Anyone successfully using _TWO_ Hauppage HVR-900 USB2 Sticks?

[BlueMagician]

With careful installation, both USB sticks will be visible in Windows Device Manager, both tuners have their own device numbers in GBPVR, and both be tuneable and have channel maps assigned - BUT...

...things seem to go horribly wrong as soon as I restart the machine, or resume from standby. Either one of the two sticks will fail to tune, but both will still be detected in device manager.

I'm guessing that none of this is directly related to GBPVR itself - more that it is a Hauppage driver problem, or the fact that the drivers aren't written to correctly support more than one instance of that tuner device at all.

That said, I would REALLY appreciate a response from anyone who has managed it, or had come close and may have tried something I haven't.


As an aside, I also get a LARGE number of 0kb recordings, mainly (but not entirely limited to) immediately after wake from suspend for a scheduled recording - should I be looking at buying a more reliable tuner device, or am I doing something stupidly wrong here?


I'm using:

GBPVR v 0.99.5
Cyberlink MUX 5.0.2022
Hauppage WinTV-HVR-900 driver v 4.6.606.24158 (06/06/2006)


Any help would be mucho appreciated! I desperately want to carry on using this sweet software that has made my MediaMVP worth buying!

Cheers to all,
S.

[sub]

As an aside, I also get a LARGE number of 0kb recordings, mainly (but not entirely limited to) immediately after wake from suspend for a scheduled recording - should I be looking at buying a more reliable tuner device, or am I doing something stupidly wrong here?

Yeah, it sounds like buggy drivers to me.

Have you tried asking the question on the Hauppauge forums? http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/pages/forum.html

[zaphod7501]

There's also a section at SHS's forum. http://www.shspvr.com/smf/
As an aside, Hauppauge appears to be trying to abandon development for anything but the latest OS's so Win2000 and even XPsp1 will probably never get any revised drivers.

While Hauppauge makes nice hardware, they are leaving advanced software development to third parties. As they advertise, "TV on your PC", they aren't interested in the HTPC user. Recording is an after effect of the hardware.

[BlueMagician]

I've asked on the Hauppauge forums, if 2 of these are supported for simultaneous use - and the answer seems to be yes. They asked me to try a utility called 'ScanChannelsBDA_UK.EXE' to check tuning ability.

Indeed, I can run two seperate instances of this utility simultaneously, pointing each at it's own tuner, and it will lock/tune and read MUX info from both, and yet when I return to GBPVR, only device #2 will scan for channels.

If I try to tune with BDA device #1, or watch live TV (which defaults to unused device #1), I get a signal strength/quality/lock = 0.

GBPVR seems to realise that there are two devices, because when I try to trick it into looking for a device #3 (instead of 1 or 2), it says ~cannot find device etc etc.


Curiouser & curiouser.. any ideas please ladies and gents?
S.

[sub]

Reproduce the problem, then zip and attach the logs and I'll take a look.

[BlueMagician]

Okay..

• Restarted the service.
  
• Ran Config.
  
• Tried to Map Digital Channels to EPG for device #1 - no joy (0% quality etc)
  
• Tried to Map Digital Channels to EPG for device #2 - success as expected.
  
• Closed Config.
  
• Started GBPVR
  
• Tried to watch a channel through EPG/Guide - GBPVR defaults to device #1 - and a couple seconds later, recieved the following message on screen:
  
  

  No signal detected. Please ensure that the antenna cable is connected or that the antenna signal is strong enough.
  
  Quality: 0
  Strength: 0

The only reason the channel list for recording source/BDA device #1 is populated is because it has stayed that way from when I had only the one device installed.

I have left the channels in the list for device #2 unselected to try and force GBPVR to use device #1 (the one it seems to be having trouble with).

I feel like, at this point, I could be missing something silly - but honestly, I've tried installing this pair so many times in so many different orders and ways, that I'm going a little cwazy-in-the-head..


Logs attached - thanks as always Sub..
S.

[sub]

20:10:38.062 VERBOSE ERROR_DEVICE_NOT_CONNECTED

Your first device is failing to start with this message, but I dont know why exactly.

[sub]

Try setting <BDAAutoDetectTuner>false</BDAAutoDetectTuner> in config.xml

[BlueMagician]

Try setting <BDAAutoDetectTuner>false</BDAAutoDetectTuner> in config.xml

I've got a sneaking suspicion that you're a genius, but I wont know for definite that this has cracked it until I enable the tick boxes for the channels of BDA device #1. I don't want to do this just yet in case it affects the 'scheduling/recording clash' diagnosis in my other thread..

S.

[BlueMagician]

Am I going mad, or did my config.xml file just change itself back to <BDAAutoDetectTuner>true</BDAAutoDetectTuner> ?

S.