Supported Tuners: which ones work, which ones do not?

[jaminben]

Originally Posted by JREkiwi

Updated my earlier post about Hauppauge HVR-4000 not working. Now works in SageTV 6.2.10 with updates provided by Qian

John

DVB-T works and DVB-S works but for some reason DVB-S2 doesnt work.

[UgaData]

The Vista View DA-1N1-I analog/digital combo tuner sort of works with SageTV. I have the PCI version and I presume the same will hold true for the PCI-e version (DA-1N1-E)

Analog reception over cable no problem. OTA works well provided you have good reception. QAM is a disapointment in SageTV. Vista View advertises that the card is QAM capable but an e-mail to Vista View support stated that this cards QAM capabilities are not supported by SageTV. They are currently working on support with GBPVR and Media Portal. No mention of Sage.

This is a good card (and low profile to boot) but not if you plan or want to get QAM channels in SageTV. I believe the current market for this card is Vista MCE machines for doing the QAM tunning (when the patch or update for Vista comes out to support clear QAM).

[brandito]

VisionTek TV wonder 600 USB- Works well for OTA Digital tv.

A spontaneous Black Friday purchase at BestBuy works great as an OTA HDTV tuner. Very good picture and signal using only the included telescopic miniantenna. I didn't even have to put in a driver disk as WinXP found a driver automatically and Sage found it with a reboot. However that may be why it hasn't worked when trying to set it up as an analog tuner, Sage just gives the non stop spinning circle (one of the only times sage has crashed on me). Obviously it wouldn't work well anyway since it would rely on software compression of analog tv, so I didn't put much effort into it. I am just glad to finally have some HDTV on my HDTV.

Pinnacle PCTV HD Card - Marginal OTA digital performance at best, poor analog performance(software compression), No Clear QAM in Sage.

Bought this to replace the ATI 600 above, because it said it was Clear QAM compatible. To get clear qam though it requires download of beta PCTV software a 200mb download. ( for those that are like me and don't know the QAM type differences here is a quick explanation QAM 64 is the digital transmission of SDTV, QAM256 is the digital transmission of HDTV, either one of these can be encrypted or unencrypted, Clear QAM is just the name for unencrypted QAM signals.) I was able to get about 20 clear qam stations over my TWC basic cable line, but the playback was choppy and sound wasn't in sync. The QAM tuning is just not available for this card in sagetv... so sad. Sage really needs to get out there and make some driver extensions for some more clear qam cards (XP drivers please). OTA digital reception was choppy, out of sync, and poor reception (albeit a small antenna). overall I am glad to see that clear qam is available, but I am returning this card and getting a HDhomerun.

[LostInSpace]

Against what I said some days ago, Technotrend budget C-1500 WORKS with vista!!!!

[Duck2470]

PINNACLE PCTV HD Card 800i
The analog cable works Fine However The Clear-Qam dont appear to be supported by sage tv. No option shows up to scan for Clear-Qam channels and at this time im only able to scan and watch the standard analog cable channels.

Windows Vista 32, Pentium4 3.4Ghz, 2GB ram, Nvida 7600GS 512mb agp, 500gb sata HD. Sage TV V6.3.3.157

Any idea if this HD TV tuner card will be supported or should i just get used to using the buggy software it comes with?

[gjvrieze]

I am running the lastest version of SageTV, v6.3.5 on Windows Server 2k3 Standard with SP2..
I have the 2 tuners of the HDHomeRun tuning cable via clear QAM.
2 Vbox 3650s running ATSC.
1 ATI 550Pro tuning standard def cable.....

Works great!!!

[NCAL]

The Vista View SABER DA-1N1-I COMBO PCI TV TUNER CARD works well for me using Sage where it would not work at all in Microsoft MCE xp. The digital hd and analog are both great. As soon as the Sage HD extender becomes available it will be replacing the Linsys extender that has been a source of constant problems for years.

[JonTom]

I thought that card wasn't supported???

[UgaData]

Originally Posted by JonTom

I thought that card wasn't supported???

The Vista View DA-1N1-I mostly works with SageTV. The card isn't listed explicitly but SageTV does support Conexant CX23883 ATSC based cards which the DA-1N1-I is.

Analog tuning works fine as well as OTA digital/HD tuning. Don't expect this card to work for clearQAM with SageTV, or any other software, at this time. Mediaportal and GB-PVR are working on QAM support. Other than the drivers, Vista View doesn't supply any software for these cards for watching TV.

[AzJazz]

Tuner: Hauppauge WinTV HVR-950 USB (Recognized by Windows as HVR-980)
O/S: WinXP Pro SP2
SageTV Version: 6.3.5

Source: ATSC OTA - Works OK
Source: Analog NTSC via Cable - Works ... but signal quality is so bad, it is effectively unusable for PVR use.

Also, the audio was out of sync with the video, but more noticeably with the analog signal.

The Hauppauge WinTV HVR-950/HVR-980 USB should only be used in a PVR setup using the Digital tuner.

AzJazz

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by AzJazz

Source: Analog NTSC via Cable - Works ... but signal quality is so bad, it is effectively unusable for PVR use.

The Hauppauge WinTV HVR-950/HVR-980 USB should only be used in a PVR setup using the Digital tuner.

If I'm reading the Hauppauge specs correctly, the analog side uses a software encoder, so what you describe seems expected. On the requirements page, that's probably why the card is listed under the OTA HDTV Tuner section, but not in the Analog Tuners list.

- Andy

[AzJazz]

Tuner: VisionTek ATI TV Wonder HD-650 USB
OS: WinXP SP2
SageTV Version: 6.3.5

Source: ATSC OTA - Works very good, but noticing some slight jumpiness in the video while watching. Audio was synced with video. Since I used a small unamplified UHF antenna, it could possibly be due to some reception signal degradation. However, I am seeing 80%+ signal strength for almost all available ATSC OTA signals in my area. The Hauppauge HVR-980 I tried earlier with the same antenna only received 3 barely usable channels, while the HD-650 USB received 19 totally usable channels. Pretty impressive!

Source: Analog NTSC via cable: Works very good. Audio was synced with video. Video quality was far superior to the HVR-980 (No surprise there). The signal is still a little noisy (I'm sure it's ground loop noise). I'm trying to find the video processing settings to adjust for the HD-650 to see if I can improve the video even more.

As a side note, the CPU utilization seemed pretty low for Analog (about 15-20%). HD signals were more significant, usually maxing out one of my dual 2.2 GHz cores (maybe that's what's causing the slight jumpiness?)

Thumbs up!

[matterofrecord]

2 hauppauge wintv nova-t-500's

two hauppaugge win-tv nova-t-500's are working fine with sage

They have been working fine since jan 2008


2 hauppauge win-tv nova-t-500's ( 4 tuners) xp home sp2 running sagetv 6.3.5 core 2 duo E6750 gigabyte p35c-ds3r mboard 2 gb corsair xms ram lots of hard drives2x500gb 1x80 gb 1x160gb

[HKme]

Hauppauge WinTV DMB-T USB stick (see hauppauge's singapore website for details)
WHS (tested on WinXP SP2 also)
SageTV 6.3.10

The OTA digital television standard here in Hong Kong and China is DMB-T rather than DVB-T (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMB-T/H and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital...n_in_Hong_Kong). As such, I wasn't expecting any luck getting my capture device working with Sage. To my surprise, sage was able to detect the device and tune the 4 SDTV channels I can currently receive in my building. It was also (sort of) able to download the guide data, although it made a bit of a mess of things and so I'm currently looking at using MyTheatre with the XMLTV exporter to grab guide data outside of sage. I guess the BDA driver must abstract sufficiently far from the protocol that the DVB-T|DMB-T/H differences don't matter too much.

That said, I've only tested this with the standard definition MPEG2 encoded channels as that's all I can currently receive (digital tv is only just being rolled out and there's several mountains between me and some of the initial transmitters). Standard and Hidef channels are also being broadcast in H.264 so not sure how those would work out.

The only real issue I've noted (aside from the EPG being a bit scrambled) is that channel changes are very very slow. MyTheatre is able to change the channels in about 1 second (without fast channel changing enabled) but sage takes anywhere from 4-10 seconds to tune the channel.

p.s. I did have to edit the PredefinedDVBT.frq file to add the Hong Kong frequencies before Sage would find the channels - would be great if they could be included in the next version, I'm happy to post the details somewhere if it helps.

[Dvid]

Tuner: Pinnacle 7010ix
OS: Windows Vista 32 bit
SageTV 6.3.10

Have been able to get Sage to recognise the 2 DVB-T tuners and with some tweaking get the channels working. A little patchy, but usable.

Totally unable to get Sage to recognise the 2 DVB-S tuners on the card. It doesn't show them in the setup, only the DVB-T tuners.

This is a good spec card, costs only 30GBP, would be nice to get it supported. Any ideas?

[logsvp]

Tuner: Pinnacle 7010ix
OS: Windows XP Professional SP3
SageTV 6.3.10

As Dvid said

Originally Posted by Dvid

Totally unable to get Sage to recognise the 2 DVB-S tuners on the card. It doesn't show them in the setup, only the DVB-T tuners.

[garys]

Windows XP Pro SP2
Sage 6.3.10

Hauppauge HVR-1250 works w/ QAM using TS source. Haven't personally tried it with ATSC OTA, but a friend says that works also.

Note: Did not work under Sage 6.1.x

[david1234]

Originally Posted by garys

Haven't personally tried it with ATSC OTA, but a friend says that works also.

Works fine, but the tuner is very sensitive to how well the cable is attached to the card.

[Steverino]

This post is my first time, please be gentle

Computer #1
SageTV Windows Vista x86 SP1
Dell Inspiron 530 Quad-core Q6600
3GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce 8500GT
(this PC was originally purchased just to run Folding@Home, but I just can't stop tinkering!)

ATI Diamond 650 PCIe not on list, ATSC works, NTSC audio stutters
ADS Tech InstantHDTV PCI, not on list, ATSC works, NTSC audio stutters

On order: Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950 (may be used with this PC or with Mac below)

Computer #2
Apple Mac Pro 2007 model, 8-core dual Xeon 3.0GHz
Apple Raid Card
1.5TB RAID 0+1 array
8GB Ram

Elgato EyeTV-250, not on list, not seen by SageTV Mac, does not work
Elgato EyeTV 500 HDTV, not on list, not seen by SageTV Mac, does not work

--
I'm hoping that once my Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950 arrives it will work with the SageTV on my Dell PC, because I really like SageTV, and I want an excuse to buy it.

IMHO SageTV beats the competition hands down in terms of user interface and feature set.

[Striker77s]

I'm using a MSI 650 tuner which is a rebranded ATI 650Pro card. Works great.