UK setup - some issues

[slayer]

I have Telewest or (C&W now) cable. I use BLEB to grab my data. Am in UK.
My kit is: VIA M10k, Wintv-pvr-350, 512Mb stick, Travla C137 120W case.

I have some questions. Apologies in advance if I am being a newb -I have tried searching the forums and bladerhq wiki, with some success. but some niggles:

is BLEB the best for London UK? does it have all the channels? suspect not.

If I put the PC into Standby, the Travla C137 case doesnt have a 'soft' resume button. just the power button. Once it sleeps, not sure how to wake it! How do I configure the recording service to wake it up? seen numerous posts about people getting it working, but not how they did it. :confused:
Sub, for the interests of the environment, I think you or someone equally clever should have a sticky on this; I suspect most people dont bother, and have 90W+ power supplies running 24/7. related: the shutdown plugin - does it have a suspend mode? rather than shutdown only?

the via M10k seems to crash sometimes with WinTV-pvr-350. I have tried a lot of BIOS tweaks, and consulted forums, and have come to conclusion that there is a fundamental bug, and all you can do is try and limit IO to avoid crash. Is this current thinking or is there something new?

Intend to use redeye to change the cable box channels (yes I have the awkward box), which inputs on svideo in to the WinTV card. How do I map channel numbers to the channels in this case? Can I mix terrestrial and cable channels? if I do that, can i have BBC1-CH5 (terrrestrials) along with 'the rest' of the cable in the same configuration? For example - if I have configured BBC1 as channel 26, wont redeye try and send that to my cable box? suspect I have missed the plot on this one

my wintv svideo out is black and white. the composite is colour. hmm, this may be my dodgy SCART converter plug - some have cores missing. but any advice appreciated.

Travla C137 fan is really noisy! Anyone had the same experience? Any reccos for a replacement that works with dynamics of this case?

bleepbloop actually puts a button on my menu (why?) when I click it, GB-PVR stops responding although the mouse works, and you can Ctrl-Alt-Del to kill the gb-pvr process.

If I get answers to this, I will send back to the wiki! everyones a beginner once!

-Slay

[sub]

If I put the PC into Standby, the Travla C137 case doesnt have a 'soft' resume button. just the power button. Once it sleeps, not sure how to wake it! How do I configure the recording service to wake it up? seen numerous posts about people getting it working, but not how they did it.
Sub, for the interests of the environment, I think you or someone equally clever should have a sticky on this; I suspect most people dont bother, and have 90W+ power supplies running 24/7. related: the shutdown plugin - does it have a suspend mode? rather than shutdown only?

I just leave my PC going the whole time, so I'm not really familiar with all the issues etc. GB-PVR just uses the ACPI interface to schedule the machine to wake for the next recording. If your machine supports this, it'll wake up. There is nothing you need to enable in GB-PVR. If you machine doesnt start there may be something in the BIOS to enable support for this.

the via M10k seems to crash sometimes with WinTV-pvr-350. I have tried a lot of BIOS tweaks, and consulted forums, and have come to conclusion that there is a fundamental bug, and all you can do is try and limit IO to avoid crash. Is this current thinking or is there something new?

The PVR350 has buggy drivers, and does seem to cause these problems on lots of hardware. I am no longer looking at this problem (I was wasting lots of time on this one).

my wintv svideo out is black and white. the composite is colour. hmm, this may be my dodgy SCART converter plug - some have cores missing. but any advice appreciated.

Sorry, I dont know. Could be a dodgy scart converter.

bleepbloop actually puts a button on my menu (why?) when I click it, GB-PVR stops responding although the mouse works, and you can Ctrl-Alt-Del to kill the gb-pvr process.

Go into the config app plugin list, and uncheck it. This will hide the button. I've never tried it myself, so I dont know what happens when you click it.

[slayer]

*bump*

Just want the input of anyone out there who has a Nehemiah M10000 and a PVR-350 - have you guys got some stable configuration working? I'm sure its like the lottery, but worth a check before I stump up the cash for another mini-itx board.

On that subject, what are people using successfully with the Hauppauge pvr-350?

cheers

[Beaker]

my wintv svideo out is black and white. the composite is colour. hmm, this may be my dodgy SCART converter plug - some have cores missing. but any advice appreciated.

You may be able to solve this if you can switch your TV to S-video mode.

If you can switch your TV to S-video mode, it looks for Luminance on Scart pin 20 and Chrominance on pin 15. If, like me, you can't switch to s-video mode, then the TV is looking for a composite picture on pin 20 and only finds luminance. Voila, black and white.

So I got this adapter from svideo.com. It connects my S-video cable to my scart adapter.

Sorted me out.

[slayer]

many thanks for your post, beaker. this is an svid to RCA-type connector. do you lose quality by going to RCA?

cheers

[Beaker]

I can only guess that I did. I don't have an S-video capable TV to compare it with.

That said, I'm very happy with the quality of recorded TV - hard to distinguish it from the original analog cable signal.

[birty]

is BLEB the best for London UK? does it have all the channels? suspect not.

radio times has (almost?) all tv channels but no radio channels, see my website ( http://www.birtles.org.uk/xmltv ) for a grabber

[Clanky]

If you download XMLTV & look inside share\xmltv\tv_grab_uk_rt\channel_ids it shows a list (all?) of channels on the RT site.

http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/channels.dat

[SimonP]

Just want the input of anyone out there who has a Nehemiah M10000 and a PVR-350 - have you guys got some stable configuration working? I'm sure its like the lottery, but worth a check before I stump up the cash for another mini-itx board.

Not really much help but I'm using an almost identical setup but with the PVR-250 and not having any problems with that.

As Sub has said several times, the M10000 is a bit underpowered for this kind of app. so perhaps trying it in a faster computer might shed some light? although if there's a known problem with the 350's drivers then you might be best selling it and getting a 250 or something different. Trouble with that is that the M10000's video out isn't all that good, almost certainly worse than the 350's.

[slayer]

SimonP

Would it be too much trouble to ask, your driver versions for OS, Via chipset, etc? From browsing the forums, it appears that M10000's are a bit flaky and its pot luck with the drivers if you suceed or not.

Is there anyone else out there with a stable M10K/pvr-250 or pvr-350 setup?
I'd love to find out. Currently, I seem to spend more time trying to get my PVR to work that actually watching any shows! maybe this is the rite of passage or something. My girlfriend has despaired and calmly bought a VHS. Help me eliminate obsolete technology from my house!

cheers