2nd Tuner Card

[Karen0302]

Hi!

I am adding a 2nd tuner card to my system. Both cards are Haupauge PVR-350s. My question is how to go about this.

Since both cards are the same, it seems to me that I can get plug the card in and lets WinXP recognize it, the drivers for it should already be there.

As to getting Sage to recognize the new card, do I just run setup again? Do I have to re-install Sage? Is there some way of prioritizing the cards?

Thanks!

Karen

[Opus4]

Originally posted by Karen0302
As to getting Sage to recognize the new card, do I just run setup again?

Go to Setup -> Setup Wizard -> Add New Source.

Is there some way of prioritizing the cards?

See the SageTV Configuration Properties doc & look at this property: mmc/encoders/XXX/encoder_merit=N. Normally, it is set to 0 for all encoders. You can set a higher priority for an encoder by giving it a higher value here.

- Andy

[carlgar]

Do you know for a fact that 2 350's in the same computer will work? I only recall some posts indicating that it does not work. If you only want to record with the second then I would think it might work. But unless SageTV 2.0 has new support for multiple 350's I don't know how you would specify which one to send video out to.

[Opus4]

Oh yeah... I read too fast & skipped the '3' in the '350'... I also seem to recall some messages a while back about two 350's not always working together. There used to be a list of which multiple tuners should work togther (a quote from SHS), but I can't find it at the moment.

Edit: here is a quote from SHS commenting on using multiple tuners together. That list says two 350s should be fine. But, I thought someone else said they had problems. Who knows... could be mb dependent, like a lot of this seems to be.

Then, there is the fact that having 2 of them is a bit of overkill, since the both do hardware decoding, but you really only need 1 decoder.

- Andy

[Karen0302]

Thanks for the great info! I think I have everything installed and working but I still have a couple of questions.

Detailed setup does not seem to support a 2nd tuner card. Is this right?

Does it matter which tuner card the Haupauge IR detector is pluged into?

Is it necessary to tell the tuner cards apart?

Karen

[Opus4]

Originally posted by Karen0302
Detailed setup does not seem to support a 2nd tuner card. Is this right?

That's because you don't want to go to Detailed Setup. (Unless there is something in particular you thought you could change there?) Once the 2nd tuner has been installed as a new source, SageTV handles everything else automatically.

Go to Setup -> Setup Wizard -> Add New Source.

Does it matter which tuner card the Haupauge IR detector is pluged into?

That's an interesting one, since you have 2 of the same cards. I have a 250 & a pvr-usb2. I don't remember whether I simply didn't install IR support for the 250 or simply didn't plug the IR receiver into it... that's what I get for having set my 2 tuners up so llong ago! (The usb2 has it built into it.) I would simply try pluging in the receiver & seeing if that one works w/the remote. If someone else has done this more recently, I wouldn't mind hearing their results too -- for 2 of the same types of encoder cards.

- Andy

[Karen0302]

Apparently it does matter which card the IR Detector is plugged into. It will only work if it is plugged into the first physical card. The same goes for the TV Out.

Question. In the Sage Properties file, I can find this;

mmc/encoders/1642691032/video_capture_device_name=Hauppauge WinTV PVR PCI II Capture
mmc/encoders/1642691032/video_capture_device_num=0

There is also a second entry identical to the first except that the capture device number is 1.

Do you think this corresponds to the physical order of the cards?

Karen

[Opus4]

If you have a need to tell the cards apart, I would simply plug the cable into only 1 of them & see which one gets a signal for a recording. If that still isn't clear, since I don't believe SageTV will tell you whether it is using device 0 or 1, set the encoder_merit for one of them to be higher than the other. Again, only connect 1 cable, make sure nothing is already recording, & start live tv. The higher merit tuner should start recording... if you get a picture, you know you've connected to the higher merit tuner.

When there are more people online, maybe someone else will have a better method.

BTW -- I don't think you can simply change the device name for future reference of telling the cards apart.

- Andy