Can Sage handle 3 ATI E-HOME WONDER cards?

[mikbro]

Single card, on fresh, minimal installs.

[mlbdude]

Do these cards work better in Sage 2.0 or are these these problems related to 1.4? Obviously the system loosing the card on reboot is not Sage related but what about the rest?

Cayars is using a one or two in his 8 tuner system and has not reported these issues.

I have an OEM 250 and it does the disappearing act as well. In then end I wish I spent the extra money and got a supported card.

[Crowdx42]

Well I got cold feet and cancelled the E-Home, gonna get a PVR 250 tomorrow in either Circuit City or CompUSA, both have them in stock, will try and get an assistant to open the box to see if it is a 15 or 16, don't need the headache of a card which may or may not record when it is scheduled to, reliablity is the name of the game with PVR setups IMHO.
Patrick

[Opus4]

If you want no problem with your current 250 & are willing to spend the money, get a pvr-usb2. (Provided you have a usb2 connection...) It works quite well w/o any conflict with a 250.

- Andy

[medialivingroom]

I ordered 3 of them in total and I was able to get it working with no problems so far.

[Crowdx42]

What motherboard and configuration you running?
The earlier posts indicate inconsistant results with the E-home?
Have you had no problems at all?
Patrick

[medialivingroom]

AMD Duron 1.8GHz Processor - $20
ECS K7VTA3 Version 8.0C - $20
256 PC2700 RAM - $30
ATI RADEON 9200 SE - $49
(2) 120GB Hard Drive - 2x$60=$120
(1) Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 with silver remote - $100
(3) ATI E-HOME WONDER - 3x$66=$198
Windows XP Pro OEM fully updated with all patches - $100
SageTV Beta Update 2.0.13 - $59
Antec Solution Series SLK1600 - $30

Total is about $726

[Crowdx42]

So can you get all the cards to record at the same time? I am wondering why MikBro is having problems, maybe it is an Intel problem?
Anyone else got these cards running on their systems yet?
Patrick

[AJ Bertelson]

Originally posted by Crowdx42
So can you get all the cards to record at the same time? I am wondering why MikBro is having problems, maybe it is an Intel problem?
Anyone else got these cards running on their systems yet?
Patrick

just buy the PVR-250

edit-Media livingroom I can't believe you got the PVR-250 to work with a kt266a

[PGPfan]

FWIW, I was exploring "thegreenbutton.com" (Windows MCE fan site) and there seems to be alot of dissapointment with the ATI Ehome Wonder card. Mostly the feeling that it was a 'lame duck' from the get go, that ATI dumped it into the enthusiast market when they were unable to sell to OEM's.

This seems to be indicated by an utter lack of driver developement from ATI, and the fact that all the cards are 'whitebox', with no 'retail' ones available. I don't know how true this is, but there does seem to be no driver developement going on for these cards.

I truely believe that Sage's best opportunity is with the Avermedia M150 which does seem to have a large OEM base, as well as very active driver development. I certainly hope that Jeff can add Sage support for it soon, since the price/feature set is impossible for Hauppauge to compete with right now.

Jeff, Dan, or anyone - thoughts on this?

-PGPfan

[Crowdx42]

Yeah, I think I will bite the bullet and get the PVR 250, problem I have is now to make sure it is a 15 version to match my current card. Would get the PVR 350 but I am finding it hard just to ditch my 3 week old Xcard, still hoping that Sage may support the OSD on it.
Patrick

[jmiddleton]

The ATI e-Home wonder has only been on the market for a couple of months and is intended to be installed in XP-MCE systems by the OEM's that build the machines. In this context, the apparant lack of information available to the end-user community is understandable. ATI never intended this card to be sold directly to end users and they never intended it to be installed in non-MCE systems. On the other hand, the card works very well with Sage (in my limited experience) and, here in Canada, it's half the price of a PVR-250 and easier to find. I don't expext this card to be a dead end for ATI. It uses the same Theatre 200 chip as the All-in-Wonders for the first stage of the capture process and adds the Connexant chip for hardware MPEG while the current generation AIW cards still use software encoding. I think it's far more likely the e-home wonder is the beginning of a new era at ATI and that we'll see hardware MPEG on the next generation of All-in-Wonders.

[mikbro]

I wanted to update my comments re: this card... I received the full featured version (with the FM tuner, A/V dongle) and it seems to work just fine, a lot better than the more limited version which just had RF input. Part of the issue may have been that Sage would detect this limited card as having all the inputs of the full featured card (even though I did not attempt to select them). Perhaps this causes a problem in Sage, hence that card's instability.

Also it appears the unit is defaulting to 2 gig/hour recording quality. Just as with the other card, the quality settings are not available to change the recording quality to something else.

[PGPfan]

The thing that is bothering me about the ATI Ehome card is that there is no driver support. In it current state, it IS recognized by Sage but is not implemented correctly (no video quality adjustment) and we are just lucky that the quality setting it is stuck at via default is reasonably good.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of this card. But, if there is no support for it from ATI (who is knowingly selling it for use other than strictly MCE) then the darn sure better look into long term driver support. If I were Dan and Jeff, I'd disable support for the card until atleast ATI starts to support it. Too many chances of support headaches, and their hands are tied to do anything about it.

From the description on the Newegg site, the Avermedia 150 does support quality settings, and from the reviews it looks to be an ideal card. I just hope Dan and Jeff see the potential of this card. Heck, I'd even buy one to loan to them if it'd help to get this on Sage.


-PGPfan

[Crowdx42]

Well I just bought a second PVR 250 and so I will see how things go with that. I am currently out of PCI slots now, so any further additions will be on a server on another machine.
A thought on servers, how do you guys use the tv card when using Sage recorder, does Sage recorder allow live stream just like the capture is local on the machine?
I have 6 networked machines here so have a lot of possibilities for setting up additional cards on other machines.
Patrick

[jmiddleton]

I don't think Frey made any changes to SageTV to support the e-home wonder. Both products support the Windows Driver Model (WDM) and work together without any special attention by either manufacturer. This is the way things should (but rarely do) work. If AverMedia provide WDM drivers for the M150 it too should be plug and play. I wouldn't expect the same degree of fit that you get with the Hauppauge PVR cards. In this case it appears that both Frey and Hauppauge have put a lot of effort into making the products work together seamlessly.

[SHS]

Has any even try going to the Video Capture Setting and try changing the quality settings manual that way?.

[jmiddleton]

You can do a registry search for ehomewonder and find the key that controls the parameters for the card. On my system the path is
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4D36E96C-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0030\Parameters

There are 40 odd parameters including several bitrate values that the adventurous might play with (be sure to export the key and/or set a system restore point first). Personally, I'm quite happy with the defaults. I've also been around long enough to watch too many companies shoot themselves in the foot by trying to include a lot of features in their version 1 drivers. First make it work, then make it fancy.

[stanger89]

Originally posted by jmiddleton
First make it work, then make it fancy.

Sounds like SageTV

[heffe2001]

Any of you guys that have an Ehome tried to set it up in MCE? Wonder if the drivers for it look for the quality settings from MCE's reg entries, and not finding them fall back to a default of 2g/hour?

Wonder if setting these registry entries will set the quality:

The predefined quality settings available from the Media Center UI are stored as registry values on the multi-strings

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Recording\EncodingQuality

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Recording\AudioEncodingQuality


I'll probably be getting one later this month, if I can find 'em in stock, and give it a try myself. Also probably try it in the MCE machine that Microsoft is sending me to test (if it doesn't have a ehome already in it that is).