Query re: DVB-T card won't work with SageTV

[asandbrook]

I've got a Visionplus (often known as Twinhan) DVB-T card and can't seem to get it working with SageTV. I can't find anything to categorically state that this sort of card WON 'T work with the software. Does anybody know if this will work and if so, what drivers will need to be installed on the TV tuner card? It isn't being recognised by SageTV at the moment - any ideas?

Help mucho, mucho appreciated.

[AndersNolberger]

Sage does not support DVB at the moment.

If your card is supported by old versions of MyTheatre you can try the SDVBCoreRecorder but it has its problems and is not supported by Sage/Frey. It can be found here: http://www.nolberger.se/Sage/default.htm.

If your card has BDA drivers you can wait a little longer and I will present my new SBDARecorder that will work better (I hope ).

[heffe2001]

I don't think Twinhan currently has BDA drivers for their VisionPlus (but do for some of their other products).

[asandbrook]

Thanks for the info. Any idea when your much-needed SBDARecorder will be released? Days...months...years...?

[ck-]

I have a VisionPlus DVB-T card - VisionDTV Mini Ter. BDA drivers for this can be found at: http://www.digitalnow.com.au/TwinHanBDA216.zip
Using these drivers I have had both GBPVR and Mediaportal working.

Originally Posted by heffe2001

I don't think Twinhan currently has BDA drivers for their VisionPlus (but do for some of their other products).

[ck-]

I would be interested in beta testing this for you, if that would be any help.
I have a server PC with a DVB-T card and working BDA drivers, and a SageTV PC with a Hauppauge PVR350 in it. Unfortunately I can't fit both cards into the SageTV PC so it would be nice if I could access the DVB card across the network.

Originally Posted by AndersNolberger

Sage does not support DVB at the moment.

If your card is supported by old versions of MyTheatre you can try the SDVBCoreRecorder but it has its problems and is not supported by Sage/Frey. It can be found here: http://www.nolberger.se/Sage/default.htm.

If your card has BDA drivers you can wait a little longer and I will present my new SBDARecorder that will work better (I hope ).

[asandbrook]

Hey ck-
I've had major problems getting GB-PVR to work with it. I've downloaded the BDA drivers and can get my card set up ok, e.g. live tv is working fine but I'm having serious problems getting the damn thing to record properly. I was wondering - what multiplexer are you using and what do you have under video decoder etc... Any help would be much appreciated!

[ck-]

I shouldn't have spoken so soon! I re-installed GBPVR to see how I had it set up, and now GBPVR can't tune in to any channels! This was with GB-PVR v0.91.12, TwinHan drivers 1.2.1.7 downloaded from TwinHan site. I tried with previous drivers - 1.2.1.6 too, and I tried with the MCE drivers and the 'other' drivers, but nothing would persuade it to work. This did happen when I first installed the card, and switching to a different PCI slot kicked it into life, but didn't have the courage to try that and potentially stop it working everywhere!
It still works under Media Portal, except that channel changing doesn't work very well. It works perfectly with MCE 2005.
Now you come to mention it though, I do recall that recording didn't seem to work for me under GBPVR either. I didn't worry too much about it at the time because I had decided to stick with Sage. It seems that no matter how often I get frustrated with Sage and try something else, it still has the edge .
Sorry I couldn't help more.

Originally Posted by asandbrook

Hey ck-
I've had major problems getting GB-PVR to work with it. I've downloaded the BDA drivers and can get my card set up ok, e.g. live tv is working fine but I'm having serious problems getting the damn thing to record properly. I was wondering - what multiplexer are you using and what do you have under video decoder etc... Any help would be much appreciated!

[asandbrook]

Thanks for the reply - at least it's not only me! Another quick question - I'm really interested in getting MCE 2005 up and running on my pc and I'm wondering what you need to get tv recording going in terms of specs - it's very hard to find this kind of advice. I've obviously already got the twinhan card, the pc is 1.2ghz AMD Duron, 256mb Ram and the graphics card is very basic onboard 8mb. Would this work or would I need to improve anything? Does MCE work perfectly in the uk with digital etc? Any quirks/peculiarities/limitations of the software? Any advice would be hugely appreciated!

[ck-]

I am running a Twinhan VisionPlus MiniTer card in a system containing Athlon64CPU and 512MB memory. My graphics card is an Nvidia Geforce MX40000, so nothing special.
Just as a check, when recording TV, this is showing between 12 and 25% cpu on my system - averaging about 17%. When just dislaying tv guide for example it ticks along on virtually nothing - occasional jump up to 5%.

MCE 2005 from what I have seen is good. Guide just works out of the box even in UK - no messing around with XML and imports.
Music visualisation works. More importantly for those of use who have Napster subscriptions, protected WMA works too.
It does seem a little flakey sometimes. For example quite often the display gets hopelessly corrupted with icons blown up to large size and superimposed on the background, navigation buttons being replaced by other resources etc.

Originally Posted by asandbrook

Thanks for the reply - at least it's not only me! Another quick question - I'm really interested in getting MCE 2005 up and running on my pc and I'm wondering what you need to get tv recording going in terms of specs - it's very hard to find this kind of advice. I've obviously already got the twinhan card, the pc is 1.2ghz AMD Duron, 256mb Ram and the graphics card is very basic onboard 8mb. Would this work or would I need to improve anything? Does MCE work perfectly in the uk with digital etc? Any quirks/peculiarities/limitations of the software? Any advice would be hugely appreciated!

[ck-]

I suppose I should qualify what I meant by saying MCE20005 seems good and then a paragraph later saying it seems a bit flakey sometimes. When it does get itself in a bit of a mess a quick restart of media centre cures it - and that takes about 10 seconds including menu navigation.