Problem using HDHomeRun and HDPVR

[Diego Garcia]

Some background...

Like many others, I've been struggling to get my Hauppauge (may they suffer a thousand cuts ) HDPVR to work reliably with Sage. I only bought an HDPVR because my cable provider, Comcast (may they also suffer a thousand cuts ) helpfully decided to encrypt essentially all but the over-the-air channels in their system.

Prior to getting the HDPVR I was happily using an HDHomeRun from Silicon Dust (now there's a great product from a company that actually knows how to build great products and write great software; I wonder if they could buy Hauppauge and clean up their act?? ). It work continues to work fine with the unencrypted cable channels, so I don't want to get rid of it (probably 60% of the stuff we record is from an over-the-air channel).

But this creates the basis for a subtle, and therefore nasty, problem within Sage. Because Sage can't handle using the same channel line up, from the same cable provider, for two different capture devices, one of which requires channel remapping (the HDHomeRun) and one of which doesn't.

If you add the HDHomeRun tuners to Sage, before adding the Hauppauge HDPVR, Sage will map the cable provider's channel lineup to what the HDHomeRun provides (you have to create a channel scan file from within the HDHomeRun software, but that's a separate issue).

When you then add the HDPVR, even if you tell Sage to copy the channel lineup from the cable provider (Sage is smart enough to detect that you're trying to use the same channel lineup from the same cable provider), it will copy over the channel mappings it created for the HDHomeRun tuners.

This results in extraneous/invalid channel codes being sent to the HDPVR's built-in IR blaster. Since it's not an HDHomeRun tuner , it naturally rejects them. Which means Sage thinks it has changed the channel on the set top box connected to the HDPVR...but it hasn't. No flickery LED lights, no channel change .

The solution is to add the HDPVR first, and then add the HDHomeRun tuners. But in doing so, you have to remember to tell Sage to clear the channel mappings it did, because even though the HDHomeRun tuners are "gone", they're not forgotten -- Sage remembers their channel mappings, and will helpfully carry them over to the HDPVR, leading to the same problem with the built-in IR blaster.

BTW, clearing the channel mappings if you install the HDPVR after the HDHomeRun tuners doesn't work -- it deletes all the channels from the HDPVR's lineup, which isn't helpful .

I don't know how many people will be bitten by this problem. It's a nasty one because there's no sign, other than the HDPVR's built-in IR blaster not working, to indicate that something's wrong. In particular, there's no sign that the HDHomeRun channel mappings were copied over to the HDPVR's lineup if you install the HDPVR last. "Fortunately", in order for this to be a problem you have to be using an HDHomeRun and an HDPVR with the same channel source (i.e., the same cable feed).

I hope this saves someone else several hours of frustration. And that includes me, because I ran into this problem last April under Sage v6, but had forgotten about the solution when I did a clean install of v7.

[paulbeers]

Couple of points....

1. You could have copied the channels and then just changed their mappings
2. You could have used another line up. In my case, both my cable and my satellie companies have multiple line ups that I can pick between so you could use "cable-analog" for one and "cable-digital" for another or in my case I use "Dish Network - Location" and "Dish Network - USA".

As a side note, I do not map my HDPVR to channels that I can get otherwise because I have fewer HDPVR's than I do regular tuners and I would hate to inadvertently tie up my HDPVR because I am watching regular television and Sage needs to change channels.

[madpoet]

Good point Paul. I don't remove those channels from the HD PVR, I just have it set for the lowest priority.

[null_pointer_us]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

Couple of points....

1. You could have copied the channels and then just changed their mappings

What happens when you need to reconfigure/replace/upgrade the tuners using the original lineup?

IIRC, the original is deleted, the copy becomes the new original, and you're stuck copying that and clearing all the remappings. Or, if you want to start with a fresh lineup, you wipe both sets of tuners and do it all over from scratch.

I expected this to be fixed by v7. *sigh* I should've been more active in the beta process. Maybe someone will write a plugin to expose the lineups more directly so that we can press a few buttons to create multiple fresh lineups from the same provider.

2. You could have used another line up. In my case, both my cable and my satellie companies have multiple line ups that I can pick between so you could use "cable-analog" for one and "cable-digital" for another or in my case I use "Dish Network - Location" and "Dish Network - USA".

This doesn't apply to me. Comcast only provides two digital options, one of which is World of More (?), but thankfully the other name uses at least preschool level grammar and gives some indication of what channels it actually provides.

Luckily I copied over my mostly working config from v6, where it had taken hours to do these incredibly simple things, just because it was so very flaky -- QAM preview randomly (and frequently) crashed/limbo'd/(dropped audio and/or video)/showed-wrong-channel/didn't-play-until-you-hit-remap -- and required hand-editing/remapping tons of QAM channels.

The v7 UI seems stellar other than this oversimplified-lineup issue and some network-related GCoL.

As a side note, I do not map my HDPVR to channels that I can get otherwise because I have fewer HDPVR's than I do regular tuners and I would hate to inadvertently tie up my HDPVR because I am watching regular television and Sage needs to change channels.

I only get OTA channels on my HVR-2250 now anyway, but I would remap the full lineup if it came in unencrypted.

I expect SageTV to be capable of handle this multiple/complex tuner setup stuff in a fairly straightforward and stable manner. People who fit neatly into the few "ordinary" use cases can just load up Windows Media Center as a basic, idiot-proof DVR. SageTV is for people who want more options.

[MTisza]

I have the same setup, except instead of Comcast (probably the worst), I have Verizon FIOS (second worst). So I have 2 dual tuner HDHR, and one HDPVR.

The same exact problem happened to me and for a while I couldn't figure out how to get lineups and mapping to work. I was in the process of upgrading to Sage v7, when I was using the HDPVR for my first time. Till then I was using v6 with HDHRs for a couple years, with no problems.

So when I noticed the problem you mentioned above, I found my .frq and .scn files for the HDHR tuners from the v6 install, and copied them into the sagetv install directory, and restarted the sagetv service. Then after that I didn't need to remap anything it just worked. Just make sure on each HDHR tuner at least once you do an update scan. Also before the update scan disable the setting in the advanced section "automatically add channels found in EPG lineup", because otherwise (at least for me) the scan found 100s more channels than I actually have, and then auto-enabled them.

It would be nice if configuration of this setup was simplified a bit by sagetv, as I would predict it will become very popular.

I assume if ever mappings would have to change, I'd have to create new .scn, and .frq files on a pc without the HDPVR, and then copy them over, or I'd have to finally learn that funky physical/logical/guide number magic that has always confused the heck out of me.


Also, I too have the unencrypted (9 channels or so) on the HDHR tuners, and those are disabled on the HDPVR to ensure that I only use the HDPVR for mythbusters (pretty much the only thing I watch on "cable" channels).

[Diego Garcia]

Misery loves company, so I'm glad I'm not the only one who got bit by this problem

[Narflex]

There's a relatively simple solution to this problem.

If you setup the HDHR first and it did all of the remappings, and then want to install an HDPVR, just do this:

1) Configure the HDPVR using the original lineup for your cable co (I realize this will have the remapped channels in it)
2) Change the lineup for the HDHR, and select to use a copy of the lineup from the HDPVR (this will have the proper HDHR mappings in it)
3) Clear the channel mappings for the HDPVR's lineup

Then it should all be fine.

[Diego Garcia]

Originally Posted by Narflex

There's a relatively simple solution to this problem.

I appreciated the smiley at the end, as I wouldn't call it a simple solution. At least not in the sense of being intuitively obvious .

I did do a variant of what you described, copying the HDHomeRun lineup over to the HDPVR. But when I cleared the channel mappings for that copy, the entire lineup disappeared.

At the end of the day, I think a more user-friendly approach is needed. At a minimum, Sage should ask the user whether or not the mappings should be copied when the lineup is copied. That won't help most people, who won't realize that the presence of the HDHomeRun mappings is causing a problem for the HDPVR. But it would give people a chance to correct things.

A better solution might be for Sage to virtualize the mappings, and separate them from the channel lineup (i.e., a mapping could be applied to zero or more lineups). I think that might solve the problem, but it would make the whole process more abstract, which is not good from a user experience point of view.

Maybe Sage could recognize when it was going to apply mappings which make no sense to a particular piece of hardware and alert the user about the problem?

[Narflex]

Originally Posted by Diego Garcia

Maybe Sage could recognize when it was going to apply mappings which make no sense to a particular piece of hardware and alert the user about the problem?

That makes sense, and not a bad idea. If the input of the device is of a different phyical type, then the mappings probably wouldn't work and therefore shouldn't be copied. Should be a relatively simple fix. Thanks.

Wait...after checking the code this is not something we want to change in the RC stage because it may break other things. We currently only offer the option to copy the lineup if the inputs are of a different physical type, and there's some reason why we added copying of the physical channel mappings as part of this (because I know they weren't originally there as part of it), so we need to evaluate that before making the change. We'll look into this for V7.1.

[Diego Garcia]

Okay, that's fine. Hopefully I'll remember the issue in the meantime...

[Polypro]

This post should be stickied for all those "Sage has no support" or "why do I pay for this" posts

P

[Brent94Z]

Thank you for posting this detailed info. It is very much appreciated. I've been trying to get cable companies to show up and when I do will be using an HD PVR and HDHR. I am waiting to install the HDHR until *after* I get the cable company thing figured out and have my HD PVR installed. I don't think I could have figured out all that you were able to troubleshoot without a ton of and aggravation. Thanks!

[Diego Garcia]

You are quite welcome. Always glad to save someone else from pulling out their hair !

[MTisza]

I would appreciate the effort of simplifying this for 7.1.

Shouldn't the instructions above become an FAQ entry?

[Brent94Z]

Well, despite your best efforts with this post, I still managed to screw it up!

I guess either I don't read well enough or I just don't get some of the lingo.

I installed the HD PVR and it is recording off my cablebox no problem and I had all the guide data so all was great.

I spent about 1.5 hours in the HDHomeRun setup fixing all the channel numbers and names and just got done installing the HDHomeRun. Went through the setup process in Sage and told it what cable company I was using. Got to the step where it noticed I was using the same lineup as the HD PVR and asked what I wanted to do. I did NOT copy the HD PVR lineup because I knew the HDHR only has a fraction of the channels and I had no reason to think I needed to. So, it did its thing and just glancing at the channels it enabled and disabled it looked like things were good... until I went into my Guide and noticed all my HD PVR channels were wiped out!!! ARGH!

I don't know exactly what I did wrong but am guessing I should have COPIED the line-up from the HD PVR rather than tell it to just use the lineup.

Anybody have any suggestions on how best to "recover" from this and get it back to where my HD PVR channel lineup was like it was before? I'm going out for a beer now and if no experts chime in between now and when I get back, I'll try clicking some buttons. LOL

I don't think I was an idiot about this because I didn't read anything during the Sage setup of the HDHR that led me to believe I was about to wipe out my enabled channels for the HD PVR. But, who knows, maybe I missed it Either way, since it is obvious I don't really know how best to do this, some pointers on recovering would be appreciated Thanks!

[Diego Garcia]

Ouch! I feel your pain.

So far as I can see, you've already figured out the right way to do this, which is to copy the channel lineup to the HDHR. So far as I can tell, copying a lineup means Sage creates an independent standalone copy of the lineup, and doesn't thereafter try to maintain consistency with the original lineup. So once you've created a copy, you can delete channels, enable them, whatever, and it won't affect the source lineup.

But if you don't copy the lineup, then you're editing the original lineup when you make changes to it, even in the context of a separate tuner/video source. That's why your channels disappeared from the HDPVR lineup -- so far as Sage was concerned, it was the same lineup.

Unfortunately, I don't know any way to recover your earlier setup. I suppose if you had copied the wiz.bin file to a backup location after you set up the HDPVR but before you set up the HDHR you could restore it. That would lose the work you did on the HDHR, but recover the configuration for the HDPVR.

One of the protocols I've developed (based on many a painful experience) is that whenever I do >>anything<< significant to Sage, I copy the entire C:\Program Files\SageTV branch to a backup location. That way I can undo anything I've done by copying it back. It's overkill, but it's saved my butt on more than one occasion .

This whole discussion makes me think that a good enhancement would be to "redefine" channel lineups as independent, named entities with undo capability, which were then separately assigned to tuners. I think much of that happens "behind the scenes" in Sage today -- except for the undo capability -- but because it's hidden/implicit, it tends to confuse people.

To be fair, this part of Sage has received a lot of enhancements already in the last year or so. But my gut tells me more would be helpful.

[Opus4]

This is on Windows, right? Please see these instructions: HDHR setup for Windows, particularly step 4c for QAM setup.

Set up the HDPVR first. Then, don't even use a lineup for the HDHR; just let it map the channels named in the HDHR setup software to existing channels. That's what I do.

- Andy

[Brent94Z]

Originally Posted by Diego Garcia

Ouch! I feel your pain.

So far as I can see, you've already figured out the right way to do this, which is to copy the channel lineup to the HDHR. So far as I can tell, copying a lineup means Sage creates an independent standalone copy of the lineup, and doesn't thereafter try to maintain consistency with the original lineup. So once you've created a copy, you can delete channels, enable them, whatever, and it won't affect the source lineup.

But if you don't copy the lineup, then you're editing the original lineup when you make changes to it, even in the context of a separate tuner/video source. That's why your channels disappeared from the HDPVR lineup -- so far as Sage was concerned, it was the same lineup.

Unfortunately, I don't know any way to recover your earlier setup. I suppose if you had copied the wiz.bin file to a backup location after you set up the HDPVR but before you set up the HDHR you could restore it. That would lose the work you did on the HDHR, but recover the configuration for the HDPVR.

One of the protocols I've developed (based on many a painful experience) is that whenever I do >>anything<< significant to Sage, I copy the entire C:\Program Files\SageTV branch to a backup location. That way I can undo anything I've done by copying it back. It's overkill, but it's saved my butt on more than one occasion .

This whole discussion makes me think that a good enhancement would be to "redefine" channel lineups as independent, named entities with undo capability, which were then separately assigned to tuners. I think much of that happens "behind the scenes" in Sage today -- except for the undo capability -- but because it's hidden/implicit, it tends to confuse people.

To be fair, this part of Sage has received a lot of enhancements already in the last year or so. But my gut tells me more would be helpful.

Yep

I just finished "fixing" my screwup. It wasn't that hard really. I just removed both the HD PVR and the HDHR from the video sources then added back the HD PVR and then the HDHR but with the HDHR I COPIED the lineup.

This was all a piece of cake. The core functionality of this is just fine and works great. That's the hard part so it is good this part works great. The problem I see with it is pretty much just the wording used during the setup process. It seems that unless you are a Sage expert or have learned from your mistakes, it isn't really easy to figure out what you *need* to do by the wording provided. Now that I know the difference between "use" and "copy" it was about as painless as it could be

[Brent94Z]

Originally Posted by Opus4

This is on Windows, right? Please see these instructions: HDHR setup for Windows, particularly step 4c for QAM setup.

Set up the HDPVR first. Then, don't even use a lineup for the HDHR; just let it map the channels named in the HDHR setup software to existing channels. That's what I do.

- Andy

Thanks, Andy. I actually had that page up the other day too So, I read the instructions at SiliconDust and even then opened that thread. I just did the fatal mistake of reading the first part and not paying enough attention to the guide info that was provided thinking that "Oh, I got this... doesn't seem too difficult". LOL So, all the info was there to help me to do the right thing first but I was still able to mess it up. My fault. I'll try to do better and read more closely ALL of it