Does the tuning assistant know what TV standard to use based on country selection?

[lchiu7]

Trying to use my PVR 250 to tune into the cable system. I know the cable provides all the channels since my TV can tune into the cable signal. However when I use the tuning assistant to try to tune into the channels, while it stops all the time and notes a channel has been selected, the picture on the screen is just noise.

I select the right country (NZ) and cable spacings - does the tuning assistant then know to set the PVR 250 to PAL B/G? WinTV2000 has a selection for the PAL format and can tune into the channels okay

Any help appreciated

Thanks

[sub]

Does the tuning assistant know what TV standard to use based on country selection?

Behind the scenes, directshow determines the tv standard based on the counrty. I dont explicitly set it.

[lchiu7]

Well I tried using WinTV2K to tune the channels. It only tuned channels if I chose all countries and it tuned by frequency. When I tried setting a country and using either antenna or cable nothing tuned in. What was worse that even when I used tune all countries, it didn't pick up the unscrambled RF output from the cable box so my planned setup is not looking good alas

[sub]

When you tell the WinTV2k software to tune 'all countries', they do a non-standard approach to tuning that doesnt use the standard Directshow mechanism.

Its possible that there is some logic that is ignoring your the PAL-B/G standard associated with country=NZ, if you card only has a PAL-I tuner (which I remember you saying in another post).

You could try setting the following registry setting, then try the tuning assistant again. It may help.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Hauppauge\hcwPNP\Override]
"VideoFormat"=dword:0000003f

[sub]

What was worse that even when I used tune all countries, it didn't pick up the unscrambled RF output from the cable box so my planned setup is not looking good alas

When I try to tune in channels directly off the TCL cable, then I get the following:

Splitter in front of the cable box: can tune tv1,tv2,tv3,c4,prime,weather,mosaic,tv guide.

Splitter after the cable box, or output directly from analog cable box: just the currently selected channel on the cable box.

[lchiu7]

Hmm - that's what I would have expected except with the digital STB all the channels come through plus the decoded one. Will try the registry hack and see if fixes it. Also found my 250 is supposed to handle all PAL standards so that's not the issue (else I would not be able to tune into stations with WinTV2k)

[lchiu7]

OK tried it with the registry hack. Started the tuning assistant. Found lots of channels but all looked like scrambled channels. When it got to about channel 151 the CPU went up to abou0% and the app locked up. Can you tell me what channel # and frequency you found the RF output from the cable box?

Thanks

[sub]

I'm actually not home. I've been out of home a few days, but I'll be back in a couple more.

(for those that have forgotten...dial up is painful)

[lchiu7]

OK - got this working I think. Used the WinTV2K fine tuning programme to find the channel frequency of the cable box. Initially I had that set as channel 44 in the registry and WinTV2K can tune into that channel using that number. But when I put that number into the epg for gbpvr all I got was static. Turned out the actual frequency was 814687500Hz. So stuck that number into the epg (as opposed to the channel number) and it works!

So now if I select a channel which is only in the RF source (and I only have one channel in that source) gbpvr tunes into that frequency as the video source. Not exactly plug and play but happy that it works

Thanks

But that raises a more interesting question. Now that the channel is a frequency (which is the RF output from the STB) I don't think there is any way for gbpvr to use the usb-uirt to change the STB to any channel I want to record since it would not know what codes to send to the STB :-(