Starting from scratch, or does anyone want to buy a HVR2250?

[sub]

Mike, when I'm back home, and if you want, then you can arrange for VNC or Remote Desktop, and I'll connect and work out why its not finding the channels for you. In advance of that, do a scan in WinTV so I have some information to go on (list of channels that should be available, frequencies in hcwChan_5.mdb etc).

If you can get the channels in WinTV, then you should also be able to get them in GB-PVR.

[pcostanza]

Since WinTV in XP gets me 10 QAM channels (GBPVR 0) I copied the WTV database file from WinTV XP to WinTV Vista and those channels don't work. Not sure if they should but they don't.
I then ran a scan in WinTV again and it came up goose eggs. Would the info in this WinTV file help get QAM info in GBPVR?

[mmatheny]

This is WinTV on Vista? Can't help you there. I run Vista on my main machine, but I'm just trying to get the simple setup working!

[rmorein]

My experience with the 2250 is strictly OTA, but it is a very poor tuner. With WinTV, it picked up only the analog channels, which is explained by the fact that in my area, the digital channels are on temporary low power frequency assignments.

[pcostanza]

My experience with the 2250 is strictly OTA, but it is a very poor tuner. With WinTV, it picked up only the analog channels, which is explained by the fact that in my area, the digital channels are on temporary low power frequency assignments.

There are a few stations in my area whose HD signals are either low power or they come and go. 1 station is going all digital on Dec. 15 but as of now, I can't get them OTA or QAM. I think they want to work out any possible kinks now instead of later.
I did talk to a local TV dealer who said he's still amazed at how little the buying public know about the switch in Feb and are making uninformed decisions.

[rmorein]

I failed to make my point. The 1250 tuner picks up all the stations one could reasonably expect, plus one.

Comparatively speaking, the 1250 is superb for OTA, while the 2250 might be acceptable in strong signal areas. Since there are no strong ATSC signals in my area, I am unable to determine this.

[drbenjamin]

Sub - I'm pretty sure NO ONE using one of these cards has has any success with GBPVR.

If anyone has, please speak up!

Sorry I'm a little late to the thread, but I thought I'd share my experience which is quite different than yours. I decided to finally upgrade my old machine (in .sig) as I couldn't fit any more drives in. I got an Intel E7300 / ECS motherboard combo and set it up with Windows XP Professional (I wanted dynamic drives). I added 2GB RAM, 3 TB hard drive, one HVR-2250. Brought up XP to SP3, installed the latest GB-PVR and WIN-TV, and everything has worked perfectly. In fact, the GBPVR "Map EPG" window somehow manages to correctly extract the names of the clear QAM channels, which was very nice. The only minor nit that happened was that I had the HD channels enabled in the analog capture device setup so my first recording was a bust, but it was trivial to figure out.
I have Comcast in Redmond, WA and I get around 30 channels, basically all the OTA HD stuff, digital versions of the OTA Channels and some public access stuff. My next challenge is to work out some post processing scripts to change the AC3 audio on the SD digital channels and downres the HD ones for playing on my MVPs.

I have to say, GB-PVR continues to impress me. It has always just worked, and in combination with the MVP (and someday for me the PCH!) it is a truly elegant and simple solution. Thanks again for your hard work, sub.

[dennit]

In fact, the GBPVR "Map EPG" window somehow manages to correctly extract the names of the clear QAM channels, which was very nice.

That's because your cable company is sending those names with PSIP (Program & System Information Protocol). If you look at your scan.cache file you will see them at the tail end of each line in the scan (IIRC, after the >). Prior to mapping, you can change those names to ease your mapping task. I usually save my raw scan.cache, then delete out all the odd audio channels I can't get or don't want (other languages, shopping, encrypted, etc.), add in any missed channels from prior scans, add names at the end of each line then save that as the SCAN-2.cache file (for source #2) before mapping. If I scan multiple times, I do a file compare on the scans to see what has changed and build a master scan.cache for each source.

(actually, this is what I used to do - for satellite scans with 100's of channels I'm using another system described in another post)

At this point I never use the raw scan.cache file. I always process it before mapping (or use SQL and the scan-cache to directly modify gbpvr.db3).

[mmatheny]

See my elated response here:

http://forums.gbpvr.com/showpost.php?p=3...stcount=28