[TV] Automatic Detection of Hybrid Cards (1 Viewer)

[FreakyJ]

Mapping in regards to hybrid tuners not channels... as far as I know you can bundle the tuners to so called hybrid tuners...

 

[kiwijunglist]

When you scan using a single DVB-T tuner then what it finds should be mapped to all the DVB-T tuners rather than just the one, then we assume the user will know to map these new channels to the other tuners... why not do this automatically? Are there situations where this would be unwanted? I think the majority of users would need these channels mapped to the other tuners, and most new users would have no idea they had to do this.

 

[FreakyJ]

Please read my post carefully again
I think we are talking about different things

 

[mm1352000]

Yeah, kiwijunglist... while that is an excellent idea I think it is different to what we're discussing here. To answer your question though (great minds think alike! ):
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/threads/there-is-no-free-card-available.119499/#post-1000577

 

[mm1352000]

No response from Hauppauge yet. Will send request again...

 

[el_kano]

Thanks for posting the definition of a hybrid:

• tuner drivers present two source filter interfaces to the operating system for a single tuner + demodulator pair
• only one of the interfaces can be used at any given time
• the tuner graph must be rebuilt in order to switch tuning modes

This is important due to cards now being frankensteined a bit.
e.g. Hauppauge HVR-4000 was a hybrid (as defined above) with DVB-S/2, DVB-T/analogue
Hauppauge HVR-4400 which is similar but has separate DVB-S/S2 and DVB-T tuners so can record from both at the same time.

 

[mm1352000]

Received two responses from Hauppauge. I quote:

Unfortunately I don't think there is a nice clean answer to this question. In [Hauppauge] TV Server we try to avoid having to know this information, because the answer varies from device to device. With some device you can tell the related instances by looking the dw1 or dw2 of the pin medium (or sometimes 16bits of those values).

I found some more useful info:

On most of the drivers that handled Combo(dual) + Hybrid tuners (like 880 and 885/7/8 based drivers, and HVR-19xx) we implement Win7 "Container IDs" so that the sections that can operate concurrently are discoverable (looks like the HVR-22xx were never updated to do this). If this is not implemented the default is to assume the device is "Hybrid"(ie, only once section can be running at any time; Analog or DVB-T for example)

To make this work, we create a "TunerInstanceID" value on the tuner filter registration. In theory someone could manually look at that value even on pre-Win7 systems, and use that to make a choice. I don't have any code handy to do so, and any such execise is left to the reader. They can start with the INF file, and follow the "TunerInstanceID" reg addition.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff540024(v=vs.85).aspx
For info on Container ID

I searched my [XP] registry for TunerInstanceID before rushing to work, and the results look promising.
So far I can only say that Hauppauge are not the only vendor to use TunerInstanceID so we have potential for a cross-vendor solution. Of course that doesn't mean it will be easy. In fact I think it will be quite hard with the new async tuner detection code that is included with CableCARD.
...but if we have information there is potential for a solution!
I will examine my registry in more detail this evening and [time permitting] write some code to confirm that we can access the TunerInstanceID easily. Once I have the code I will post a test DLL that will log the details. Then we can ask the community to try it and report the results. I'm almost certain the results won't be perfect, but it is better than nothing right?

 

[mm1352000]

Okay everyone, here is the DLL for MP 1.4. This DLL successfully auto-detects my Pinnacle 7010ix hybrid tuners, so lets see if it can do the same for any others...

Instructions:
1. Open TV Server configuration.
2. Go to the "manual control" section and click "stop service", then close TV Server configuration.
3. Take a backup of the TVLibrary.dll in your TV Server installation folder (typically c:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal TV Server).
4. Download and extract the attached DLL into your TV Server installation folder.
5. Open TV Server configuration (click "yes" to start the TV service).
6. Click "open log directory" in the top left corner.
7. Zip up the TVService.log and post/attach the zip file here.

Shouldn't take more than 2 minutes.
Note: do not expect hybrid groups to be created automatically yet. I did not want to mess with configuration in any way, so I only put additional debug in the log file.

Please, everyone test... even if you don't have a hybrid tuner. Thanks!

 

[el_kano]

Please, everyone test... even if you don't have a hybrid tuner. Thanks!

Awesome, will try this out tonight.
Should be a good test as I have multiple tuners including 2 hybrids (HVR-3000,HVR-4000 and HVR-3300).
The 3000 and the 4000 are both hybrids while the 3300 is a DVB-T/DVB-S card with separate tuners.

 

[mediacowboy]

Will this affect anything done for the cable card area? I believe I have a hybrid as I can use one card to do analog and digital. But before I go testing stuff i don't want to break the cable card fix.