BGT3620 - native?

[SidKnee]

Hi all, a bit late to the party I know but I've just bought one of these cards so we can start watching the Freeview HD channels.

It installed fine, but Sage only sees a single tuner. I notice that there have been comments in the forums of having to use DVBLogic in order to get both tuners working but that it may be supported natively by Sage in later releases. Is it safe to assume this never happened and I'll need to go down the DVBLogic route?

BTW
How do you manage HD/SD recordings to ensure that Sage will record an HD version of a show when it's available?

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by SidKnee

Hi all, a bit late to the party I know but I've just bought one of these cards so we can start watching the Freeview HD channels.

It installed fine, but Sage only sees a single tuner. I notice that there have been comments in the forums of having to use DVBLogic in order to get both tuners working but that it may be supported natively by Sage in later releases. Is it safe to assume this never happened and I'll need to go down the DVBLogic route?

BTW
How do you manage HD/SD recordings to ensure that Sage will record an HD version of a show when it's available?

Hybrid tuners are not natively supported by STV in full and sadly they will never be. Your only options are the DVBLogic route with all the issues associated or swap your card for a TBS which is natively supported by STV and this forum has lots of information to keep you going.

Hope it helps
Eddy

[SidKnee]

Argh, I went for the Black Gold card because I'd seen a lot of posts about difficulty with TBS ones, typical! Thanks Eddy

Cheers, Adrian

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by SidKnee

Argh, I went for the Black Gold card because I'd seen a lot of posts about difficulty with TBS ones, typical! Thanks Eddy

Cheers, Adrian

If you only need two DVB-T/T2 tuners and your mobo has a couple of PCI bus (I think for T2 you need PCIe for bandwidth reasons) then your safest option is to buy two single tuner and that should give you 100% success.

I know that even with some dual TBS tuners some people had trouble to get the second tuner recognised by STV with a four tuner being working properly instead. Unfortunately it all depends from the tuner drivers and how they register themselves to the system to dictate whether STV will be compatible or not.

Cheers
Eddy

[matterofrecord]

Originally Posted by SidKnee

BTW
How do you manage HD/SD recordings to ensure that Sage will record an HD version of a show when it's available?

========== Between these lines may not be relevant to your question ==========

The Freeview HD EPG is huffman encoded. Essentially it's encrypted and as such natively just displays gibberish. You need to import a quality epg to get it working properly. Some people use the epg provided by MS windows - there's a program to download it from MS, some people buy epg linups, some people scrape webistes. I use dvbGuide 0.95 beta. this program gets the xml data from your tuner and converts the HD epg from gibberish into something useful. Which ever epg line up you go with you will need to import it. The only option I am aware of is XMLTV Importer for SageTV AKA stephane 's xml importer. It's a hassle to setup but once it's setup it properly you can forget about it.

Once I have imported a decrpyted epg, I have an EPG line up for both the Freeview channel SD which I get OTA and a seperate line up for it's Freeview HD channel via the xml importer.For channels that have HD and SD versions my EPG has two versions ie BBC1 and BBC1 HD, C4 and C4 HD etc. Next I set the favourite to record specifically from the freeview HD channel ( or sd channel if I want to save space - else it will record 2 copies. One from the freeview sd and one from the freeview HD channel. ). that's how it works for me.

==========Between these lines may not be relevant to your question==========

The problems come when a program is sometimes on different channels say a film - you set it as a favourite as you want to record it next time it's on in HD if it's an option and SD if it's only available on SD. This I don't know how to do. What currently happens on my setup is sagetv records on both channels if it's on an HD and an SD channel at the same time. This happens because the HD and SD epg data is slightly different ( the SD channels often say "Also in HD" at the end whilst the HD channels say " [HD] " at the end. ) Sagetv see's these as two different and separate Episodes as their EPG description is very slightly different. This means I would get two copies and would have to manualy delete the SD version. However this duplication would only happen on channels that broadcast in HD and SD - work arounds would be get rid of your SD channels (if there is an HD version available ie get rid of bbc1 and just use bbc1 HD )or if you don't want an SD version and only want an HD version you could set your favourite to record only from HD channels. However setting Sagetv to prioritise HD over SD is not an option afaik. I think part of the problem is that the part of sagetv that deals with scheduling recordings does really know what's an HD channel and what's an SD channel. I could be wrong about this.


FYI - Rocking a TBS quad tuner 6284 with few probs - although one of my four tuners may have broken. - you could try LM DVB Smart Recorder. It creates network tuners that sagetv then tunes to. It makes the channel tuning slower BUT my understanding ( BUT I COULD BE WRONG ABOUT THIS) is that the tuner only has to be supported by LM DVB Smartrecorder for it to work with sage as LM DVB Smartrecorder does the actual work - sagetv just does the timing. LM DVB SR lets you create lots of network tuners on one tuner for one frequency so it works really well when you want to record lots of channels from one tuner on one frequency. Seeing as there are two HD frequencies in the UK just now that would allow you to cover both frequencies IF your BGT3620 works with lmdvd smart recorder. You would still need to import guide data. I cannot guarantee that LMDVB SR will work with your black gold tuner OR that if it works with LMDVB SR it will then work with sagetv. I haven't heard that much good about blackgold. I think they are ok with WMC but not with sagetv. May be now sagetv is about to be open sourced you may find driver improvements but Blackgold looks like a company that being run part time.

Also what routerunner says about pci-e bandwidth is not quite right. Pci can support 133MB/s thats 478 GB per hour. Pci-e can support 250MB/s. Thats 900 GB per hour - and unfeasible amount of television. However some tuners are really usb tuners stuck on a pci/ pci-e card. This means they only really support USB speeds are stuck at 35MB/s although that's a theoretical 126GB per hour my nova-t-500's ( usb tuners on a pci card ) flake out when you ask for more than one channel on the same tuner at the same time.

I guess I could summerise by saying there are no easy answers when it comes to tuners and sagetv but with a few add-ons and a wise choice of tuner you should be okay. But never mind sagetv is going open source so all this will be magically fixed in time I'm sure.

TL;DR - ( Sorry for the wall of text but hopefully it is all useful.) However there is no way to prioritise HD over SD AFAIK. There are just imperfect work arounds as listed above.

[SidKnee]

Thanks for the replies and valuable information guys

I might give LM's software a try but DVBLogic also responded and confirmed I could get hold of a previous version. I think v3 was the last one to work but can anyone confirm? There's also mention of having to use a utility from Damian Flynn that's no longer on his blog. Is this just used to configure the channel ini file?

Cheers,
Adrian

[matterofrecord]

Originally Posted by matterofrecord

LM DVB Smart Recorder. It creates network tuners that sagetv then tunes to. It makes the channel tuning slower BUT my understanding ( BUT I COULD BE WRONG ABOUT THIS) is that the tuner only has to be supported by LM DVB Smartrecorder for it to work with sage as LM DVB Smartrecorder does the actual work - sagetv just does the timing. LM DVB SR lets you create lots of network tuners on one tuner for one frequency so it works really well when you want to record lots of channels from one tuner on one frequency.

Just to clarify

For instance if one digital frequency can get 5 channels - BBC1 HD, BBC2 HD, ITV HD, C4 HD, BBC3hd

Each network tuner you setup can get all the channels on that one frequency. I use one phyical tuner per frequency, this is by far the best, most realistic way of doing it. Physical tuners can only tune to one frequency at a time so setting one physical tuner to tune from two different frequencies is going to cause problems. I create multiple network tuners from one physical tuner on that one frequency ( 7 is an arbitrary number in this example - you can have more or less but 7 is usually more than enough ) . Each network tuner can get all the channels on that frequency and the 7 network tuners functions as if I had 7 physical tuners getting all the channels on one frequency.

A setup like this means I can record any 7 channels ( more if I added more network tuners) at the same time from one frequency which is great when you are recording 3 channels back to back and don't want to miss the end of programs. In this example I can record BBC1 HD, BBC2 HD, ITV HD, C4 HD, BBC3hd at the same time with two tuners left over for recording back to back recordings on any of those channels. I can do all this from one physical tuner split into 7 network tuners using lmdvb smart recorder.

Like I say there is no guarantee that

A) Your blackgold tuner will be seen by lmdvb smart recorder ( you can test with the non donator edition)
B) Your blackgold tuner will be able to record multiple channels from one frequency. some tuners can some tuners can't ( you can check this with Nextpvr )
C) That if it works in LMdvbsmart recorder it will work in sagetv ( you can test with the non donator edition)

I should also point out that LMDVB SR uses .ts format for writing instead of the .mpg format. I personally prefer .ts but most likely you will notice no difference. The disadvantages I see are that bbc standard definition .ts recordings seem to be larger than bbc sd .mpg. I suspect this is because lmdvb smart recorder has recorded the whole stream including epg data and subtitles. a quick run through videoredo reduces the file size.

Another disadvantage is that network tuners are slower to tune meaning there can be a 10 to 20 second gap from tuning to watching.

[SidKnee]

Fantastic, thanks, I was struggling with understanding how Sage could record multiple channels without multiple tuners

I've tried the non donator version of Stephane's software and it seems to work fine with Sage (only allows one tuner though so can't comment yet if it will work as you suggest) although I'd recommend restarting the SmartRecorder service after you make any changes to it, and before you try it with Sage. Took me ages to figure this out with Sage complaining that the network encoder had no channels

Cheers,
Adrian

[matterofrecord]

Hi SidKnee (or anyone else with a BGT3620 )

Did you ever get both tuners working with the blackgold BGT3620 either natively or through LMdvbsmart recorder?

If you got the BGT3620 working with LMdvbsmart recorder how many network tuners could you create with a one physical tuner?

Thanks

[SidKnee]

Hi, I did get this card working with Stephane's SmartRecorder software & SageTV (although for the life of me I can't remember how I set the card up in the end). I'll check tomorrow and let you know.

Cheers,
Adrian

[matterofrecord]

Thanks for the reply

So just to check the Blackgold bgt3620 is a Dual dvb-t2 tuner. The bgt3620 doesn't work with both tuners natively in Sagetv BUT you could get both tuners working in sagetv using lmdvb smart recorder? Just out of interest are you recording multiple channels on both tuners?

[SidKnee]

Hi, yes, Sage only saw a single tuner but Stephane's software correctly sees both.

Most of my recording conflicts were recordings off the main terrestrial channels and luckily the main ones are only on 2 muxs (in the end I stayed at SD as I was having problems with HD, I think it's an issue with my reception rather than with the set up). To avoid recording errors I allocated/configured each physical tuner to look at a single DTT mux and then 'guestimated' how many concurrent programmes I might end up recording on that mux. I then created as many virtual tuners as needed for the number of concurrent recordings (in theory I could have just created a virtual tuner for each channel, but that seemed overkill). When I added them to Sage I then created a unique channel list for that mux, only with the channels it could see. That way it would never be asked to record a channel that wasn't on the mux it was set up for. It sounds complicated but it was easy to do and means I never have to worry about Sage asking a virtual tuner to record a channel it can't see.

You can set Stephane's software up so that you just create a pool of virtual tuners that can see all terrestrial channels, and leave it to allocate the requests out to the physical ones, but you then run the risk of Sage asking to record 3 programs concurrently on 3 different mux's but with only 2 physical tuners. I don't know what Stephane's software would do in this scenario but I assume it would just fail to record one of the 3 programmes. With allocating them the way I have Stephane's software does the job of recording multiple concurrent channels on the 2 mux's and Sage is none the wiser that it's only using a couple of physical tuners.

The only (minor) downside I've come across is that all the recordings are in a TS wrapper instead of an MPG one. I've still got a Hauppauge MVP box in use in my daughters room and this struggles to fast forward/rewind this format properly, but plays recordings fine (makes it tricky to skip through adverts etc). So far the only way I've found around this is to get Sage to convert programmes I know will be watched on this box into an MPG wrapper so that they play fine. Not a big problem as I can set any favourite that my daughter is going to watch to auto-convert. It's a bit of a work-around but it keeps everyone happy.

Cheers,
Adrian.