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EVERYONE WITH ATSC CARDS: If you can get your card to autotune, Please disable EPG. Doing this has allowed me to use a VBox DTA-150 to view timeshift and record ATSC channels.
Regarding ATSC Support in Media Portal, In order for the MP team to get ATSC support up to snuff, we need to test some things. If you haven't already figured it out, ATSC support for MP is very problematic due to the lack of developers and testers. It's a North American Standard and roughly 7/8 of the MP user base is located elsewhere.
We need to work together to establish repeatable ATSC tuning issues so that we can provide the Devs with concete, verifiable issues for them to address. Pursuant to this goal, the MP Team has established a testing team. I'm going to attempt to be the primary liason to the Devs for ATSC support so they can work on fixing issues, while I try to synthesize all of our various ATSC problems and issues and distill them into bugs that can be entered into the Mantis bugtracking system. I'm also going to try to offset some of the load for Dman_lfc, with various capturecarddefintion.xml issues you are having.
With that in mind, we need to standardize our approach to this common issue:
1. Card is not recognized by MP. Symptoms include:
If you have these issues, most of the time, your capturecarddefinitions.xml file needs to be updated. You may have a new hardware revision or driver revision, not yet incorporated in MP. Your Device ID may have changed or some of your filter names may have changed.
At this point you have several options. You can PM me, post here, or find me on IRC (commy64 or c64|work). For now, I think it might be most useful to use this thread, so that new users will have a visual reference to how we go about solving capturecarddefinition.xml config issues. Please refer to Page 4 of this thread http://nolanparty.com/mediaportal.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10681&start=45 where Mad Chemist and I posted some screen shots while investigating his problem. This is the kind of info that I am going to need. Don't forget about http://mp.pastebin.com/ for log file info.
Once we get you autotuning and able to view a TV signal, we can get down to troubleshooting and reproducing errors. Right now, I've only got a Vbox DTA-150. I will soon have a test system with an AverMedia A180, Fusion 5 Lite, and possibly a TwinHan ATSC card. We need to identify, verify, and duplicate errors and issues with ATSC and get them into the Mantis bugtracking system. I'll be your liason for that part...Help me test ATSC cards, and I will communicate issues with the Devs and we will see if we can't get it sorted out. Part of the problem is keeping track of all the issues and problems and there are hundreds of posts everyday.
Let's keep ATSC issues in here. There are posts regarding issues in the Media Portal Talk, General Support, General Development, and Hardware Support fora and I can't keep track of them all.
If your card has good BDA drivers (Like Vbox), We should be able to get you viewing TV in Media Portal right away. Once we get a number of people viewing their OTA ATSC, then we can get down to the real business of testing.
Anyone else who is reading this and is considering buying an ATSC card for MediaPortal: go to www.pcalchemy.com They have Vbox cards. I know the Vbox DTA-150 works for viewing TV. I can't reccomend them highly enough. I've got a difficult tuning environment with lot's of multipath issues and my Vbox has been far superior to the A180 for me.
Also, I've been through quite a bit of trial and error regarding antennas and OTA reception. So I can help you with that too. Get familiar with your tuning environment at www.antennaweb.org if you haven't already. You can also use the info from antennaweb to manually program your channel information. Note that I haven't done this in Media Portal, but I have done so in WatchHDTV, which is a little app that works with the A180 and a few other cards for watching OTA HDTV.
Revised:15-Feb-06
It is becoming apparent that in order to get stutter free HDTV with VMR9, most (if not all) users are going to need an 6600GT or better or x1300pro or better. This isn't jsut a Media Portal thing, I've seen it in SageTV as well. I've always used the nVidia PureVideo codecs, so that could be a major caveat, but I could not get stutter free playback with any ATSC signal with a r8500, r9600pro, r9700pro, or nV 6200 (128-bit). It wasn't until I got a 6600GT that I got crystal clear and stutter free ATSC playback.
Also, It also eliminated microstutters in DVD playback. I think it may have something to do with deinterlacing and rendering the video with the video card, but it seems to get rid of the sync issues with frame rate and refresh rate.
For more info through this thread and pay attention to Tech Geek's travails.

Regarding ATSC Support in Media Portal, In order for the MP team to get ATSC support up to snuff, we need to test some things. If you haven't already figured it out, ATSC support for MP is very problematic due to the lack of developers and testers. It's a North American Standard and roughly 7/8 of the MP user base is located elsewhere.
We need to work together to establish repeatable ATSC tuning issues so that we can provide the Devs with concete, verifiable issues for them to address. Pursuant to this goal, the MP Team has established a testing team. I'm going to attempt to be the primary liason to the Devs for ATSC support so they can work on fixing issues, while I try to synthesize all of our various ATSC problems and issues and distill them into bugs that can be entered into the Mantis bugtracking system. I'm also going to try to offset some of the load for Dman_lfc, with various capturecarddefintion.xml issues you are having.
With that in mind, we need to standardize our approach to this common issue:
1. Card is not recognized by MP. Symptoms include:
- When you try to add your card, you get an error "Media Portal cannot Build a graph for this device"
- You can add the card, but get "Autotuning is not supported by this device" error
- You can get to the autotune section, but no channels are found
If you have these issues, most of the time, your capturecarddefinitions.xml file needs to be updated. You may have a new hardware revision or driver revision, not yet incorporated in MP. Your Device ID may have changed or some of your filter names may have changed.
At this point you have several options. You can PM me, post here, or find me on IRC (commy64 or c64|work). For now, I think it might be most useful to use this thread, so that new users will have a visual reference to how we go about solving capturecarddefinition.xml config issues. Please refer to Page 4 of this thread http://nolanparty.com/mediaportal.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10681&start=45 where Mad Chemist and I posted some screen shots while investigating his problem. This is the kind of info that I am going to need. Don't forget about http://mp.pastebin.com/ for log file info.
Once we get you autotuning and able to view a TV signal, we can get down to troubleshooting and reproducing errors. Right now, I've only got a Vbox DTA-150. I will soon have a test system with an AverMedia A180, Fusion 5 Lite, and possibly a TwinHan ATSC card. We need to identify, verify, and duplicate errors and issues with ATSC and get them into the Mantis bugtracking system. I'll be your liason for that part...Help me test ATSC cards, and I will communicate issues with the Devs and we will see if we can't get it sorted out. Part of the problem is keeping track of all the issues and problems and there are hundreds of posts everyday.
Let's keep ATSC issues in here. There are posts regarding issues in the Media Portal Talk, General Support, General Development, and Hardware Support fora and I can't keep track of them all.
If your card has good BDA drivers (Like Vbox), We should be able to get you viewing TV in Media Portal right away. Once we get a number of people viewing their OTA ATSC, then we can get down to the real business of testing.
Anyone else who is reading this and is considering buying an ATSC card for MediaPortal: go to www.pcalchemy.com They have Vbox cards. I know the Vbox DTA-150 works for viewing TV. I can't reccomend them highly enough. I've got a difficult tuning environment with lot's of multipath issues and my Vbox has been far superior to the A180 for me.
Also, I've been through quite a bit of trial and error regarding antennas and OTA reception. So I can help you with that too. Get familiar with your tuning environment at www.antennaweb.org if you haven't already. You can also use the info from antennaweb to manually program your channel information. Note that I haven't done this in Media Portal, but I have done so in WatchHDTV, which is a little app that works with the A180 and a few other cards for watching OTA HDTV.
Revised:15-Feb-06
It is becoming apparent that in order to get stutter free HDTV with VMR9, most (if not all) users are going to need an 6600GT or better or x1300pro or better. This isn't jsut a Media Portal thing, I've seen it in SageTV as well. I've always used the nVidia PureVideo codecs, so that could be a major caveat, but I could not get stutter free playback with any ATSC signal with a r8500, r9600pro, r9700pro, or nV 6200 (128-bit). It wasn't until I got a 6600GT that I got crystal clear and stutter free ATSC playback.
Also, It also eliminated microstutters in DVD playback. I think it may have something to do with deinterlacing and rendering the video with the video card, but it seems to get rid of the sync issues with frame rate and refresh rate.
For more info through this thread and pay attention to Tech Geek's travails.