STB with tuner card, keep tuner on ch3? (1 Viewer)

PatM

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I've been searching and searching and not found a better answer than below:

I have a hauppauge tuner card (which was great until the cableco forced everyone to switch to digital) and a motorola STB. I also have a Collosus and a second STB connected to it. I use IRSS to blast the cable boxes and that works great.

The Collusus is set up and works perfect. The tuner card works as far as video and sound goes but I can only view channel 3. If I choose any other channel the STB gets changed via IRSS just fine by MP also changes the channel on the tuner card - but only channel 3 is coming from the STB to the tuner.

I did see a very old post talking about editing the registry to make every channel use the same frequency as channel 3. I'm willing to give that a go but I'm wondering if MP has some built in way to do this? Some of the posts I read were very old (back to MP 1.1) so it seems likely there's some facility for this that just hasn't made it into the Wiki yet.

Any ideas out there other than editing the registry?
 

mm1352000

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    Hello again PatM

    There is a way to do it through MP which is 100% equivalent to tweaking the registry.
    Edit the tuning details for the channels:
    http://wiki.team-mediaportal.com/1_...guration/03_TV_Channels/Add_or_Edit_a_Channel

    =Tuning_detail_1_Analog-TV.png


    Set the frequency to the frequency corresponding with channel 3. It will be sixty something MHz - 61.25 if I recall correctly. For other people reading, this frequency is country dependent. 61.25 is USA's channel 3. YMMV.

    Having said that...
    I strongly recommend that you consider other options if at all possible.
    Several reasons:
    1. Coax/RF connection usually gives the lowest possible video/audio quality. Even composite (yellow RCA) would be better.
    2. Applying these frequency overrides (as they're called - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd375809(v=vs.85).aspx) is not guaranteed to work reliably.
    Further, if you're intending to have the Colossus and tuner share channels... well I'm sorry to say I don't think you're going to get it to work unless the two cards are using the same inputs. See here for an explanation I gave recently:
    https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/threads/channels-change-while-recording.124362/#post-1059949

    mm
     

    PatM

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    Ugh... I currently use NextPVR. The approach they took was to have two different channel lists with the "tuner" card set to always look at channel 3. The EPG channel list was merged so that identical channels aren't listed twice in the guide but knew how to set each card appropriately.

    The tuner card is connected to the el-cheapo SD STB that has only coax for video out, no other choice.

    I can't afford another vastly overpriced STB and capture device for now so I guess I have to stick with NextPVR for the foreseeable future.
     

    mm1352000

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    Sorry, I think you're right. You can use MP - you just can't merge the channels so you'd have things listed twice in the guide.
     

    PatM

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    Actually, I just did a quick test and it does seem to work after all. I edited the frequency of 3 channels to be 61.25 and source to tuner and set the SDSTB to a higher priority, tried the channels and I got video/sound. I know it wasnt the HDSTB because it's channel never changed (the SD one doesn't display the current channel).

    Then I switched priorities and tried the same channels and the HDSTB channel changed and I saw the proper shows. I'm thinking the colossus ignores the tuning and source (it was originally set to SVHS on those channels and I'm using component) so changing those doesn't mess up the colossus but does let the SDSTB work.

    No time this morning because of work and probably none tonight since it's valentines day (SWIMBO would kill me if I spent the evening on the computer!). Tomorrow I'll really look into this.
     

    PatM

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    I works!

    I set one channel to 62.15 in TVserver then exported the entire list (Channels only). Opened up export.xml in notepad and replaced all 'Frequency="0"' with 'Frequency="<the freq shown for the channel i changed above>"'. It's not 62.15 in the export file, its something like 0000621500

    I deleted all channels then imported the modified export.xml. Mapped the channels to the colossus and the Hauppauge 885 and tried it out with the 885 at a higher priority. I left out a couple channels on the 885 just so I could see if the colossus would tune to those as well.

    The 885 tuned in a few channels while the rest said no signal. The colossus had no troubles. I messed around for a couple of hours trying to see why some channels worked on the 885 and others didn't. Finally I gave up temporarily and got the EPG going. While I was messing around with that I discovered that the previously " no signal" channels on the 885 had suddenly started working. As far as I can tell, every channel on the 885 works perfectly.

    Before getting the channel list from SD I set the source to Tuner. Don't know why the colossus works with channels set to Tuner instead of component - maybe Tuner's index in the source list is the same as component on the Colossus?

    Anyway, now I've got to figure out how to modify the skin because there isn't one that is suitable for non-perfect vision. I do OK but the wife can't read the tiny fonts on the 42" from across the bedroom. On the 96" it's no problem of course.
     

    mm1352000

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    That's good news. Not sure how it is working. Maybe it relies on the Colossus driver ignoring any requests to switch to a tuner channel and staying on the inputs you wanted? Doesn't sound the most bulletproof of setups. I hope it keeps working for you. :)
     

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