Pinnacle PCTV Sat Pro PCI 4000i

[evil Homer]

Hi everyone,

Someone on AVForums recommended GBPVR so here I am.

Downloaded the newest version, but it is failing to detect my TV Tuner, a Pinnacle PCTV Sat Pro 4000i with dual tuners.

System Specs:
Windows Vista Ultimate Service Pack 1 64bit
Intel Quad Core Q6600 2.4ghz
Asus P5E HDMI Mother Board
4Gb RAM
Gainward ATI Radeon 4850 512Mb

Pinnacle's "beta" drivers for Vista 64 do not work, and I have it running currently with Microsoft's own drivers. The card currently works in DVBViewer with hd channels perfectly fine, and works in Vista Media Centre (No hd channels).

I had previously used Media Portal, which also failed to detect the card.

Now as far as I am aware, these are BDA drivers.

I cannot see the card in the dropdown list in the Config, and if I tick the detect tuners in system, it says there is nothing there.

A friend of mine has more or less the same system and TV tuner but under Vista Ultimate 32bit, and the config also fails to detect the card, but again it works fine in DVBViewer and VMC.

Are the drivers not up to scratch or could it simply be down to the card being active elsewhere in the system?

Please let me know what files you'd like me to attach so someone can analyse the problem.

Many Thanks

[martint123]

I have the same dual tuner and a similar problem.
Mine is detected in config, but will not produce results from scanning channels.
Even manually entering the tuning data doesn't work.
I'm using driver 3.1.3.0 dated 31/03/2006. There was another one, but that worked even worse.
Pinnacle support sucks and all they wanted to do was sell me their software.
I've put it down to their crap drivers - which is a shame as it is a cheapish card with two tuners.

[Graham Worley]

I too have bought this card. I've discovered that the following seems to work.

Install a clean Windows XP SP2 System
Install the Pinnacle Media Centre Software
Channel Scan the Pinnacle software, all seems fine.
Install GBPVR and modify the BDA.INI file so that it sees the Pinnacle Stargate drivers.
Perform a channel scan and all seems well.

Upon re-boot GBPVR seems unable to see the satellite card. If the Pinnacle software is made to show TV and then exited just prior to GBPVR needing a tuner then all appears well.

So I guess that the Pinnacle software must be performing some additional set-up of the card that GB-PVR isn't doing? Does that make any sense? I notice the card has two tunder drivers and a Common bit, should we be making any reference to that in the BDA.ini perhaps?

[martint123]

Interesting.
My card came with no software. I grabbed drivers from their web site.
GBPVR sees that card but doesn't seem to be able to get any data out of it at all - scanning or using a predefined cache file.
It works fine with DVBViewer though. I'll try gbpvr after a dvbviewer run to see if what you are seeing is the same.
I was wondering on how to differentiate between the two tuners - but I think that some drivers have two distinct names and some have the same name, but have a logical unit number that is passed to the driver.

What would be handy would be a DVB driver trace utility to see what teh differences are!

[MMatej]

I have 2 450i cards in my system. They work and tune fine with DVBViewer, MediaPortal, AltDVB, etc. I remember that one - several months ago - while I only had one i450 card I was successful with GBPVR tuning as well. I think that it stopped working after an GBPVR update (Hauppauge updates?), but I am not sure. I was just briefly testing the GBPVR at that time.

(background: System XP latest patches, latest GBPVR, BDA.INI updated)

I was surprised that the latest version of the GBPVR exhibits the same problem. It is simply unable to tune channels.

BUT - I have noticed something interesting: It does find some signal while scanning the transponders. Only it reports the signal level as a negative integer while quality shows positive integer (i.e. strength: -48, quality 99). It does so only on transponders where I expect the card to find some signal. I don't know if the negative integer is expected as signal strength indicator. Would it be possible that GBPVR is skipping the stream analysis because the strength is less than 0?

I have also noticed that in the AltDVB signal indicators are broken as well. They are jumping from 0 to 75% all the time in less than a second intervals.

--
Best regards,
Matej.

[sub]

BUT - I have noticed something interesting: It does find some signal while scanning the transponders. Only it reports the signal level as a negative integer while quality shows positive integer (i.e. strength: -48, quality 99). It does so only on transponders where I expect the card to find some signal. I don't know if the negative integer is expected as signal strength indicator. Would it be possible that GBPVR is skipping the stream analysis because the strength is less than 0?

No, its not that. It ignores the signal values reported by the drivers, but does report them in case they're of any value to the user. Nearly every tuner manufacture uses their own scale for strength/quality, and there is no way for the app to query the range, and some are logarithmic, which add up to it being pretty much in possible normalize to a nice to readable 0-100 range.