MP 0.2 & Multiple DVB-T cards (1 Viewer)

[moviebuff03]

Callifo/Taipan,
Read your posts. Didn't realise that there might be a known problem, although to think that so many different manufacturer's of cards would all work in harmony, maybe I am a bit naive

Anyways, I will delete all cards/channels and try tuning just the Cinergy and see what happens. BTW, how should I compare the frequencies? Is there an easier way than going into setup and listing each channel freq?

I've exported the Channelist under both setups. Would someone be kind enough to look at the XMLs if I upload them to the pastepin? Much appreciated!

Ps. I'm sorry that this is gonna sound ridiculous, but I assume there is no way that this problem is in anyway connected with the PC going into/coming out of standby. I am having a nightmare with missed/incomplete recordings and trying to work out why...Just wondered if the cards were behaving strangely

 

[Taipan]

BTW, how should I compare the frequencies? Is there an easier way than going into setup and listing each channel freq?

Since we only have a few channels to choose from in Oz, its not so difficult....

An easy way to tell if you are hitting bug #722, would be to find a channel that the Cinergy fails on, and then check if the frequency of that channel as listed in MP is correct. If it is not correct, then change it to the correct value and see if that fixes the Cinergy problem.

If it does, then you know what the cause is....

If it doesn't, then you are back at square one again...

 

[moviebuff03]

Thanks Taipan,
You were right, it was down to different frequencies and the bloody Nova card is to blame, therefore the Cinergy card wasn't happy. At least I know it's not faulty and has recorded for the first time

The Compro card isn't that sensitive and will work on both sets of freqs. Now my problem is how do I update both the Cinergy and Nova cards with different frequencies, but without having two sets of channels. There are five duplicate channels after a re-scan.

I don't know how the Combine function works. Would this do the trick? Or is it only for DVB & Analog channels.

 

[moviebuff03]

Juan
Thanks for the tip. You're definately right in terms of needing a 167 offset on some channels. Unfortunately I cannot read Italian....That note on the Hauppauge site, where did you enter 'usefreqoffsetdvbt' value. I can't see one in the XML files for MP nor Regedit.

Can you help?

 

[juandionis]

If I remeber correct, firts thing I had to do was to update the driver to the one mentioned in that page MCE ver 2.7A. Doing this I found in my regedit the "UseFreqOffSetDVBT" key and put it in 167 worked for me.

Since that my two cards are working great with MP. I tuned using KNC, mapped all the channels with the HVR-1300

The only drawback is that I did not update my drivers since that date not to be back in the same problem.

BTW I do not read italian too

Juan

 

[moviebuff03]

Juan,
Thanks again for the advice.
On reading your note, it appears that I've accidentally loaded the XP driver and not the MCE driver. This might be part of the reason I have been unable to locate said setting in the registry.

I will try uninstalling lthe card and oading the new drivers and checking it's function in MP. My only concern is that not all the channels need offset 167, so it will be interesting to see what happens when I view the channels.

Fingers crossed!

 

[Taipan]

it was down to different frequencies and the bloody Nova card is to blame, .

No, the Nova card is not to blame - MediaPortal's Autotune is to blame...

Now my problem is how do I update both the Cinergy and Nova cards with different frequencies

There is only one correct frequency. If you read bug #722, you will see that the problem is that MediaPortal Autotune is sometimes unable to select the correct frequency, but as you have found out, some cards can tolerate that error and tune themselves to the correct frequency.

For example, here in Melbourne, a channel can be on 191,500 with an offset of 125 - meaning that it can be on only one of 3 frequencies - 191,375, 191,500, or 191,625. Our channel Nine is actually on 191,625 - but MediaPortal chooses 191,500, which is wrong! So, to make it work correctly with both my DVB cards, I have to change it to 191,625 in Configuration.

The best way for you to fix the problem is to find out what all your channels' correct frequencies should be (you should be able to find this information on the web somewhere) and check that they are listed exactly the same in Configuration. I realise that if you have a lot of channels that this will be quite tedious, but until this bug is fixed, there is no other way...

 

[juandionis]

I hope it will work.

Taipan I am not an expert but in Hauppauge Forum there are a lot of posts regarding this issue and they explain this as a problem of the cards that need to have the exact frecuency to work (KNC, Terratec,). I tried to manually fix all the channels and the Hauppauge card did not work. I understood that they have their "own way" to set the channels and "lock them".

In my case it was not a MP problem or at least I saw this as a "compatibility" problem between the different cards. Both of them work great with their own set of channels tuned by the same card, but no one worked with the channels tuned by the other card. Result the did not work well together.

As you can see my comments are not very "technical" but is the way I see the problem I had

Juan

 

[Taipan]

Hi Juan,

I don't have any experience with Hauppauge DVB-T cards, so I don't know if they have any particular requirements.

However, if a TV channel is advertised as being on a particular frequency (say 191,625) then I would expect that all DVB-T cards would have to tune to that exact frequency in order to receive that particular channel. It seems that some DVB-T cards can be tuned to a frequency near to the correct frequency, and still be able to lock themselves onto the correct frequency.

For example, card A might be tuned to 191,500 and then be able to lock itself to 191,625 and work. But card B would be tuned to 191,500 and not be able to lock onto 191,625 and thus not work.

My experience with MediaPortal is that it often collects the wrong frequency during the Autotune and some DVB-T cards can cope with this (it takes them a little longer to lock the signal, so channel changes are slower) and some DVB-T cards cannot cope at all. Correcting the frequency value manually then solves this problem (at least for all the cards that I have experienced).

As you say, maybe the Hauppauge DVB-T cards are different in some way.... :?