Dual Tuner Installation hurdles (250mce & 350)

[joedornan]

Hi all,

After searching all the forums I could think of for clues, I'm resorting to an open request for advice in troubleshooting the installation of two tuners on one HTPC.

I've had trouble getting a Hauppauge 350 & 250mce to play nicely together. Any links to tips/tricks or tutorials would be welcome.

If you're curious, my situation is described below:

Hardware:
Dvine 4 (not relevant... but dammit only you folks would appreciate it :-)
motherboard: asus a7n8xe-d
graphics: asus 9200se
ram: 512
Tuner1: Hauppauge 350 (pci slot #1)
Tuner2: Hauppauge 250mce (pci slot#2)

Software:
OS: WinXP Pro (all updates)
PVR: WinTV/Sage1.4/BeyondTV3.42

Drivers:
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR PCI II (Encoder 16)
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR PCI II (Encoder/Decoder)

The first installed for the 250mce the second for the 350. Both were version 1.17.390.21283 initially. Oddly despite upgrading to the newer 21288, the device manager still reports 21283...

First there was only the 250mce. It worked fine with all three PVRs. When I installed the 350 the result on all PVRs was a highly pixelated video feed of one unchangeable station, with the bottom sixth of the screen snow.

I went through various combinations of uninstalling and installing the newest hauppauge drivers and switching around the cards in their PCI slots. But no luck. The best I could acheive was WinTV working with only one of them, and one time BTV worked but no longer. I admit to trying to switch the Video Source causing a crash in BTV.

General system instability followed. BTV now errors as follows: "The Beyond TV recording/viewing engine could not start, probably due to incorrect setting. ..."

I'll be reinstalling XP, but first I'd like to know the right way of installing and setting up the two tuners with Sage, and to be able to choose which tuner works with BeyondTV. Any advice?

Wearily yours,
-Joe

[stanger89]

Hey, I just saw your post over at AVS, like they said there, it's a known problem that 250s and 350s don't play well together, there are a couple threads around here, here's one:
http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthr...hlight=250+350
There was also a thread with a work around to get both working but I can't find it right now. Your best bet is to stick with all 250s.

As for how you set up multiple tuners, basically you just go through the setup wizard twice, once for each tuner.

Might also want to try the latest drivers from http://www.shspvr.com they are a little newer than the ones on the Hauppauge site.

[AJ Bertelson]

looks like he went for a multikill as I also saw this on htpcnews.

My suggestion is to also try the SHS drivers.

[Crashless]

Has anyone tried a USB2PVR with the 350? for the moment it sucks not being able to have the great TV out of the 350 AND a second tuner internally. But for a little extra adding an external one could be an option. Has anyone tried it?

[Cayars]

They work fine together.

[carlgar]

Originally posted by joedornan
Drivers:
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR PCI II (Encoder 16)
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR PCI II (Encoder/Decoder)

The first installed for the 250mce the second for the 350. Both were version 1.17.390.21283 initially. Oddly despite upgrading to the newer 21288, the device manager still reports 21283...

First there was only the 250mce. It worked fine with all three PVRs. When I installed the 350 the result on all PVRs was a highly pixelated video feed of one unchangeable station, with the bottom sixth of the screen snow.

You should try my work around Possible initialization problem with multi-tuner cards to get rid of the pixelated vedeo with snow on bottom. I don't know if it will work with 250mce but works with other combinations of 15 and 16 type cards.