SageTV w/ Dual Hauppage Cards

[GT500Shlby]

I have a Hauppage PVR-350 which works great, but the other night I came into posession of an older gateway that had a hauppage 878 tv tuner in it. Being frustrated because many shows run offset by a minute or two which messes up my ability to record, I wanted dual TV Tuners. Installing it on my Athlon 2200+ w/ 768mb of PC2700, and 80Gigs of storage worked well after playing with it but I have some weird issues.

In the few days I will be in posession of a nice 160GB UDMA6 IDE drive for an old Dell Optiplex 170L 2.4 Celeron-D I have laying around. It has 512MB of PC3200, A Lite-On DVD-ROM and a 120GB Sata. Being small in form, and not very fast for anything else I do other than simple web browsing and instant messenger I have decided to use that as a "Media Center" with XP Pro.

Some things I would like to figure out: Both come with an FM-in, TV-in, S-Video-in, and IR Remote In. Now sage (awesome) can use the Hauppage remote, but how do I choose which card I want the remote to run on? ALso, how can I switch Tuners?

The Entire System will probably be like this:
Celeron-D 2.4 Prescott 533Mhz FSB
512MB Samsung PC3200 DDR400
160Gb IDE UDMA6 ATAPI133
Hauppage WinTV-PVR 350
Hauppage 878 Chipset TV Tuner
Chaintech 7.1 channel sound card with Optical SPDIF out (to go to my stereo)
Hauppage Remote
I also have a nice USB ATI Remote Wonder I could use as well

I'm on the 15day free trial of SageTV and so far I like it, although It's gonna need a little configuration to be more stable. If I can get it working well I'm planning on purchasing it. One thing I am a little confused about however, does the standard SageTV come with the ability to record, or do I have to purchase the SageRecorder seperately?

[laurenglenn]

Originally Posted by GT500Shlby

Some things I would like to figure out: Both come with an FM-in, TV-in, S-Video-in, and IR Remote In. Now sage (awesome) can use the Hauppage remote, but how do I choose which card I want the remote to run on? ALso, how can I switch Tuners?

I'm on the 15day free trial of SageTV and so far I like it, although It's gonna need a little configuration to be more stable. If I can get it working well I'm planning on purchasing it. One thing I am a little confused about however, does the standard SageTV come with the ability to record, or do I have to purchase the SageRecorder seperately?

I don't know about the remotes, but Sage can record with multiple hardware MPEG tuners, like the Hauppauge 150 and 500 cards. My system has 3 tuners in it and the system schedules the recordings automatically. The remote should control just the program. Sage will handle the recording across all the MPEG tuners in the system, so the remote would not necessarily need to handle each tuner separately.

It works like a Tivo/ReplayTV, but the ability for unlimited multiple tuners is one of the best features. Probably one of the problems is the 878 tuner. I don't think Sage records with the 878 tuner like it does with the hardware tuner cards.

SageTV is a great problem and it gets better with each new release. I bought version 1 way back around when it first came out and upgrading to version 3 was free. Not to many software packages are this well supported.

P.S. I think Sage handles the 1 minute offsets internally. It might not show right away, but when the one minute interval comes up, it will sometimes schedule it to record anyway.

[acrowe]

The remote thing is a pain. UNfortunitly there is no easy way to control which IR port the system uses.

I currently have a batch file I run when I reboot the machine that stops sage (and service), stops IR, disables my 150's, starts IR, the reenables my 150's. Then I restart Sage.

Its a pain, but the only thing I could figure out.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by GT500Shlby

I have a Hauppage PVR-350 which works great, but the other night I came into posession of an older gateway that had a hauppage 878 tv tuner in it.

That card is a "software encoder" and isn't supported in 2.x, only the 3.x beta supports soft-encoders. Unless you can't, I'd suggest a PVR 150/250/500 as a second card.

Now sage (awesome) can use the Hauppage remote, but how do I choose which card I want the remote to run on?

Sage just relies on the Hauppauge IR app, which will just pick the first card it sees.

ALso, how can I switch Tuners?

You don't, Sage handles that behind the scenes.

[QUOTE]I'm on the 15day free trial of SageTV and so far I like it, although It's gonna need a little configuration to be more stable.[QUOTE]

Take the 878 out and see how it works then.

If I can get it working well I'm planning on purchasing it. One thing I am a little confused about however, does the standard SageTV come with the ability to record, or do I have to purchase the SageRecorder seperately?

SageRecorder is a separate, and unneeded app.