Installing PCTV Dual Sat pro PCI (4000i) card

[harfordg]

Hi There,

I am trying to get my brand new PCTV Dual Sat pro PCI (4000i) card to work with most up to date version of gbpvr - I have installed the Visual C++ redistributable too.

I am using a brand new XP sp3 /Dell Optiplex 320 PC installation to test out this card.
The utilites that come with the card work fine (The card works well with the bundled TVCenter application (6.3.0.584) and I can browse for channels etc using
Windows device manager finds the cards and has the manufacturer's driver installed on it.

When the config is run the utility cannot find the card.

I have been looking around the forum for a while and cannot see an answer.

I am quite prepared to send this card back to manufacturer and purchase whatever card(s) you recommend - I would like at least 2 Satelite inputs if possible.

Can you help?

I have attached configs for your information.

Kind Regards

[Graham]

Run filtercheck.exe from the GBPVR folder and post the log file that it creates.

Someone will come along a tell you what to add to the BDA.INI file.

[harfordg]

Filtercheck.log attached - as requested

[harfordg]

Ah...needed to be zipped.

[harfordg]

Anyone can help with settings or shall I return and buy a true happauge dvb-s card?

[martint123]

I have had a 4000i running with gbpvr (in fact I've just spotted that the machine I use as my browsing machine has it installed.
ISTR there are two drivers floating around and one works.
looking at device manager, I have three entries
Pinnacle PCTV DVB-S Dual Common, driver dated 16/3/2007, version 4.2.1.0 and
Pinnacle PCTV DVB-S dual tuner 1 (and 2)

In config, I have it set as
Pinnacle DVB-S (1)
As it is only a test machine, I only have one of the tuners used - it looks like the second is selected by logical device number rather than name.
Here is an extract of my BDA.INI that I may have tweaked for the board, or it may be the same as yours.

Code:

[Pinnacle DVB-S (1)]
TUNING_TYPE=DVB-S
FILTER_TUNER="Pinnacle Stargate Tuner"
FILTER_CAPTURE="Pinnacle Stargate Capture"
PIN_TUNER_IN=Input0
PIN_TUNER_OUT=MPEG2 Transport
PIN_CAPTURE_IN=input0
PIN_CAPTURE_OUT=output1

Ahh, just had a test - I think it is one of the tuners that does not return proper data when scanning for channels. I seem to recall that I needed to use someone else's scan.cache file and map using that. Here is a link to a fairly recent cache file uploaded by Pob. The lack of scanning by a tuner can be a bit of a pain, but things don't change all that often and everything else works fine and hopefully, one of these days the reason and fix may be found - Pinnacle support sucks and one a produce is superceded, just forget it

http://forums.gbpvr.com//showthread.php?...ight=cache

Martin

[harfordg]

Hi Martin,

I have not quite got there yet...What device settings do I need to pick up BBC/ITV channels - I assume Astra 28 degrees East is what I need? I live in Edinburgh and have a 60 cm dish

Cheers

Gordon H

[martint123]

If you select Astra 28 East and do a scan, because of the oddities of that tuner, it will probably come back with 'no channels found'.
However, it should create a file in \program files\devnz\gbpvr\BDA called SCAN-x.cache where x is a nuber corresponding to the internal tuner number.
If you download and extract the zip file above and rename it to that file name you can then go back into gbpvr's config program and ignore the scan and just do a mapping to the channels you want.

[harfordg]

Hi Martin,

I am getting " GB-PVR was unable to start the BDA device you have configured. Check the device is configured properly, and not already in use. (Reason: Failed to locate configured BDA capture device" message.

I know this card work as I have it working on this machine using this machine's orginal hard disk and using the pctv utility. I have created brand new XP installation on different hard disk and booting from this and am doing my testing on this. I can get DVBdream working on this new configuaration too.

My device manager says 3 devices:

PCTV DVB-S Dual Common
PCTV DVB-S Dual Tuner1
PCTV DVB-S Dual Tuner2

I have updated the drivers from the orginal ones that came with the card to the versions you mentioned.

I had downloaded the scan-n.cache file that you suggested into the Devnz/GBPVR/BDA directory and had 2 files there. I have since deleted scan-1.cache(which was zero bytes) and renamed scan-n.cache to scan-1.cache

When I open up PXR32 and try to use LIve TV the screen just slightly dims and does not do anything else.

Please can you advise what I need to check next to get this working?

Thanks

gordon H

[martint123]

The first things that needs sorting is the "failed to locate" message, as this would stop anything further down the line from working.
Using the driver version I mentioned, can you run filtercheck again and post the resultant file. The names found in the list you posted earlier are like PCTV Stargate.... whereas the driver I use says Pinnacle Stargate... This is important for the software to be able to talk to the device/driver.
Did you paste the BDA.INI extract I posted above into the top of your main BDA.INI file - this is the bit that gets found when setting up the source and ticking teh box "only show detected devices" (or something like that.
Once the device gets detected, the normal thing to do would be to scan for channels, This is the bi that the 4000i doesn't do and needs the borrowed cache file.
Then you need some channels in the tuner source. These would normally come from an external source like the RadioTimes XML service via Birtles XMLTVGUI or with terrestrial freeview, from the broadcast itself. For testing, you could simply add a channel like BBC and then with config, map that to one of the entries in the borrowed cache file.

It is a lot to take in at once, but unfortunately, most things have to work before things can be seen. I'd also try viewing via the TV Guide rather than the LiveTV option, as then at leat you know which channel you are going to try to view.

Martin