TBS6985

[deanm]

Originally Posted by routerunner

Unfortunately It doesn't happen to me so is very difficult to debug, but it looks like a timing issues due to the fact that the TBS is very quick to tune (less than 1 seconds on some condition). Did it happened before with your previous tuner?

Eddy

No this never happened before with my other tuners.

In the DVBDCC-Tuner-XX.log the SID is being picked up but it looks like OSCAM is not picking this up as the SageTVUser_XX under users does not change from Yellow to Green

On another note I'm have a lot of [Transport::Sync] Warning, sync is drifting, re-sync in the one of the DVBDCC-Tuner-XX.log

Dean

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by deanm

On another note I'm have a lot of [Transport::Sync] Warning, sync is drifting, re-sync in the one of the DVBDCC-Tuner-XX.log

That's worries me. Can you please isolate the tuner that offer better performance? If you have a quad LNB, you will not get the same quality of signal from all of them (as it also depends on the LNB focus, size of the dish, bla, bla).

Do you think, by looking at the OSCAM log and DVBDCC-TUner-xx.log timestamp, you can correlate the failure with the sync warning? If the sync is lost no samples are processed until the sync is locked again.

Also, I think we're mixing topics here ;-)

Eddy

[deanm]

Originally Posted by routerunner

That's worries me. Can you please isolate the tuner that offer better performance? If you have a quad LNB, you will not get the same quality of signal from all of them (as it also depends on the LNB focus, size of the dish, bla, bla).

Do you think, by looking at the OSCAM log and DVBDCC-TUner-xx.log timestamp, you can correlate the failure with the sync warning? If the sync is lost no samples are processed until the sync is locked again.

Also, It think we're mixing topics here ;-)

Need to play around with this. But if my logic is correct then the log file is DVBDCC-Tuner-02.log with should be for Tuner C, which was the one giving me poor signal quality issues this morning. Need to check the cables as I have not touched them since I installed the Card this morning.

As for LNB I have a Quad LNB connected to 12 port Sat Quad Multiswitch. So should get the same issues on all tunes, I would of thought.

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by deanm

Need to play around with this. But if my logic is correct then the log file is DVBDCC-Tuner-02.log with should be for Tuner C, which was the one giving me poor signal quality issues this morning.

There isn't any correlation between the xx.log enumeration and the tuner letter I'm afraid, it all depends on how SageTV detects the tuners every time you start the server, otherwise the channel selection mechanism would have been dead easy...

To know the correlation you must check inside each of the DVBDCC-Tuner-xx.log looking for the tuner identity number 0 = A, 1 = B, 2 = C, 3 = D at the time it tries to tune.

Eddy

[deanm]

Can't seem to replicate Sync issue.

Been doing more testing and FTA channels are working.


I have notice that I'm getting random 'No Signal' errors on encrypted channels.

It seems to be that the channel tunes before a key is read.

Couple of things I have noticed when I get 'No Signal' message.

The SID is always in the DVB-Tuner-xx Log but does not get picked up by OSCAM or passed to over.

Sometimes the key is read after the No Signal appears on the screen. And if left it will continue reading, sometimes even after you have stopped the channel. If this happens when you tune into another channel with the same tuner you will always get a No Signal error.

Dean

[something fishy]

I use a TBS6985.
It has from day one given me more:
"Halt detected in recording" errors than I would like.
It recently seems to have become worse.

Has anyone else experienced any similar problems or have any suggestions as to a fix. The problem may be satellite dish location (its hiding at ground level due to listed building issues and there might well be a tree in the way)

I get periodic minor green fuzz break-up but the Halts seem uncorrelated with this (they always seem towards the end of a recording). They also seem uncorrelated with the number of concurrent recordings.

I have
...\broadcast_standard=DVB-S
and
...\delay_to_wait_after_tuning=2000
in sage.properties for all four tuners.

I'm using drivers 1.05 (upgraded from 1.03) - no difference.

I've a DVBSky S952 on order to see if that solves the problem, but I'd prefer to stick with the TBS if possible as anything else will require varying degrees of system rebuilding.

[something fishy]

Ok, I've done a bit of googling and found this from the tvheadend website:

TBS6985

This is a quad S2 tuner that replaces the TBS6984. Adam currently uses one of these that was donated by TBS to provide more tuners so he had some available for development without interfering with his live system.

Unlike the TBS6984 though it does not suffer from the massive concurrency problems that have been discovered with the TBS drivers and are detailed here. This is mostly down to the fact that it has 4 completely independent tuners rather than a pair of pairs (the TBS6984 is basically 2xTBS6981).

The one issue that is still common on this device is that the default interrupt handling mode can cause the device to stop working after a random period of time. To overcome this you need to enable MSI interrupts (assuming your MB support it, VERY likely).

A bit more googling on MSI interrupts found this from Guru3D.com (not been there since the Quake days).

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=378044

Too long to quote in full but in summary the Guru3D piece
1) offers a way to test whether the TBS6985 is running with MSI interrupts enabled. It is not.
2) offers a registry edit to force it to run with MSI interrupts enabled.

The registry edit works in that test 1 is passed but with MSI interrupts enabled SageTV cannot see the card.

My Sage server is headless so I can't test with other software easily but my software satellite meter can still read signal strength and quality with TBS6985 in MSI interrupt enabled mode.

I guess I could set the card up as a network encoder (how?) but otherwise I fear that while this card might work for some with SageTV its not 100% guaranteed.

[deanm]

I just wanted to add my thoughts on this.

One of my tuners displays random green glitches. And only seems to happen on HD Channels. I can't seem to point it to a particular tuner as it happens on all 4 but only one tuner at a time. Think it down to how windows handles pci-e.

What I have noticed is that the issue doesnt seem to effect Channels that use Eddys DVB plugin.

I remember having issue with this card whilst helping test DVB Decrypter where the signal would not lock. This might be the issue I have with non encrypted channels as it by passes DVB Decrypter.

Might be worth speaking to Eddy to see if his DVB Decryper fillter could be used on all channels.

This might help with the green glitch issue but I'm not sure about your other issue.

Also to add im sure that I also had this issue in DVB Logic.

I'm going to try and do some testing this weekend to try and pinpoint my issue down.

Dean

[routerunner]

I know at least three users that have the TBS6985 tuner card running on Windows 7 and 8 working flawlessly with SageTV.

The only issue with this card and some other TBS cards is a bug within SageTV that fails multiple recording after 1 minute. Unfortunately I discovered the bug after the Google buy out and therefore never had an official fix, however after few weeks of attempt I managed to found a workaround that I've implemented in the Tuner Preroll Plugin

If you have a TBS card you should install the plugin because the TBS cards needs to be "massaged" to work properly with SageTV 7, however that will not solve any other hardware compatibility issues you might have with your motherboard. The TBS cards are notoriously picky on which PCI controller they work properly with.

Hope it helps
Eddy

[something fishy]

The green glitch that I describe is a signal quality issue. I can make it worse by marginally misaligning the dish (thanks to my builder for demonstrating this). I do have a tree that is marginal in occluding the signal; I attribute it to that.

The "halts" as detected by SageTV are complete loss of recording for anywhere between 2-3 seconds and minutes. There's no indication from the picture or sound that its going to happen (its like a clean edit has been made to the file, you could almost believe it was a scene change). Sage reports "Halt detected in recording. The device input "TBS 6985 Digital Capture X DVBS Digital TV Tuner" stopped producing data while recording ... SageTV will try and reset the device.

It smells like either a hardware or software issue to me rather than signal strength so I was almost looking for something like the TVHeadend comment. The DVBSky card has arrived. I will swap it out as soon as possible. If it works then I'll have to source two USB tuners (mitx mainboard, Asus H77 BTW) but it will be the least hassle solution.

FWIW I never had any start of file issues with the TBS file and no problems recording off all four tuners simultaneously. Just this halt issue.