Can only record/view one program at a time

[majortom]

Hi,

I've just installed GBPVR onto my living room PC.

I have two Hauppauge DVB-S+ PCI cards, one Hauppauge DVB-T USB Stick and one Freecom WideView USB Stick.

They are all detected as Hauppauge devices, and I've set them all to id #1 as the utility to detect the id didn't produce any output, so I presume that's ok. Setting the id to anything other than 1 and trying to scan results in errors.....

I'm pretty sure that the hardware is OK as I was running MythTV previously without any major problems.

So, I scanned everything just using the EPG as a starting point (will probably use Radiotimes later). Each card scanned ok and brought back the channels I would expect. (the sat cards did bring up the invalid format message, and the patch made it crash, but the channels were detected ok and A/V was visible/audible during the process).

Now I have two cards with all the UK freeview channels (30 or so) and two cards with the FTA Sat channels (more like 10).

However whatever I do I can only record/view one program at a time. It seems to be able to choose cards ok (i.e. I can watch C5 which is only on Freeview, and also NME TV which is only on Sky).

Is there anything I've missed?

Thanks,
Tom

[sub]

Can you zip and attach your gbpvr.db3 file?

[majortom]

sure, thanks.

[sub]

This happens because the different DVB sources you use have different names for the same channel. For example, the app has no idea that "BBC 2 England" is the same channel as "BBC2", or "ITV1" is the same as "ITV1 Granada". Because the name is not the same the app thinks these are different channels.

With the current setup, depending on the channel you chose in the guide, it'll only be available on one, or two sources. As you've found, this can quickly lead to no devices be available to record those channels.

In this sort of mixed DVB-T/DVB-S setup, you'd probably be better off using an XMLTV based epg. This way all three sources have exactly the same name for the channels and will be treated as one channel.

If you switch to xmltv, its best to delete your gbpvr.db3 to start again from a clean database, to make sure all remnants of the old channel names are gone.

[majortom]

ok, thank you sub I will try this ..

[martint123]

That is the way I do it (and most others I guess). The only minor, once only, downside is that you have to manually map more channels when first setting it up to associate the RadioTimes (or whichever source) channel name to the transmitted channel name.
Once that is done, it makes life a lot easier.

[majortom]

Thanks, the RadioTimes site appears to be down today, but I'll sort that out tomorrow.

I was confused as even trying to record two programs on Freeview didn't work. It turns out that the Freecom card wasn't detected as a Hauppauge after all, it was detecting the Haupauge one twice. I added the following to bda.ini to detect the Freecom one and now I can watch two Freeview shows :-)

[Freecom DVB type7]
TUNING_TYPE=DVB-T
FILTER_TUNER=USB Digital-TV Receiver.
FILTER_CAPTURE=USB Digital-TV Device Capture.
PIN_TUNER_IN=Input0
PIN_TUNER_OUT=MPEG2 Transport
PIN_CAPTURE_IN=Input0
PIN_CAPTURE_OUT=Output1

[martint123]

I'd not seen a problem with the RT in my logs....
Most people seem to use Alan Birtles xmltvgui to grab the RT listings http://www.birtles.org.uk/xmltv/
Settings, select and tick pick UK_RT, settings, channels and select the channels you want grabbing. Then "just run it". There are some command line options for runing not as a gui and to limit the number of days downloaded.
Have fun.

Martin

[majortom]

Thanks Martin,

I hadn't seen that tool before - very useful.

You may be able to get updates, but starting from scratch doesn't seem to work as http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/channels.dat is empty at the moment.

I did notice running xmltv on linux that sometimes it went away at the weekend.

Cheers,
Tom

[martint123]

Ah yes, I just hit "refresh channels" and it emptied my list ;(
<restore from backup>
Everything else seems to work. If you want a play with it - everything except "Reload channels list" then here's the missing data. sits in \Program Files\XMLTV GUI\settings\UK_RT