Been Running Sage for over 7 years! Now cable will be all digital! Help?

[rickgode]

I'm just about ready to begin purchasing the tuners/capture devices I will need. I've decided on the 1212 HD-PVR for the copy once content and a HDHomeRun PRIME 3-tuner card for everything else.

JerryB answered this earlier and said it would work, but I'm still not completely sure. Will my Hauppauge MediaMVP that use SageTV work with these new tuners? I have two of them

Thanks!

Ricky

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by rickgode

I'm just about ready to begin purchasing the tuners/capture devices I will need. I've decided on the 1212 HD-PVR for the copy once content and a HDHomeRun PRIME 3-tuner card for everything else.

JerryB answered this earlier and said it would work, but I'm still not completely sure. Will my Hauppauge MediaMVP that use SageTV work with these new tuners? I have two of them

Thanks!

Ricky

Yes, the MVP working as a sage client will still function just as always. The only caveat is that since it can't support the H.264 codec of the HD-PVR, the server will have to transcode those recordings on the fly. As long as you have a fast enough processor in the server, this shouldn't be a problem. The MVP is, of course, still SD only. An HD200 or HD300 would be able to play back everything in full HD in it's original format without transcoding.

Personally, We still use a MVP in my home for my kids room, and everything plays back fine. But the UI is certainly a lot slower than pretty much anything else in use.

[JerryB]

Originally Posted by rickgode

JerryB answered this earlier and said it would work, but I'm still not completely sure. Will my Hauppauge MediaMVP that use SageTV work with these new tuners? I have two of them

Thanks!

Ricky

I'm currently controlling a Hauppauge HD-PVR (copy protected content) and a SiliconDust HDHR Prime (non-copy protected content) using a SageTV HD200 extender at one TV and a SageTV HD300 extender at the other. Using a Hauppauge device as a SageTV extender is a very old technique that predates SageTV's HD100, HD200, and HD300 extenders. Assuming your Hauppauge device is correctly functioning as a SageTV extender in your current setup, i.e. changing channels, pausing, fast forwarding, etc., then theoretically it should work exactly the same way with the HD-PVR and HDHR Prime, but I have no experience with using a Hauppauge device as an extender and cannot guarantee that this will work. Perhaps someone else has this experience and can comment on it.

[rickgode]

I AM SO CLOSE!!!

Last night I hooked up the HDHR Prime 3 Tuner, Downloaded & installed the latest software from SiliconDust. And get this, I called Charter and the robot lady answered and all I had to do was say "reset" and my cable card was activated! No kidding, took all of 30 seconds!

Everything worked fine using the HDHR software, but it took me some doing to get SageTV to use the tuners. About an hours worth of trouble shooting so not that bad. What I had to do was uncheck Use PBDA Capture (Windows 7 Only). and generate the assignments and copy that stuff into my sage.properties file. I don't even know what that does?

So I set up 3 simultaneous recordings with the HDHR before I go to bed and I added one favorite. When I woke up this morning all three simultaneous shows recorded perfectly and I had 10 recordings of my favorite (SpongeBob if you must know)

Next I setup the HD-PVR. Seemed easy enough, I downloaded the latest software from the website, plugged in everything, set the blaster to work with my new set top box. Then I went in and added the "premium" channels to the HD-PVR's lineup and everything seemed to work perfectly.

It does take a second or two longer for the HD-PVR to tune a channel watching live TV. I didn't realize that it would light up with bright blue lights. But it works just fine.

Here is my problem: I can't get my Hauppauge 45 button remote to work with my HD-PVR in SageTV. I made sure it was the last tuner I installed (although it does show up in the third position on that screen with one HDHR tuner below)

I know that it "works" because when trouble shooting why SageTV couldn't tune the HDHR I configured Windows Media Center and the Hauppauge 45 button remote controlled everything just fine. I have since uninstalled Windows Media Center and it still doesn't work in SageTV.

Then I thought all I needed to do was relink the infrared commands because VOLUME UP AND DOWN WORK IN SAGETV, but in the menu where you can see what the buttons are mapped to, nothing shows up. It's late and I've already read several pages of people with similar issues. But their drivers and solutions they are using have since been solved with updaed firmware and software.

tl;dr

I can't get my Hauppauge 45 button remote to work in SageTV through my HD-PVR.

edit#1: the mute & volume up and down works, the channel up and down works and the play/stop/ffw/rw buttons work.

edit#2: I'm an idiot. I guess I forgot all about that irremote.ini in the windows directory... I was reluctant to use the one from my old windows xp 32bit machine in my new win7 64 bit machine, but it fixed EVERYTHING!

Thanks!

Ricky

[KryptoNyte]

I believe you need to install the ArcSoft Total Media extreme software from the CD that came with the HDPVR. When you launch that software, and click on the record icon, I believe that you're given a set of options for the HDPVR in the upper left corner of the recording window. Those options allow you select your audio recording parameters, not to mention a few other tweaks, like turning off the blue "under the hood" light. I don't know why Hauppauge never actually just created their own little application to tweak the HDPVR settings without having to install the ArcSoft stuff.

I believe there are also some Sage properties tweaks to make to try and maximize the recording bitrate from the HDPVR. I'll see if I can find that thread ...

[KryptoNyte]

Here's that thread with regard to the HDPVR recording bitrate settings in Sage:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33407

I'll also mention that I initially had "okay" success with the HDPVR IR emitter and it changed stations fairly well, but after time, it seemed to get worse and would miss digits frequently. I think there were (2) primary reasons:

1) Locating the exact point of the IR receiver on my STB was very difficult and it can't even been seen with a light, so had to trial and error the exact location.

2) I had to build a "tent" around the STB IR receiver area and the HDPVR IR emitter due to what seemed like stray IR/light in the room. That improved it, but never really got it to work every time.

I ended up buying the USB-UIRT and using it instead of the HDPVR emitter, and I finally have that working darn near 100%. Had to add an "enter" prior to a 4-digit channel change to wake up the STB from a soft-sleep state, but other than that, seems to work better than the stock HDPVR emitter.

[KryptoNyte]

Additionally, are you using (2) different channel lineups, one for the Prime and one for the HDPVR? I had to do this (on a regular HDhomerun dual tuner) to ensure that the HDhomerun did not attempt to record on a copy once channel.

... and I recall setting up tuner merit (priority) in Sage to ensure that the HDhomerun is used before the HDPVR on channels common to both tuners.

A couple other things while I'm thinking of it. I use 1080i setting and optical 5.1 audio recording from the HDPVR/STB. I found that with the optical audio feed, if I switch the HDPVR rez to 720, I was getting some terrible audio/video sync problems. I still get some strange audio/video sync issues on some channels it seems, but not as bad.

[rickgode]

Thanks for the input KryptoNyte. I haven't installed the ArcSoftware yet... I had such good success with my last SageTV server that I'm trying to install just what I need.

Once I put the my old irremote.ini file in the windows directory the remote worked perfectly.

Now that everything is up and running the only issue so far is that my HDHR stops tuning after 10 minutes or so. For example, I'm watching golf everything looks good then I notice that one of the green tuner lights goes out on the HDHR and a few moments later instead of full screen TV, I'm at the Program Guide on the selected channel.

I haven't even searched for solutions yet, so hopefully it is something simple.

Ricky

[KryptoNyte]

Ricky, I'm sorry, I can't help much with the Prime. My attempts to get SageDCT running with the ceton failed, and once I found out that my cable company sets all but locals as copy once, there wasn't any point.

I would probably start with signal issues (cabling, too many splitters, etc.).

[JerryB]

FYI, the ArcSoft software is not necessary for using the HDPVR in SageTV. I don't have it installed on my machine and haven't had it installed for years.

I second the recommendation to add the configuration string to the settings file so that you can get all the resolution that the HDHPR is capable of.

I haven't had any problems with my HDHR Prime but I did have a problem with signal strength when I initially installed the HDHR that preceded the Prime that would cause me to lose channel reception. As soon as I simplified my coax cabling to remove all unnecessary splitters and replaced the remaining splitters with high quality splitters the problem went away. Therefore I'd suggest that you use the software that came with the HDHR Prime to check the signal strength entering the Prime over a 30 to 60 minute period and if it is all all suspect, look at your coax cabling/splitter to see what you can do to improve signal strength. If this does not appear to be the issue, then I think you should look at the SiliconDust forum to see how to send them debug information to see if they can help you identify the cause of your problem.

[rickgode]

Thanks guys. I'm beyond frustrated right now. I think I'm going to uninstall/hwclear everything and start over.

My signal strength hovers around 80 sometimes a bit more and sometimes a bit less. I only have a 3 way splitter and one coax goes to my modem, the other goes to my STB and the 3rd goes to my HDHR. I have everything on a Gigabit switch and the first night it did fine. But I did not have the HD-PVR installed.

I'm still poking around to see if I need to change some settings, but I've been at this all day and all I have to show for it are the 10 spongebob shows it recorded the first night.

Ricky

[KryptoNyte]

I doubt the Prime exhibits this behavior, but I did have a heck of a time with my older HDHomerun (non-cable card) units when they were within 5 feet of my wireless router.

At least you got SpongeBob.

[JerryB]

Originally Posted by rickgode

My signal strength hovers around 80 sometimes a bit more and sometimes a bit less. I only have a 3 way splitter and one coax goes to my modem, the other goes to my STB and the 3rd goes to my HDHR. I have everything on a Gigabit switch and the first night it did fine. But I did not have the HD-PVR installed.Ricky

I just checked and my signal strength hovers around 95 ± 2% across a variety of channels so your issue may be related to signal strength. Since things seemed to work better before you added the HDPVR into the mix, have you tried completely removing it and seeing what happens to the signal strength into the HDHR Prime.

For the record, I have a single coax run that terminates in a 4-way 5-1000 MHz splitter. This splitter then feeds my HDHR Prime, my STB, and my TV (basically unused but I had the opening on the splitter so I ran the cable). The last port on the splitter used to feed a second HDPVR but I removed this when I upgraded from a HDHR to the HDHR Prime since I lucked out and have a cable provider that only flags premium channels such as HBO as copy once. As a result, I now get >90% of my shows through the HDHR Prime and no longer needed a second STB/HDPVR. I returned the STB, saving that monthly cost and am saving the second HDPRV for if/when the first one fails.

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by rickgode

Now that everything is up and running the only issue so far is that my HDHR stops tuning after 10 minutes or so. For example, I'm watching golf everything looks good then I notice that one of the green tuner lights goes out on the HDHR and a few moments later instead of full screen TV, I'm at the Program Guide on the selected channel.

By any chance does your cable provider use SDV (Switched Digital Video)? This is a way that some cable providers use to squeeze more channels into less space. If you have it, you would have an extra adapter that plugs into the Prime. SDV treats all channels kind of like onDemand (rather than the cable company sending every channel to you all the time and your tuner picking which one to watch, you tell the cable co. what channel you want to watch and they send you just that channel). That extra adapter is what sends the channel request back to the cable co. If you have a set top box, it may have the adapter built in. Anyway, with SDV systems, they usually set the set top boxes to time out after some period (and they will usually pop-up an "Are you still there" message), so they can conserve even more bandwidth. Sage users with these types of systems often program their tuners to send an "OK" or "Enter" as a wake-up signal before changing channels.

I don't know if cable card tuners that use SDV will also time out or not (and my cable provider doesn't use SDV anyway), but thought I would toss it out as a possible thing to consider.

[rickgode]

Thank you for your replies.

@KryptoNyte my HDHR was right next to my wireless router that plugged into a gigabit switch that went to another gigabit switch. I have moved it (pulled cables in the attic last night) so that it is in my office plugged into the same gigabit switch as the DVR.

@JerryB I bought a RadioShack Signal Amplifier Now it seems that my signal stays constantly above 80. I also repulled some coax in the attic. My HDHR is plugged into the shortest coax in the house. It's split 3 ways: Cable Modem, STB, and HDHR. Come to think of it, it might be split outside too as I have a charter landline phone.

@Tiki, I'll have to check with Charter, but....

I think I might have it working. It is WAY TOO SOON. But, it's been running over 2 hours so that is a plus. Here is what I have done so far:

Blew up the server, complete reinstall of win7 and drivers (actually way easy thanks to clonezilla, I highly recommend it)

Several reboots in-between.

Followed sic0048's detailed instructions for HDPVR

1) Install drivers for Hauppauge HDPVR
2) Install HDPVR Scheduler, IRBlaster, IR32.exe
3) Configure IRBlaster
4) Install SageTV

Followed Tiki's detailed instructions

5) Installed SiliconDust Software
6) Ran SiliconDust Setup Software & Scanned for channels (this took a while)
7) Tested HDHR watched TV for about an hour in HDHR QuickTV (it worked perfectly)
8) Installed SageDCT
9) Ran SageDCT Config & saved the text file it generated
10) Couldn't fine Sage.properties file (I had never run SageTV yet!)
11) Ran SageTV for the first time, went through everything except I didn't setup any tuners.
12) Copied SageDCT info into Sage.properties
13) Opened up SageTV and setup the EPG Lineup on all three HDHR tuners.

So far it's been running for a couple hours perfectly. Hauppauge remote works without me messing with irremote.ini. I'm currently watching liveTV with one tuner and recording random shows with the other two tuners. I have not added any favorites or added the Hauppauge HD-PVR yet. I'm going to run it this way for a few days to see how it goes.

Ricky

[rickgode]

@ Tiki I just checked out this page. Is this something I need to go get? Cause right now it's working sorta?

http://www.myaccount.charter.com/cus...ArticleID=2397

Ricky

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by rickgode

@ Tiki I just checked out this page. Is this something I need to go get? Cause right now it's working sorta?

http://www.myaccount.charter.com/cus...ArticleID=2397

Ricky

I'm not really an expert on it (I've just seen enough articles on the topic to know the basics). The tuning adapter on that page sounds like what I was talking about. If Charter is using SDV in your area, I would think you would need one of those adapters. I wouldn't think you would be able to use your cable card tuner at all without it (you wouldn't have any control over what channels you were recording), but as I said, I'm no expert (maybe some channels will work and others won't). You probably need to talk to Charter to find out if they are using SDV where you live, or if that is just general info for some Charter customers.

[rickgode]

@Tiki

I talked with Charter today and was told that they don't use SDV in my area so I guess I'm good there.

Also it's been running with just the HDHR for the past 24 hours rock solid! I added 20 favorites and it recorded over 50 shows last night and today. Tomorrow I'll see if I can add the HD-PVR (after backing everything up of course!)

Also I noticed that my HDHomeRun LIve shows up twice on my other windows 7 machines under Media Devices. Shouldn't it show up three times because I have three tuners? Should I just ignore this?

Thanks!

[JerryB]

Originally Posted by rickgode

Also I noticed that my HDHomeRun LIve shows up twice on my other windows 7 machines under Media Devices. Shouldn't it show up three times because I have three tuners? Should I just ignore this?

Thanks!

If you're referring to the Media Devices folder in File Explorer, then it is correct for the HDHR Prime to show up twice since this view is individual network devices and not the number of tuners in the device. The reason the HDHR Prime shows up twice is that the network sees it as two separate devices, one based on IP address and the other as a DLNA server. Accessing the HDHR Prime via it's IP address in a network browser allows you to view the HDHR Primes status menu, channel lineup, individual tuners, etc. and accessing the HDHR Prime's DLNA server via a DLNA client allows you to view non-copy protected channels (and with a few rare DLNA clients that understand copy protection, copy protected channels) on that client. For example, if you have a non-SageTV client computer on your network, you can watch live non-copy protected channels from the HDHR Prime on that computer using VLC as a DLNA client. Similarly, if you have a TV, DVD player, Blu-ray player, etc on your network that has a built in DLNA client, you can use that device to watch live non-copy protected channels from the HDHR Prime. The principal disadvantages of using the HDHR Prime as a DLNA server, is that the HDHR Prime menu only provides a list of channels with no indication of what program is currently being carried on these channels and there is no way that I know of to schedule and/or record a program for later viewing. It's strictly live streaming of the selected channel.

[rickgode]

HOLY COW

Everything has been up and running for 48 hours and working perfectly! I added the HD-PVR tuner last night around 10:00pm, then added a new linup and made sure to add the copy-once premium channels and recorded several movies on the premium channels via the STB. It's recorded well over 55 hours of shows in that time span and they all play back perfectly!

I backed up SageTV this afternoon and tried my hand at the SageTV Mobile & Web Interface plugins. I love how the plugins work now. Super easy to setup and I love the mobile interface. Way better than the old version of the webserver I used before.

Tomorrow I'll see if my modem can handle caller ID and YAC. Then I will install InfoPopup / Caller ID. If that works, I'll use clonezilla to backup everything as it will be compete.

I appreciate everyone's help and suggestions on my transition to all digital.

Thank you!

Ricky

edit: Switching back and forth from the wii to my SageTV, I noticed that my SageTV volume was really low. Then I remembered that Fuzzy helped me out a couple years ago link. I chose the AC3Filter in SageTV and ran the ac3config.exe (in the sagetv directory) upped the gains and configured it for 2 channels. Now the sound between devices is pretty much equal.