additional channels than the OTA, Sage will record those using the QAM tuner and the OTA for the others.

PS KQED needs to show up as different channels in your example because KQED multicasts different programming on those channels. In the morning for example, you cna see kids program on KQED analog, and the HD version is showing something completely different.



Thanks,
Mike