What was your 'set-up' time?

[teookie]

I've been monkeying around with my setup for a few months now and am still working out the wrinkles. It's taking me a long time. The motivation to keep going (besides just how seriously cool it is) is that I've seen some posts from people on this forum stating they've had GBPVR up and running with minimal errors for months.

How much tweaking, and how much time did it take everyone to get there system up and running reliably?

[Captcol]

I think part of the problem is that people will get there system stable then add a new plugin or try a new mux or decoder etc, change some hardware, so with my system I will mess with it for a month or so then leave it alone for a couple of months then add and change stuff etc etc.

When ever an updated plugin is released I will have a look or try out features that i haven't used before, like currently I am playing with netradio which till now i hadn't played with as I was getting other stuff sorted.

[sub]

It also depends what type of stuff you're trying use. Regular analog should be pretty painless and would be up and running quickly. If you're using cutting edge stuff like H.264/HE-AAC DVB channels, or trying to do client/server, multidec etc, then things will take a longer.

[psycik]

And besides you could argue that it's never completely set up as you always tend to tinker a bit - well I do

But in terms of my system - I can rebuild it from scratch in a day - but I actually have instructions for myself now - as there are a lot of bits to remember.

To get my system from playing to in the lounge the first time, took a few months. But that was probably being over cautious. When I rebuilt last year I had it back up and running in a day..

And also as sub says it depends what bits you are playing with, a simple DVB-S (single tuner) system is much easier to configure then almost anything else as the EPG is simple, the playback is relatively simple, there's not external channel changing of sky boxes etc..

[mvallevand]

1.5 hours including EPG.

For me because I basically only access GB-PVR from a media-extender I haven't had to deal with the codec, direct show, dll update, and driver hell that I read about so often here. I also never worried about the next biggest problem which seems to be people trying to do things on under powered machines especially older video cards.

Both GB-PVR and the extenders have a way to go on mpeg transport stream and HD media handling before I'd say things are perfect, still I am willing to bet I could install GBPVR and an MVP or PCH, with Hauppauge capture cards and have it stable and running on any new machine running Vista Home Premium in under half an hour. This setup could run for weeks, at least from one patch Tuesday to another based on my experience.

The only thing I can say that was a pain was the EPG mapping of digital channels, which did take a couple of hours initially. Now that my cable provider doesn't offer anything of note on clear QAM even that is moot for me anyway, but it would probably take another hour to map 30-50 channels. Getting XML data outside of North America if needed would add some time too.

Martin

[Etacovda]

im still going on my sky tv set up, its been about 10 months... fix something and something else breaks, lol. To gbpvr's credit, i dont think any of my problems have really been related to it, more to external things (channel changing software, decoders, drivers, windows wake up issues, etc) not working as they should. HIP set me back months and months - if id known about ir server suite (or had it been available, i dont recall which it actually is) it would have made things a lot simpler for me. I do have a relatively complicated set up, but its all analogue so its not too bad. Getting close to adding DVB-T and DVB-S, but i need to get my computer waking up without the dreaded black screen which requires alt+f4 on the keyboard (remote mapped to those keys doesnt work) before id say im 100% done.

[malchihi]

I've been running my dvr box for about 11 months with no problems.

I have even been keeping GBPVR up to date, and every update is just seamless. Starting from scratch i would say the most time consuming part is scanning my QAM channels, and sorting through them. Other than that, everything is very quick.

[agidius]

I have had it for about 2 years now.
regular setup was rather simple.
client setup took some work.
8 months and still trying to get reliable HD.

even if it is working great, I cant go very long without changing something or trying a new plugin.

[martint123]

My biggest pain starting from scratch would be setting up the channel name to channel number table for the UK Sky STB. The EPG provider does not supply channel numbers, so it is a manual task. They also occasionally change without notice (!!0.
So I've got analogue RF terrestrial channels on one tuner.
Digital Satellite encrypted via a STB controlled by gbpvr, in via analogue.
2 x digital terrestrial tuners.
Digital satellite tuner for HD 'in the clear' stuff.

Main viewing is via a PCH in the lounge. elsewhere via MVP and PC clients.

I wouldn't like to set it all up at once from scratch though.

[agh!]

Initial set up about 20 hours of work spread over 5 weeks, but this includes getting dual channel receiver card tuned, codecs and drivers, MVP and PC Clients going - so not everything is the GB-PVR software itself. And then there was fitting a big disk, occasional defrag.
Periodically I will bring in another plug in like Music Library 2 and at some point I might try youtube.

In terms of reliability it's not much less reliable than an out of the box piece of consumer electronics, and the hiccups that do come a long are usually networking and Windows XP issues.
Bottom line is it's turned out to be much more reliable than I expected and has been a permanent in daily use part of our home entertainment system for over a year to the point where I would say only 10%-20% of our TV viewing time is live TV - and that's usually for the news and weather.

It's a wonderful luxury to be able to sit down with an evening meal and watch something we actually want to see - everyday.