US QAM tuners that work

[pcostanza]

Thanks for the tips. I had already seen your instructions and bookmarked them earlier. Seems like things have gotten easier as HDHR has progressed.
Is it possible to use both GBPVR and Media Center at the same time? Not sure that's wise but I was curious about it.

[JohnInSJ]

HVR1600 here, no problems (now) with it, it actually performs well for $60

Nightmare at first getting it to work - it really wants a clean signal! For me, getting rid of a couple of (old/cheap) splitters did the trick.

Comcast, so only clear QAMs we get are shopping channels + OTA + community access stuff. *nothing* else is clear qam. Fortunately this at least gets me the network HD stuff.

Good luck with your clear QAMs. I'm not sure I would bank on them forever.

[mmatheny]

This seems odd to me. I've had problems with my 1600, but the problems always related to signal strength. If signal was low, both GBPVR and WinTV had identical problems. The signal strength meter from Hauppauge was always a pretty good indicator of whether I was going to have problems (29.5 was the lowest I could go without problems.)

Did you ever figure out how to manually construct a tuning line in the cache file from WinTV info and tell GBPVR to tune a channel that WinTV was tuning correctly?

IOW, is this a problem with scanning to find a channel (where GBPVR has to be able to recognize that a channel has been successfully tuned and is sending valid data), or a problem with tuning once the correct tuning info is known? I've always thought that for the latter case GBPVR just hands off the tuning data to the card and waits for the data stream. What the card does with the tuning data should be the same for WinTV and GBPVR - shouldn't it? Or am I missing something?

Thanx for the reply - my signal on almost every channel in WintTV is around 87%! I am zipping up the channel database to send to Sub for him to analyze. Hopefully he can see what is going on here.

Pcostanza - I haven't even fiddled with recording and watching analog yet, I bought the card so I could us it to supplement my cable PVR. And I really want to get QAM working. However, I did go ahead and add the other Digital tuner and both analog tuners. And I tried recording one show and changing to another one, but got the message no tuner was available, so I will try to look into that. I spend half my Thanksgiving weekend working on this thing, and as you can imagine, my wife has just about had enough!

[pcostanza]

I spend half my Thanksgiving weekend working on this thing, and as you can imagine, my wife has just about had enough!

Mike, you'd better take extra good care of her for this Christmas or you'll loose more than tuners!

[mmatheny]

Well, it worked so well with 2 PVR250 tuners. I was hoping to get it set up again that simply, but technology had other ideas!

[whurlston]

Thanks for the tips. I had already seen your instructions and bookmarked them earlier. Seems like things have gotten easier as HDHR has progressed.
Is it possible to use both GBPVR and Media Center at the same time? Not sure that's wise but I was curious about it.

You could but you would need to set the application to Media Center and then set it up in GBPVR as an OTA capture source, not QAM. The QAM channels would be remapped to OTA. Not sure how it would work with the TV Pack though as I haven't tested that. I'll try to do it in the next few days.

[mmatheny]

whurlston - got your 2250 yet?

[whurlston]

Not yet. I hope to order it next week but need to wait until I have the money first. Home remodelling had to come first.

[pcostanza]

You could but you would need to set the application to Media Center and then set it up in GBPVR as an OTA capture source, not QAM. The QAM channels would be remapped to OTA. Not sure how it would work with the TV Pack though as I haven't tested that. I'll try to do it in the next few days.

I asked this question this morning in the HDHR forums and got this:
If you have two computers then no problem running a different DVR application on each.

On the same computer - some DVR applications need a compatibility mode set... it depends on the the compatibility settings needed for one DVR app with work with the other DVR app.

VMC + GBPVR will work - set the application setting to Media Center in HDHomeRun Setup.

With the latest beta release of the HDHomeRun drivers (final release due out later this week) the tuners are allocated automatically as needed. ie you can record two channels with VMC, two channels with GB-PVR, or one channel on each. If you have two HDHomeRun units then you will have a pool of 4 tuners that will be automatically allocated as needed.

Sounds promising!

[whurlston]

That's the method I described above. Note that the number of channels that you can record does not account for the new multi-record feature in GBPVR. So if you are recording two channels on the same frequency in GBPVR, it will only use one tuner and you will still have a tuner available for VMC.