HDHomeRun Prime, SageProperties, Encoder_Merit

[tahoebob]

I have a question regarding SageProperties and Encoder_Merit.

BACKGROUND
I am currently running SageTV, upgraded to v 6, then v 7.0.11.232 in 2010 when HD was introduced by my cable provider. I am running just SageTV, not Server. In 2010 I installed SageTV v 7 on a Win 7 x64 box with a HVR 2250 and 2x HD-PVRs. Having read all the posts about the HD-PVR at the time, my installation and subsequent operation has been nearly flawless, thanks to the great info in all the posts in the forum.

My cable provider has just upgraded to digital only, no more analog. After reviewing the forum, I decided to go with the HDHomeRun Prime (3 tuner) box. During my initial attempts at setup I was first presented with both SiliconDust and SageDCT options for the 3 tuners. After several visits by Charter to get the cable card properly installed everything now seems to be working OK. I am now only presented with the SageDCT options in the Video Source Setup. I added the first tuner and as I said everything seems to work OK. I was able to successfully record 3 programs simultaneously from the 2 HDVRs and the first tuner in the Prime.

CURRENT SITUATION
I was getting ready to edit the Encoder_Merit values to prioritize the 5 capture devices and noticed several things in SageProperties.

First the 2 analog devices from the HVR 2250 are still present in both the “Setup Video Source” in SageTV and in SageProperties even though I uninstalled the device thru Device Manager – I have not yet physically yanked it out of the box.

Second, in SageProperties there are mmc/encoder entries for BOTH SiliconDust and SageDCT versions of the 3 tuners, (as well as the 2 HVR 2250 devices).

MY QUESTIONS:
1. Can I safely remove the HVR-2250 mmc/encoder entries from SageProperties?
2. Can I safely remove the SiliconDust mmc/encoder entries from SageProperties. If not should I set the Encoder_Merit value for each of the 3 tuners the same in the SiliconDust entries as in the respective SageDCT entires? Or can I just leave the SiliconDust entries as 0?

Thanks for wading through my long winded post. I would appreciate any advice regarding this setup.

tahoebob

[sflamm]

Can I safely remove the HVR-2250 mmc/encoder entries from SageProperties?

Yes - go ahead. They will be there unless you manually remove (which I have done). Remember to stop SageTV before editing the properties files.

Can I safely remove the SiliconDust mmc/encoder entries from SageProperties. If not should I set the Encoder_Merit value for each of the 3 tuners the same in the SiliconDust entries as in the respective SageDCT entires? Or can I just leave the SiliconDust entries as 0?

The default for all tuners is 0... change it to whatever you want.
Typically you would set all of the tuners from the same piece of hardware to the same value (e.g. All 3 of the Prime tuners encoder_merit=5)

Pick whatever you want for encoder merit values - the higher the value the higher 'priority' it will be used.

Second, in SageProperties there are mmc/encoder entries for BOTH SiliconDust and SageDCT versions of the 3 tuners

These entries were added by hand - SageTV does *not* discover Prime tuners by itself.