HVR-1600 setup for QAM?

[skylinegtr]

I seem to remember there is a special class of channel marked as using '5C' copy protect, that a STB can display as unencrypted, but cannot record. Its possible QAM devices are purposefully skipping these types of channels.

I cant remember the exact terminology, but search for "firewire 5C" and I'm sure you'll find more info.

You have the terminiology correct.

I have a fully compliant 5C D-VHS recorder that lets me record any channel from my Verizon's Motorola 6416 DVR.

I have found a few channels where the 5C flag is set to 'copy always' ,NGCHD is one of them, that I can record to my PC via firewire.

That works because 1)the flag is set to 'copy always' so no encryption codes or encrypted data is sent out and 2) the PC is NOT 5C compliant so it knows nothing about encryption codes like the D-VHS does.

I had hoped that I could tune to the non 5C copy protected channels,like NGCHD, but I am beginning to think that 5C is totally unrelated to whether a channel is allowed to be tuned to.

I think I need a cable card in order to get the non OTA channels and that is of course a dead end on the PC.
I got that last nugget when asking about what I would need to get the Tivo series 3 to work with my cable system.

[skylinegtr]

What is in the clear for QAM and what is in the clear by firewire usually are different.

Use my graphRecorder plugin as a source to record from firewire and the BDA drivers to record from QAM, then you have a dual tuner DVR.

CV

Thanks for that info.

I am currently working on my my general purpose PC which is a Vista machine and it has no firewire cable connected to the Verizon DVR.

I was able to run the TV cable to the room where this machine is but it is 5 times father away than the spec for allowable firewire cable lengths.


I am going to leave this Vista machine as it is with being able to record from just High Def OTA stuff and pursue YOUR plugin on the HTPC which is running XP and is the one hooked diectly to my TV and Home Theater gear.


My idea was to get ALL possible channels on the Vista machine and then share the disk drive so the HTPC could play the recordings on the TV.
The HTPC has it's own recording card.

This would allow me to offload as much as I can from the DVR because it's tiny 160Gb disk gets to 90% full within just a few days.
I have a Terabyte on each of my 2 PC's so I think you can understand my logic.

[carpeVideo]

I broke down and got the Hauppauge 1600.

Went through the processes described here and it tunes, and works great with live TV. However, it won't record (0 length files)? I have tried all the muxers including DVR-MS.

Any suggestions? Logs attached

[sub]

I broke down and got the Hauppauge 1600.

Went through the processes described here and it tunes, and works great with live TV. However, it won't record (0 length files)? I have tried all the muxers including DVR-MS.

Any suggestions?

A couple of things worth noting. The preferred mux setting the config app will list all the mux options that GB-PVR can work with, regardless of whether they're installed or not. You can check which muxes you have by running at the MuxChecker utility. You can find download links for various muxes at http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=25630

Up until a recent (post 1.0.8) patch, which you may or may not have installed, ATSC only worked well with the DVR-MS mux.
Are you running XP SP1/SP2 or something else?

You may also find you need to set
<BDASubmitTuningRequestTwiceOnRecord>true</BDASubmitTuningRequestTwiceOnRecord> in config.xml

[DanDeighan]

I was able to get QAM tuning working. My info:


74041 tuner. Driver version 1.62.25129.0
Armstrong Cable, Western PA.

Armstrong had clear QAM digital equivelents for most of the channels they have in analog (67 channels), even the local HD channels. I couldn't pull in the "extended digital cable" channels (>200) on either tuner in the 1600, though.

[carpeVideo]

Got recording to work it was a combo of the tuneTwice and a windows re-install :0(.

It is XP, FYI not sure if anyone else sees this but it takes 10 seconds or so on preview for the picture to come up using QAM, tuning to a new channel thereafter is pretty quick.

CV

PS thanks for the quick response Sub (or was it one of your clones that you must have running about :0)

[sub]

PS thanks for the quick response Sub (or was it one of your clones that you must have running about :0)

I wish...

[Ted the Penguin]

I wish...

seen multiplicity?

just hope 4 doesnt go answering forum questions :p

[skylinegtr]

Well, that was it. I pulled out a couple of frequencies from WINTV and added them to qam.ini and it worked. I will do as Martin suggested and work to pull them all from WINTV. Sub, you may want to add some kind of all frequency scan as I wonder if this is the root cause for alot of people's issues with the HVR-1600 not pulling in QAM channels.

The 2 frequencies I used to test were 563650 and 563800.

Using the patch, I am able to get GBPVR to scan and find all the OTA digital stations that Verizon FIOS provides.

I am pretty sure though that I should be able to get a few other stations like National Geographic HD.
I say that because I am able to tune my DVR to NGCHD and record from that station over Firewire to the PC using Capdvhs.
That is the case with a number of the stations but a bunch of other ones have the 5C flag turned on so I only am recording scrambled data.

My problem is that I can not figure out what the frequency of the NGCHD station is.

I figured I would first start with looking for it in WINTV because I have read in here several posts that talk about getting a chanel frequency from Wintv.



So for starters, a really simple question:
How do you get those frequencies from WINTV like you said that you had done?

When I go into the Suite Manager/Channels, all I see in the Frequency column is -1

All the other choices in Suite manager do not list frequency.
For example, under the 'Source Tab', when I click on 'Clear Qam Source', the list looks like the enclosed picture.

As uyou can see, the Channel number simply starts at 55 and goes up from there and the Digital channel is 0.0 for all entries,

I am stuck.

Thanks

[skylinegtr]

I recentrly became a Version FIOS subscriber after being with Directv for many years.
I am finding GBPVR to be a GREAT tool to offload the OTA channel recordings from the Verizon supplied DVR because it's disk fills up really fast.

I am trying to use Tsreader to see the channels that I can receive in the clear. This is to augment using GBPVR's config's small preview window to check channel info + I get the needed break down of subchannel,Pid info.etc.


I am using the "Tune ATSC BDA Source" capability in Tsreader.
This is where you startup TSreader with the "ATSC BDA" Source.

It has a window where you type in the frequency and it is supposed to display a thumbnail of all the channes it finds on the frequency.

For example, in GBPVR, the Frequency of 505250 has 5 subchannels of OTA stations. Fox is one of the channels on that frequency.

If I enter these known working frequencies in TSreader using the BDA source as described above, I get an error message that says 'Failed to lock Signal".


I have spent most of the day searching through various forums trying to find out what I could be doing wrong. I am STUCK!!

I see that mvallevand has a lot of posts about using Tsreader with the HVR-1600 so I figured I would ask for help in here.
Plus I am using it to help me setup GBPVR so this is not off topic


Has anyone used the ATSC BDA tuning capability with TSreader?
Can you please tell me what I may be doing wrong?
It seems like TSreader is only expecting 3 characters of the freuency so I tried that but still no luck.

This is the full verion of Tsreader and I make sure that Gbpvr is not running (which would have it grab the HVR-1600)when I am trying this out.
Tsreader will give you a message that it can not build a filter graph if Gbpvr is running


Thanks