Plextor PX-TV402U

[aheerfor]

I am trying to use a Plextor PX-TV402 and a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1100 with SageTV 6.

The Plextor works with the bundled software, which is InterVideo WinDVR. WinDVR finds 20 channels, 19 of which give a clear reception, and one is blurred and poor. All are in colour.

Sage TV 6 finds 9 channels with the Plextor, but is generally unable to receive the channels. Usually it will display a circling white arrow on a black background for 2 minutes, and then will terminate without any errormessage or warning. During these two minutes the application is unresponsive, and does not react to mouse clicks or PageUp or PageDown. Rarely Sage TV will display a poor image, typically in black and white, after the two minutes.

Sage TV works much better with the HVR1100 DVB-T tuner, finding all the 3channels, and displaying all 3 channels in clear colours. It does however not display any DVB-T subtitles.

It seems there is an incompatibility between the Plextor and SageTV…
All the settings, such as PAL, Antenna etc are correct. (We dont use NTSC in this part of the worls)

No solution in sight….

Any advice?

[aheerfor]

It occured to me that a possible explanation for the incompatibilities between SageTV and the Plextor is that SageTV may have a too simplistic view of PAL. There is not just one PAL standard, there are many. In my part of the world we use PAL_B, or some substandard thereof. In the UK, for example, they use a quite different PAL. But SageTV seems unaware of the differences between different PAL systems.

This seems the likely explanation why SageTV doesn't work with the Plextor, while other software does.

I tried SageTV with the analogue tuner in the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1100, and the result was similar as with the Plextor. While other software worked fine with the HVR1100, using PAL_B, SageTV using PAL could only find a few channels while scanning, and failed to display them, when asked to do so.

So while SageTV may work in some parts of the world, it probably doesnt work at all in the PAL_B part of the world.

A pity. It seems a nice and well thought out program in many respects.