Sage & Dual Tuner Audio Question

[eggman51]

Hi All,

I am a BTV user who is now 'sperimenteing with Sage as I really want multiple tuner support .. and many of the other very attractive features of Sage .. but I really need a Canadian EPG <hint hint>

I have a question regarding multiple tuners...

How do you configure the audio connections when using an amplifier?

My proposed setup:
PVR 250
PVR 250 MCE
ATI AiW 9600
Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS connected to...
...Kenwood 2090 Amplifier

What I don't understand is how you folks connect the audio cables to the sound card? And how does the Audio card know which tuner should be the one sending the audio sigfnals over the amplifier?

I don't want to have to change input setings on the amp when switching between tuners (not wife friendly). And I don't want to have to change any sound card configs when switching between tuners (not wife friendly).

So... how do you set up the audion connections with 2 tuners, a single soundcard and an amplifier connected to the sound card?

Thanks in advance for any help available.

eggman

[wr202]

The PVR-250 cards will just encode. They have nothing to do with playback. So you just need one audio output.

[gplasky]

The PVR250 cards talk over the PCI bus to your sound card. Just get your sound card output to your amp. It's magic.


Gerry

[ErsatzTom]

Uh, actually as wr202 said, the pci bus/pvr250 has nothing to do with it. The 250 receives and encodes the video and then it is written to disk. Playback is an entirely separate animal. That is why it can be played back over the network to a client. And the pvr250 can be located across the network from the sage box in a network encoder box.

t

[gplasky]

Yeah- that's what I meant. PVR250 receives and encodes the video and audio and thru the pci bus, writes it to the disk. Playback reads it and plays it thru the sound card. The writing to the disk and playing the file part is the magic. :-)
I mean let's face it, if the pci bus had nothing to do with it how does the encoding get to the disk?


Gerry

[ErsatzTom]

Well, sure the pci bus is used. I was just making sure he didn't think that the pvr250 and the sound card were interacting in any direct fashion.

t

[AirJunky]

I think where the audio is connected is dependant on what hardware your using to get playback.

Ie; I'm using an Xcard. Audio outputs from the Xcard to the DAT input on a Sony amp. Video outputs from the Xcard to an s-video switch & then to the s-video input on a Sony 32" TV.

I assume if your using one of the nVidia or ATI TV cards to output your video, then the audio is played thru your sound card. But I don't know this for sure & I'm not sure how many different pieces of hardware there are available to output your video.

[eggman51]

OK I think I understand now. I have an ATI Aiw 9600 and a single PVR250 (which is still in the mail). Once I have the first one working OK I will add a second PVR250.

I have an Audigy 2 ZS as the soundcard, so I am assuming that whatever is "active" as the tuner is what is sending sound from the PVR 250 - through the PCI bus - to the sound card, then out to the receiver in whichever way it's connected (SPDIF or Analog).

Meaning if tuner 1 is active, then tuner 1 gets the soundcard, then if I make tuner 2 active, tuner 2 gets the soundcard. By "active" I mean watching timeshifted TV for example.

I am a bit of a noob here, 'specially with 2 tuners so thanks for bearing with me.

Thanks

eggman

[ErsatzTom]

Well, I still think that you are over complicating the situation. No matter how many tuners you have, they are streaming their contents to files. No audio is ever sent directly from a tuner card to your audio card. Sage reads the streams from the tuner cards and writes them to files. When you are watching one of them (whether it is still being recorded or it was recorded a year ago), the video and audio content are sent to your audio and video devices just as if you were watching a dvd or listening to an mp3 or anything else you do on your computer. It just happens that the media player (sage) is reading it from a file that happens to be receiving (or have received) the output streams of one of your tuner cards.

t

[gplasky]

Tom
You're also looking at this from a Sage perspective. What happens when you use an app like Snapstream and don't do timeshifting? You're essentially watching "Live TV". I don't think a file is created then.

Gerry

[ErsatzTom]

Well, I'm pretty sure that Snapstream also goes to file but even for those that don't record to file there is still going to be an application that is reading the mpeg2 stream out of memory, decoding it and then sending the audio to the sound card (or sending the stream unaltered to a hardware decoder). On the other hand, I'm working with a pretty limited knowledge of the hardware capabilities of the cards; perhaps I'm missing something.

The bottom line is that there is no fundamental problem to overcome in routing audio with multiple tuners. There is always some application which is playing a stream, either from file or from memory, and that application will output the audio to the appropriate place. I don't believe that the pvr250 cards have any capability to "send" the audio directly to an audio output device.

Anyway, I think we are all basically agreeing that there isn't a problem.

t

[eggman51]

Thanks all for the replies. I've made a few mistakes along the way here as an HTPC n00b. Nothing major, but I think I have spent about 20% of my budget unnecessarily experimenting.

As a result I am um... asking questions about stuff that is really theoretical to me, no more 'sperimentation budget left hehe.

I believe I undestand all this now. The PCI bus is used to transfer the audio signal. I was a lil misguided here as the AiW cards use a "line-in" cord on the back, so I assumed soemthing similar was used for the PVR250.

I bought the PVR250 with Snapstream bundle. The PVR has not arrived in the mail, so I can't actually try Sage on this box just yet.

The Snapstream purchase might end up in the 'sperimentation category heh. Thus far I find Snapstream has a very decent UI, but is generally very flaky (in about two weeks of trial usage I've done 3 re-installs to fix things).

I definitely would take Sage more seriously if they added a Canadian EPG!

<hint, hint>

Thanks again!

eggman