Dvico HDTV card

[sub]

I hear what you are saying, but it does NOT happen when I use the DVICO FUSION application on HDTV shows.

Unfortunately thats not a good comparision. The fusion app doesnt use the public BDA API that I have to use. They've told me they fall back to using their proprietary WDM drivers for much of their functionality.

GB-PVR is all ring 3 code, which in theory is unable to hang the machine or make it reboot, even if I want to. This is backed up by two and half years providing support for GB-PVR and never once finding a bug where GB-PVR is responsible for doing this sort of thing to a machine.

The DVICO drivers on the other hand are ring 0 code, which has no problems rebooting or crashing the machine.

Trust me, the code that is causing this reboot is written by DVICO, and they're going to be the only people able to fix it. The drivers for their USB device seems to be buggier than their PCI drivers.

[wintermute]

sub,
My apologies if I hit a button. I was attempting to be very clear about my comparison results.
erg. I haven't heard anyone use CPU ring codes since I got my MCSE in NT 3.5x.

Yup, if it's ring 0 I'm hosed. So, they are not providing access to their WDM driver? Only exposing the older BDA to public access?
And since GB-PVR is forced to use the BDA driver, DVICO's lack of development of that driver (or providing public access) is the cause of the crashing problem?
sigh.

and I thought this was going to be the best out of all the HDTV OTA ATSC tuners I researched.
wellll..fuss and fume.

Greg

[sub]

My apologies if I hit a button.

No, you didnt. I was just giving you a bit more info.

So, they are not providing access to their WDM driver?

They did offer me access via their WDM SDK for sum of US$1000, but I'm not gonna go down that proprietary (fusion specific) WDM path. I choose to go BDA so I could cover the widest possible audience. This has generally worked out well for me with nearly a hundred or so DVB-T, DVB-S, DVB-C and ATSC devices working with GB-PVR. Unfortunately some manufacturers have better BDA drivers than others...

[rgann]

$1000 for the WDM SDK eh? Gee, I wonder why their BDA drivers aren't getting the attention they need...

This card is a real headache. In addition to instability and the fact that you more or less have to disable PCI steering to get it working, the drivers are chronically anemic or outright broken. The AVSforum threads are full of people complaining (not about minor issues. Stuff like "channel 4 doesn't work"). And their rep seems to be, um, confrontational.

I wouldn't recommend these cards to anyone. I'm sorry I got one myself. Have to use their silly Fusion App instead of GB-PVR, which I'd really like to. Even their "record mpg" option is basically broken, since playback only works with WMP.

</rant>

[dutch]

I bought two of these to use with gbpvr, hoping to do QAM. Alas, that seems to be far off so is there any cuurent way to use gbpvr to tune QAM and, if so, with which card?

[sub]

so is there any cuurent way to use gbpvr to tune QAM and, if so, with which card?

No, there isnt any way to do it currently. I suspect it'll happen late this year when Microsoft is due to make some changes to the BDA spec, which will define for driver manufacturers how ATSC QAM support should be implemented in BDA drivers. Until then, its just not a feature manufacturers are implementing in their drivers.

[dutch]

Call me dense, but I'm just realizing the Fusion 5 HDTV Lite doesn't appear to do analog cable in gb-pvr. Is this correct?

[sub]

I'm not 100% up with all the different Fusion devices, but I assume from your question that this device has both an analog and digital component? Unfortunatly the analog portion of this device is not supported at all by GB-PVR, and wont be in the future. It lacks the required MPEG-2 encoder hardware.

That said, you might be able to get the analog stuff to work with the software encoder plugin here: http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=2753