Hi all...

I was wondering if anyone had a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1800 tuner card working in their R6 system? I have a Dragon v1.0, which is an older system but it does have a single PCIe x1 slot which the HVR-1800 should be able to reside in. I have an HD5000 tuner which has worked great, but now I need to add a second HD tuner to the system. I am looking for something that will work out of the box as my 3 year old keeps me so busy I do not have time to tinker much anymore. Just wanted to see if anyone else has had success with the HVR-1800 in R6...

Thanks in advance...
Trevor

Any one?

The firmware exists in the hauppauge-hvr-firmware package and the card looks like it was supported beginning at kernel 2.6.24. So, you look ok.



power off the box, install the card, fire up the box. Stop backend, run mythtv-setup and you should be ok.

_________________
Mike
My Hardware Profile

Thanks... Sounds like it *should* work... A co-worker is selling one for $50 - sounds like a good deal, as long is it works as well as the HD5000 I have.

UPDATE: I "borrowed" the 1800 from my coworker and tried it out this weekend. Good and bad results.

The Bad first: I upgraded fro R5.5 to R6.02. Everything went OK at first, but then towards the end I got an error that my database was too old for the version of mythtv in 6.02, and had to be updated. However, the update failed. I forget the details, but there are others who have had similar problems upgrading to R6.02. The fix looked more involved than I cared to attempt, so I decided to just do a clean install, since I had no recordings I really needed to keep. Since I was going to start from scratch, I went ahead and installed the HVR-1800 alongside my AirStar HD5000 and my PVR-250. The fresh install went OK, but after the reboot mythtv-setup started, and I could not figure out how to get both HD tuners configured. The mythtv hardware wiki said that the 1800 should use the DVD drivers. Easy enough. But the HD5000 was harder to configure. I tried a second DVB card, but the config location was already in use.

I finally gave up, pulled all tuner cards except the 1800, and tried again. This time, I got farther. I got the 1800 configured and could watch TV with it. Perhaps it was a reception problem, but my first impression was that the 1800 did not lock in channels as well as the 5000 - I saw more pixelization that I usually do with the HD5000. Buy for the most part the card worked OK. However, I could not get spdif audio to work from my chaintech AV710. This is probably unrelated to the 1800. I tried various combinations in the setup menu, but to no avail.

The next thing is to try re-inserting the HD5000 to see if I can get it to coexist with the 1800. But I wanted to report that the 1800 (at least the HD antenna portion) does indeed work with R6.02.

Trevor

Well, little did I know how difficult it was going to be to get my old AirStar HD5000 to work in my system again after installing the HVR-1800.

At first, I just reinstalled the HD5000 card back into the same PCI slot where it was installed previously. When I ran mythtv-setup for Tuner cards, I went to the DVB screen, found the HVR-1800 (was a Samsung chipset), and configured it to /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0. OK so far. Then I tried to add the HD5000, went to the DVB screen again, but the card was not found. The adapter showed /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0 (Already in use!). I rebooted and tried again and was about ready to give up when I ran across this thread.

That discussion gave me the idea of trying the HD5000 in a different PCI slot. I remember having to do tricks like this way back in the ISA card days, but I thought we were past this kind of foolishness now... I guess not!

I had to move the HD5000 three times. I finally ended up with it in the orange PCI slot at the bottom of my K8N Neo4 Platinum board. In this position, mythtv-setup recognized both HD5000 and HVR-1800 tuners, and let me configure them.

I was never able to get myth to recognize the SVideo/analog MPEG capture portion of the HVR-1800, even though I thought I had read somewhere that it was working now. Too bad. I did not spend a lot of time on this, since I still had my PVR-250. I reinstalled the 250 into the system, and got it configured and working again also.

So, the moral of the story is that PCI slot swapping is the rule of the day when dealing with multiple tuner cards sometimes. If it does not work, don't spend too much time with it. Move the card to a new slot and try again.

I hope this helps folks...

Trevor

I wanted to also write a short note about the tuning ability of the HVR-1800. After having both of them connected to the same antenna and scanning for channels, I can confirm that the HD5000 is the better tuner of the two. The PVR-1800 missed 2 multiplexes that the HD5000 was able to find.

Once locked on to a channel, both cards have a good picture; though I think the HD5000 might be a tad clearer. Still the HVR-1800 is decent card, and I have decided to keep it (hey, the price was right).

I configured the HD5000 to be higher priority, so most of the time it will be used anyway, unless something else is recording.

Q.E.D.

Trevor