Multiple tuners one program guide?

[agdm619]

I have a HD-PVR hooked to a STB and a HVR-1600 that has an analog tuner and a digital QAM/ASTC tuner. I am using 3 HD-200 on 3 three TV in the house.

My issue is I guess I don’t really understand how this multiple tuner thing goes??? I first setup my HD-PVR and added and removed the channels liked and disliked that worked fine so when I look at the program guide everything is showing like it should.

Now I add the HVR-1600 in the mix. First, I setup the analog tuner, I found the correct service provider from the list and it shows the right channels that are provided from our cable provider.

I have an opening between channels 300 and 400, so I wanted to remap all the analog channels to that area. I changed the mappings physical and logical. Now channel 3 is now channel 303, but that don’t work! The channels don’t show up the program guide nor do they work in the channel setup menu when you hit view it won’t change the channel. I don’t know what to do!!

Thanks
Aaron

[tahoetim]

I'm not a whiz at this yet but here's what i did:

I wanted my 2250 card to tune the free analog channels from 2 to 40, so I unchecked (the little green dot next to the channel) the channels above 40 that I knew the 2250 couldn't tune.

Then, I set up my pvr500 tuner and pvr150 that are connected to my cable boxes to tune the pay channels above 40 and unchecked the channels below 40.

So when I tune a free channel, it uses one of those tuners, and when i tune above 40 it uses one of the other tuners.

Hope this makes some sense... and again i could be doing it wrong and I haven't read the manual yet.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by agdm619

I have an opening between channels 300 and 400, so I wanted to remap all the analog channels to that area. I changed the mappings physical and logical. Now channel 3 is now channel 303, but that don’t work! The channels don’t show up the program guide nor do they work in the channel setup menu when you hit view it won’t change the channel.

The remapping you did is part of your problem -- see page 163 of the v6.5 SageTV PDF manual regarding channel remapping. The physical channel number is used to actually tune the channel & you seem to have remapped it to something that can't tune the channel any more.

You can map the logical channel number to pretty much anything you want.


Now, as to why your remaps aren't affecting the guide, see the notes at the bottom of pages 47 and 149. The same stations on multiple lineups are getting merged in the guide & will be listed under the logical channel number from one of the guides. You could change all the logical numbers for the station on all lineups if you want, or disable the channels on certain lineups if you don't want them to be usable by those tuners.

- Andy

[agdm619]

My Fix...

I had to remove the HD-PVR tuner and setup the HVR-1600 analog tuner and line up first. Now it seems to be running correct.

Thanks for your help!
Aaron

[agdm619]

I guess I just dont understand...

I have 1 STB with an HD-PVR connected...It uses the XML service to get the channel lineup and it works fine...I go through and remove channels I don’t like or don’t use...works great!

I add the 1600 analog tuner to mix and use the xml service to get the analog channel lineup. That works fine...but the channels overlap (channel 3 is KGET on the STB and channel 3 is KGET on the analog tuner)what do I do??? (I want access them separately, but is the right) I have tried to change all the analog channels to the 300's (i.e. 303 is 3, 304 is 4 so on and so on. It total jacks up the program guide...it starts dropping some of my STB channels like 100 through 107, 200 through 205...400 through 415 just whatever! But it seems to be always at the start of the numbers...It’s different every time I add and remove the devices when troubleshooting.

What is the normal way you setup your program guide when you have multiple tuners and alot of the same channels???

[doc]

what normally happens is that the guide joins together all the channels in a logical manor.

If you imagine tuner A has the following channels (excuse my english channel names)

BBC1
BBC2
ITV1

and tuner B has the following channels

BBC1
ITV1
ITV2
ITV3
Sky3

they way most people have it set is so that the guide shows...

BBC1
BBC2
ITV1
ITV2
ITV3
Sky3

when you record/watch BBC1, you don't tell it which tuner to use, Sage will check for a free tuner that has that channel, and use that.

if Sage always seems to choose the analogue card for a channel, and you'd prefer the HDPVR to tune it, you can specify an "encoder_merit" for each tuner it the sage.properties file. The tuner with the higher encoder_merit number will always get chosen before the lower one.

If the higher merited tuner is in use recording something else, then Sage will tuner the other card.

I always get confused with physical/logical channel numbers but I think you need to set them as follows for it to work like this (someone correct me if I'm wrong please)

BBC1 - logical channel 1
BBC2 - logical channel 2
ITV1 - logical channel 3

and tuner B has the following channels

BBC1 - logical channel 1
ITV1 - logical channel 3
ITV2 - logical channel 4
ITV3 - logical channel 5
Sky3 - logical channel 6

This should (I think) give the consolidated guide of

Channel 1 - BBC1
Channel 2 - BBC2
Channel 3 - ITV1
Channel 4 - ITV2
Channel 5 - ITV3
Channel 6 - Sky3