Baffling multiple tuner issue

[cbdavi19]

Greetings. Long time listener; first time caller.

I have 2 identical Hauppauge HVR-1800s in my Windows 7 x64 NPVR box. The 1800 is the PCIe version of the 1600 in that each card has a physically separate analog and digital tuner. The digital tuner does QAM or ATSC but not both at once. So, between the 2 cards I have 2 analog inputs and 2 digital (clear QAM in my case) inputs (4 physical coax connections). FWIW, the 2 ATSC tuners are present but disabled in the NPVR configuration (and 0 channels associated with them).

This is a new (different) box for NPVR; I was using an older/slower box for GBPVR (and a single HVR-1600 tuner) until about 6 months ago. This NPVR box has a squeaky clean Windows 7 installation, the latest drivers/software updates all around, etc. etc. And no issues tuning any of the individual channels (I've been dealing with Comcast clear QAM channel musical chairs with GBPVR/NPVR for the last 3 years).

I *think* this is a recent development, but trying to record different shows on different channels at the same can be an exercise in futility. I'll explain.

Attempting to record 2 simultaneous shows on 2 different QAM-only channels is successful for the first show, but not for the second. It doesn't matter if I switch the tuner preference order, or which channel I start recording first. Clean logs from that test are in the Logs 2 Digital 1 Fail.zip file.

I also experimented with multiple channels that I knew were available on both analog and digital (and merged in the channel list). I got 99 (79-105), 78 (117-1008) and 19 (91-8) to successfully record at the same time, but trying to additionally record 8 (80-202) fails. Clean logs from that test are in the Logs 4 D-A 1 Fail.zip file.

Now here's where it gets strange: I started with the same channels: 99 (79-105), 78 (117-1008) and 19 (91-8) but then added 10 (79-107) and that worked fine. Clean logs from that test are in the Logs 4 D-A 0 Fail.zip file.

Furthermore, I also found that of the merged digital and analog channels, attempting to add a 4th recording to the above test only fails for channels 20 (80-209), 13 (80-201), 8 (37-4), and 7 (80-202). It works fine for the remaining 8 channels!

I'm completely stumped. I've tried both tuners separately in empty npvr.db3 db's and they work fine. Hauppauge drivers are latest & greatest. I even started over on my npvr.db3 db. I started with just 1 tuner, scanned for and re-mapped all the channels, and verified I could watch a digital-only channel while recording an anolog-only channel BEFORE I added the second tuner card (and copied the configuration to the new card and merged the duplicate channels). Same result.

Could this be similar to the issues described in this thread http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...VR-to-work regarding dual 1600's and duplicate 'pins'?

Thanks,

Chris

[cbdavi19]

Well, much like washing your car causes it to rain, finally posting the question to the forum caused me to (finally) find the answer myself.

Even though I had removed the Hauppauge tuners in Device Manager and selected the Uninstall Drivers checkbox, that apparently wasn't enough.

This seeming unrelated post held the answer: use the HCWClear utility available from the Hauppauge website. After the reboot and redetection of the tuner cards (and subsequent reinstall of the analog drivers), all was well. FWIW, I never had the WinTV7 software installed; just the tuner card drivers and the analog drivers (which do use a little bit of WinTV7).

I can now record simultaneously on 2 clear QAM channels, and I can record simultaneously on 4 shared clear QAM / analog channels.

I hope this revelation helps someone else with multiple Hauppauge tuner cards installed.