Help with dual tuner card - Diamond ATI HD 650

[jryan15]

I bought the card below the other day and am having trouble with tuning both an HD and SD feed at the same time. I have setup both tuners separately and both appear to work fine, but when I install both tuners and try to record both a digital and an analog stream, I get a message that the tuner is already in use... Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?nm_mc=AFC-SlickDeals&cm_mmc=AFC-SlickDeals-_-NA-_-NA-_-NA&Item=N82E16815306020

[null_pointer_us]

(Your link does not work for me.)

From what I understand, some versions of the HD 650 have two tuners while others have only one tuner that can tune digital or analog.

While I have the dual tuner version (i.e. HD 650 COMBO PCIe) with both analog and digital sources properly configured and tested, SageTV seems to think it is only a single tuner card. This is odd because I remember the card working fine as a dual tuner some time ago.

Maybe reverting to older drivers created a problem. I reverted to Microsoft's supplied rivers (dated in 2008) because the newer drivers from ATI seemed to give me trouble with my recordings. Specifically, some recording files had no audio. (I tested mixer/mute settings and used multiple media players to confirm the files were missing audio.)

But you have a different card, so maybe updating the drivers will help you. You can find them at game.amd.com. Select the TV Theater drivers appropriate for your operating system. Ignore the USB/600 driver set, which is apparently only for external devices. This driver installation will probably require a reboot.

EDIT: No, upgrading drivers (to 9.12) did not enable me to record from both analog and digital simultaneously.

[jryan15]

it looks like drivers for windows 7 have not yet been released yet. I can tune analog channels with great quality and digital channels with excellent hd, I just can't seem to get sage to record on more than 2 sources. My source setup show all four tuners (2 analog, 2 digital).

[MitchSchaft]

You'll only be able to use one of the tuners at a time for each card. Either analog or digital. You can't use the analog and digital tuner at the same time.

[jryan15]

Is this a sagetv restriction? I found the actual product page on on the specifications tab it says that it supports combo tuning.

http://www.diamondmm.com/TVW650PCIE.php

"Two built-in tuners offering combo tuning"

[MitchSchaft]

I have the PCI version and it's a hardware limitation that wont let you use both tuners at once. I'm not sure if it's the same for PCIe, but combo tuning means you can use either, just not both at the same time.
I've used mine for a few years now, starting with MCE2005 before I knew anything about sage. It was the same for that software, too.

[jryan15]

I've hit a few other non-sage forums and have seen a few posts where people have claimed to have both tuners working independently.

Has anyone here had any success using both tuners on this card? Thanks.

[gilded07]

I've hit a few other non-sage forums and have seen a few posts where people have claimed to have both tuners working independently.

Has anyone here had any success using both tuners on this card? Thanks.

jryan15 - I just bought this card (or a similar one) for $30 at the local big box electronics store. I'm hoping to add another digital tuner. If the analog works too that'll be icing on the cake.

Mine is an "ATI TV Wonder" "HD 650 Dual Tuner" and the slot type is PCIe.

At the bottom of the front of the box it states "Watch One Channel & Record Another Simultaneously*"

The corresponding " * " is listed on the side of the box and states "Record & Play at the same time with one analog (NTSC) tuner and one digital (ATSC) tuner on board".

It also says on the box "Record and play at the same time"

The mktg on the box clearly implies that you can indeed use both tuners at the same time. If there's a hardware problem or OS problem that limits this, so as not to mislead their potential customers, you'd think ATI would disclose these dependencies to avoid poor customer reception of the product and to avoid the cost of returns.

I hope to find time this weekend to plug it in and try it out.

[MitchSchaft]

Yeah, you can with the PCIe version. So you should send Sage an email. This card isn't in their list of supported cards, so I don't know how much help they can give you.

[gilded07]

Yeah, you can with the PCIe version. So you should send Sage an email. This card isn't in their list of supported cards, so I don't know how much help they can give you.

Yeah, I saw that. I have 30 days to return the tuner if it doesn't work so I figured - what the heck - for $30, what do I have to lose?

[gilded07]

No luck.

I tried the driver that came on the CD (5/2008, catalyst)) and then I downloaded and installed the driver from the AMD/ATI website that was dated for 11/2009 (ATI theatre pro) for the tuner and still, after importing the tuner into SageTV and doing a channel scan, found zero tunable channels. Although the box says it can tune unencrypted clear QAM channels, nothing in the users' manual references anything other than OTA ATSC.

I had SageTV shut down for the driver installs and rebooted numerous times. In device manager for the ATI tuner card, I tried SageTV with the 5/2008 drivers and then I checked to make sure the 11/2009 driver was installed via device manager.

For the record, I've spent probably 5x more time on this than I did on the HDHR - it practically installed itself.

Oh well, back to the store for the refund.

EDIT: To try out the 650, I simply unplugged the coax cable from the PVR-500 & plugged into the digital input jack on the 650 without removing the PVR-500 from SageTV in "setup video sources"...would this keep the 650 from working correctly?

[null_pointer_us]

No, there should not be any conflict between the two cards.

Possible explanations:

1. The cable service has no clear QAM channels.
2. The cable was connected to the wrong jack.
3. The signal quality is too poor (e.g. too many passive splitters).
4. You picked "TV Tuner" as the input instead of "Digital TV Tuner."

Don't sit through anymore channel scans. They take forever! Do something else for 15-20 minutes while the channel scan completes.

In my experience, the driver version has little effect on channel scans. Either the drivers from Windows Update (dated in 2008?) or the latest 9.12 produce the same results for me.

Honestly, it seems like you've run into some hardware/platform limitation that no amount of software tricks or tweaks will fix.

[gilded07]

Originally Posted by null_pointer_us

No, there should not be any conflict between the two cards.

Possible explanations:

1. The cable service has no clear QAM channels.
2. The cable was connected to the wrong jack.
3. The signal quality is too poor (e.g. too many passive splitters).
4. You picked "TV Tuner" as the input instead of "Digital TV Tuner."

Don't sit through anymore channel scans. They take forever! Do something else for 15-20 minutes while the channel scan completes.

In my experience, the driver version has little effect on channel scans. Either the drivers from Windows Update (dated in 2008?) or the latest 9.12 produce the same results for me.

Honestly, it seems like you've run into some hardware/platform limitation that no amount of software tricks or tweaks will fix.

Hey null -

My HDHR picks up 8 unencrypted clear QAM local channels very well. They are locals located between channels 3 and 15 so I don't have to sit through a whole scan to see that zero channels were detected.

I've ran the full scan with the coax cable connected to the analog / NTSC jack on the card too with zero channels detected after I deleted the card as a digital source and reloaded it in SageTV as an analog source (not finding any analog channels makes me think I'm doing something wrong).

[Thomas Wischgol]

You probably have to edit the Sage.properties file and add QAM instead of ATSC for it to receive QAM chanels. See this thread:
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=30431

I installed the USB version at my girlfriends house. It was working OK but seemed unstable so that I had to power cycle the tuner. Since that seemed like a support nightmare I just disabled it (and also since I could not use both tuners at the same time anyway).

[jryan15]

I noticed that upon a fresh install of sage, a channel scan didn't pickup any of the digital stations. After installing the latest native recording path, the channel scan picked everything up. Maybe just a coincident though...

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=43579

By the way, still no luck on simultaneous recordings. I contacted Sage support and got a standard reply that this card wasn't supported (nor was windows 7).

[PiX64]

I have the USB version of this device, and it offers digital input, standard coax input, composite input, as well as s-video input. I am currently using this card to capture off of a SD STB, and it works great. I have in the past used this card for QAM and was able to receive all the channels that i can see with my HDHR.

Anyways i was wondering, being that this is a 2 tuner card, can i do the following:

1) 1 tuner setup for capture on the composite video inputs
2) 2 tuners setup for capture on the standard coax input

Does anyone know if this is at all possible?

If not, i will try it and report back.

Thanks in advance.

~Pix64

[PiX64]

I have confirmed, at least for the USB version of this card, you cannot record on the analog input & the composite input using them as seperate tuners.

The only thing you can do which doesnt' even work very well is record

1 x DTV
1 X Analog (coax or composite/svideo)

Oh well, it was worth a shot i guess..