setup wizard not detecting card

[fishbert]

So, SageTV's setup wizard refuses to list my ATI TV Wonder card as a valid capture device. I poked around these forums for a bit, and found that this is usually caused by the card being listed in the ignore_encoders line of the SageTV properties file. Lo and behold, my card is indeed listed there. But no matter what I do (delete the card's name from the line, delete the file, delete the file and the backup file, etc.), SageTV just keeps adding my card to that line again, refusing to let me select it as a capture device.

Ok, so I read on a bit more in these forums, and gather that SageTV adds cards to this ignore_encoders line when it runs in to invalid drivers or some other such irregularity. But, this is all being done on a fresh OS installation on a drive which was formatted not one week ago. In setting up hardware / software this past week, I've been gathering the most current drivers and program versions that I could find, so I'm sure it's not a case of me not having up-to-date drivers for my card. And the drivers work in that I can use the card just find with DScaler and that Windows' Device Manager says everything is peachy.

Any ideas on how I can get SageTV and my card to want to play nice with each other?

[carlgar]

I don't believe you have a SageTV supported capture device. See SageTV System Requirements .

[fishbert]

Seems rather odd that SageTV wouldn't support a Bt878-based card. I thought that was a pretty popular chipset -- not all that new, but I'm sure there's still a lot of them out there. That would make SageTV the first package I've ever run into which doesn't support my card.

[Opus4]

As the list shows on the above referenced requirements page, SageTV only uses hardware based encoders to record TV shows. Among the benefits of that are that they use almost no cpu power and you can have multiple encoders in use simultaneously w/o overloading your system.

I haven't seen a quality comparison between hardware & software encoders, but I seem to recall many people saying the quality of the recordings made by the 250, for example, are better than those from the software-based TV cards. Maybe someone with direct experience can comment.

- Andy

[mls]

I believe the E-Home is one of the few (maybe the only) ATI card that does have a hardware MPEG encoder. I could be wrong about this though.

I think I've seen other post where people have gotten it to work, but don't remember what drivers or other settings they used.

I didn't take time to look, but you should be able to find some info by searching the forum relating to E-Home problems. I don't think the TV-Wonder has hardware encoding though, so that info may not be of much help.

[fishbert]

If SageTV is only designed to work on tuner cards with built-in hardware MPEG encoders, that seems to go against the line: "At Frey Technologies, making SageTV compatible with the most common hardware is a top priority." I mean, tuner cards with a built-in MPEG encoder can't really be considered 'the most common' yet.

[kny3twalker]

the ATI E-Home Wonder is the only ATI card with a hardware encoder

and as far as comparsion
recording with old software encoding sucks
you cannot do a thing a it records
if you even touch the mouse you drop a frame

and they are much lower quality to begin with

the pvr 250 and other hardware encoder cards are such a jump in quality

the ATI is actually probably the best quality other than the pvr 250(hauppauge cards)

the only bug I know of with the E-Home is the no SVCD recordings

but I do not think that was the point of this anyways

and no SageTV will never support old software encoder cards

pcalachemy sells cheap bundles with sageTV
I would try there

[fishbert]

Your opinion that "software encoding sucks" does not outweigh my desire to keep $100+ in my pocket. I'm not looking to upgrade my hardware just so I may use the one program that doesn't play nice with what I have already.

And again, if SageTV has no intention of ever supporting cards without built-in MPEG encoding, then it's rather disingenuous to claim "At Frey Technologies, making SageTV compatible with the most common hardware is a top priority."

[mls]

All the capture cards that work with SageTV are clearly listed on the SageTV System Requirements web page.

Also notice in that list it says:

"Other MPEG-2 encoding cards based on the Conexant IVAC-15, IVAC-16, CX23415, CX23416 or StreamMachine 2210 Codec should function correctly but may not have been tested."

As far as "common hardware" goes, Hauppauge has pretty much been the leader in MPEG encoder cards. Various others based on the Conexant chips have also been on the market for several years now, so they are very common hardware.

If you want to use the TV Wonder you already have, then sorry SageTV will not work for you (and nobody said it would either).

[fishbert]

The bone to pick that I have is not that SageTV won't work with my hardware (I found that out back in post #4). It's that SageTV claims to have a priority of supporting the most common cards, yet every other program I've run in to has far greater hardware support than SageTV provides.

If you're automatically going to cut out a large segment of TV tuner hardware in the world today by eliminating compatability for cards without build-in MPEG-2 decoders (when so many other packages support them quite well), then I'm sorry, but you can't truthfully claim to have compatability with the most common hardware as a "top priority". Heck, I'd hate to see what the less-than-top priorities look like.

I appreciate the rapid responses and open willingness to help that folks in here appear to have in abundance -- it's just that I find misleading marketing to be quite distasteful.

[mls]

I will admit, especially for someone new to the concepts of video recording, that the usage of the words "common hardware" may be somewhat misleading.

However, it's all in the context of what one is talking about I guess that makes a difference in how they interpret things.

For most people involved with video capture to burn DVD's, or building PVR's or HTPC's, hardware MPEG encoders are very common.

For those doing professional video work, other (non hardware encoding) capture cards are more common since they would want AVI capture instead of MPEG (for better quality and easier/cleaner editing).

On the other hand, for those just wanting to watch TV on their computer (without needing/wanting the options of the other groups listed above), those would most likely consider devices like those from ATI more common.

If you feel you have been mislead, I'd suggest sending an e-mail directly to Frey and explain your thoughts to them. It's a small company (only 2 men), so they don't get a chance to read much of the posts here in the forum too often.

Considering they are such a small company, I'd have to still give them 2 thumbs up despite some of the problems along the way. The fact that they are actually paying for the extra web space and bandwidth for this forum shows me they that they are trying to do the best they can to help out their customers.

Not to mention the large number of people that volunteer their time here in the forum to help others out.

I'm really sorry if you were mislead about anything.

[dalty]

i am running both showshifter and sagetv at the same time. showshifter is running a LeadTek Winfast 2000 Deluxe (Software encoder) and SageTV is running a Hauppauge 250.

Originally posted by kny3twalker
and as far as comparsion
recording with old software encoding sucks
you cannot do a thing a it records
if you even touch the mouse you drop a frame

i can record in both showshifter and sagetv at the same time, plus i can playback the software encoded program while it is still recording.

all this (essentially 3 tasks) and i only use 50-60% of the cpu on a celeron 1.7 and very rarely do i ever drop a frame.

i would love to ditch showshifter to a totally integrated sagetv solution but it looks like this isn't going to happen.

[mls]

Originally posted by fishbert
Seems rather odd that SageTV wouldn't support a Bt878-based card. I thought that was a pretty popular chipset -- not all that new, but I'm sure there's still a lot of them out there. That would make SageTV the first package I've ever run into which doesn't support my card.

That's because SageTV can use multiple tuner cards. Trying to do that with cards that do not have built in hardware encoding would completely overload the computer with software encoding.

So, yes, there are other programs that work with those other capture cards, but they don't have all the functionality or features that SageTV has.

[stanger89]

Originally posted by dalty
i can record in both showshifter and sagetv at the same time, plus i can playback the software encoded program while it is still recording.

But what resolution do you SW encode at? How's the quality? How does it compare to the 250? What codec are you using? Remember the 250 uses ~0% CPU, so that 50-60% is all SW encoding playback, probably 40-50% of is just encoding.

[dalty]

totally agree that the quality isn't as good as the 250, i capture using 1/4 frame.

i caputre using the picvideo (i think thats what it's called) then schedule an overnight recompress into divx.

encode and decoding seem to use the same amount of processor, 20% each.

the only point i'm illustrating is that software encoding isn't as bad as was made out in this thread, sure it's not as good a hardware encoding but it's definately watchable and a lot better than nothing.

it would be great if sagetv supported my leadtek card, then i wouldn't have the overhead of running 2 pvr applications, plus i could do all my scheduling in one place.