Dual Tuner setup

[garygamb]

I have two capture cards:

PVR250 as Capture Source #1
PVR350 as Capture Source #2 (using the TV-Out with this one)

The PVR250 is hooked to my digital cable box via SVideo and my PVR350 is hooked directly to the analog cable jack in the wall. Thus, I have about 900 channels on the PVR250 and 76 on the PVR350. The PVR250 does share the same channels as the PVR350, but obviously the PVR250 is the only card that can record the channels above #76

I went out of town this last weekend and wanted to test how my system handled waking up from Stand By to record shows I setup to record in advance. I set this up at around noon on Friday. All of the shows I setup for Friday are blank. It appears that GBPVR recorded just blackness....the file sizes are all 1Gig plus, so it appears it tried to record something.

Some of my shows on Saturday recorded just fine, but some are blank as well. And all of my shows for Sunday are blank as well.

I am using GBPVRWake, but I'm not sure I had it configured correctly until this evening, but would this even matter if it was all the recording service doing the work anyways?

Is this just an inherent problem with a dual tuner setup? Is there anyway in the future to set which tuner in a dual tuner setup is doing the recording for a channel? Anyway to get info on which tuner did the actual recording when the show is recorded from within the GUI so that we can troubleshoot if it is a specific capture card with a problem?

Overall, anyone have any pointers for me in regards to what is best for this setup?

[onestar]

I have two capture cards:


............................................................................ Is there anyway in the future to set which tuner in a dual tuner setup is doing the recording for a channel? Anyway to get info on which tuner did the actual recording when the show is recorded from within the GUI so that we can troubleshoot if it is a specific capture card with a problem?

I don't think you can. But the way I have got around this is to map two identical but named differently channels. e.g. I have a BBC1 SAT and a BBC1 DIG. So two identical channels appear in my setup. One is mapped to one card, the other to the second. This way I choose where to get BBC1 from. Downside I lose the auto selection capability of GBPVR. You could do this for a small subset, to debug your problem.

[Darx-starz]

I have two capture cards:

PVR250 as Capture Source #1
PVR350 as Capture Source #2 (using the TV-Out with this one)

The PVR250 is hooked to my digital cable box via SVideo and my PVR350 is hooked directly to the analog cable jack in the wall. Thus, I have about 900 channels on the PVR250 and 76 on the PVR350. The PVR250 does share the same channels as the PVR350, but obviously the PVR250 is the only card that can record the channels above #76

I went out of town this last weekend and wanted to test how my system handled waking up from Stand By to record shows I setup to record in advance. I set this up at around noon on Friday. All of the shows I setup for Friday are blank. It appears that GBPVR recorded just blackness....the file sizes are all 1Gig plus, so it appears it tried to record something.

Some of my shows on Saturday recorded just fine, but some are blank as well. And all of my shows for Sunday are blank as well.

I am using GBPVRWake, but I'm not sure I had it configured correctly until this evening, but would this even matter if it was all the recording service doing the work anyways?

Is this just an inherent problem with a dual tuner setup? Is there anyway in the future to set which tuner in a dual tuner setup is doing the recording for a channel? Anyway to get info on which tuner did the actual recording when the show is recorded from within the GUI so that we can troubleshoot if it is a specific capture card with a problem?

Overall, anyone have any pointers for me in regards to what is best for this setup?

You are going to have problems with this. If both cards have an overlap of some of the channels then it may pick the card that is recording something and try and record another show. This will fail. Better that you split the channels between your cards. That way it will allways work.

[garygamb]

I don't think you can. But the way I have got around this is to map two identical but named differently channels. e.g. I have a BBC1 SAT and a BBC1 DIG. So two identical channels appear in my setup. One is mapped to one card, the other to the second. This way I choose where to get BBC1 from. Downside I lose the auto selection capability of GBPVR. You could do this for a small subset, to debug your problem.

But how do you get EPG Data for the channels you add? I added three channels as a test, but obviously there is no data in the Guide for them? I'm using the Zap2It Guide...is there something different I can do with XMLTV? thanks.

[onestar]

But how do you get EPG Data for the channels you add? I added three channels as a test, but obviously there is no data in the Guide for them? I'm using the Zap2It Guide...is there something different I can do with XMLTV? thanks.

Ah, okay good point. What I do, is simply create more than one xmltv listing.
I created a set of channels for my Sky Box, for my other Sky Box (free ones), and for normal analogue channels. Then I have a small app that I run on the xmltv files which changes the names in the files of the channels, so that on xmltv1.xml BBC1 becomes BBC1 SAT, xmltv2.xml BBC1 becomes BBC1 DIG, xmltv3.xml BBC1 becomes BBC1 AIR. Then for each capture source is pointing to each xmltv file.

In the XMLTV file the channel is listed at the top, so for your test you could do a quick one time edit and change.

Then when I have them loaded into GBPVR they show up as BBC1 SAT, BBC1 DIG, BBC1 AIR. It only means I get to choose which box the recordings come from, rather then autochoose. I guess it also means GBPVR won't make the mistake of choosing the duplicate channel on the box which can only choose the non-dup channel.

I put my own setup on http://www.hubstar.net/onestar/gbpvr/xmltv.shtml because I always forget how to do these things once a stable system.

[garygamb]

ok..thanks for the info....i actually may have gotten around this without using xmltv. i messed with it for a few hours last night...really learned alot about the GBPVR database.

I basically deleted my two capture cards, and then recreated the PVR250 that has all the Digital Cable channels. I imported them in from Zap2It and then I went in and edited the channel table in the database to reflect a change in name for any duplicate channel. I then added the 2nd tuner with the analog channels on it and it imported them in under their old name. Thus I now have two different channels to GBPVR for each duplicate channel, instead of just one like it would normally be.

Now, to GBPVR, the analog channels are at the end of the digital cable channels. ie.....last digital channel is 947, and the first analog is 948, even if it tunes to channel 3 on the analog cable. I couldn't find a way to group the digital and analog channels right next to each other in the TV Guide. When I changed the analog channel number in the database to be a duplicate of the digital, the Guide freaked out on me. I could reorder the entire channel numbers of all the channels to accomplish this, but I actually think that having the analog channels on a whole seperate section of the Guide will alleviate confusion by the wife...and possiblly me, as to which tuner is doing the recording. I setup a bunch of recording over night to see what each card captured, so when I get home tonight, I'm going to check and see if everything looks like it recorded ok.