Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Listener]

Today I installed a Hauppauge USB TV tuner (WinTV-HVR-850) on a laptop with a 2.4 GHz P4 and 512 MB of Ram.  The device was recognized by Win XP home SP2 and the drivers were installed from the CD that came with the device.

 I have also installed the WinTV application software on the Hauppauge CD.  Then I updated drivers and the WinTV applications with the latest versions from the Hauppauge web site.   I can play TV channels through the WinTV application.

----
I started MC 12 and clicked on on the TV Tuner device under "Drives & Devices" .  I followed the directions on the screen "How to watch broadcast or cable TV with MC".

I have cable TV with analog channels. At step 4, after I click on "Options", then click on the TV channels tab and choose "Analog", the dialog disappears before I can select "Scan for channels".  MC is not responsive to clicking any UI element.  MC 12 has been using 30-50% of CPU time and doing a little disk I/O for at least 15 minutes. 

MC 12 gives me no indication of what it is doing.  I have no way of knowing whether it would ever finish and become responsive again.  I know that this behavior of becoming unresponsive is repeatable; I have tried this process several times.

Maybe MC 12 is scanning for TV channels and the process takes a long time.  If so, MC should have displayed some kind of progress dialog.

----
I next tried MC 13.0.50.  I clicked on the television device and got MC 13 to scan the analog channels.  It found all the expected channels (and one extra.)  However, when I selected a channel and clicked on "Watch", I got a generic error message:

"Media Center encountered errors while trying to play the last several files. Please make sure that the path in your media library points to the right location."

Not much help.  The help file appears to be out-of-date for MC 13.  No help there.

I didn't find anything useful on this forum either.
----
I'd like to be able to use the WinTV device from MC 12 and MC 13.  Right now, I can't use it from either one.

Any suggestions from JRiver or from fellow users?

Bill

[Yaobing]

I next tried MC 13.0.50.  I clicked on the television device and got MC 13 to scan the analog channels.  It found all the expected channels (and one extra.)  However, when I selected a channel and clicked on "Watch", I got a generic error message:

"Media Center encountered errors while trying to play the last several files. Please make sure that the path in your media library points to the right location."

Not much help.  The help file appears to be out-of-date for MC 13.  No help there.

We may need to tweak our code for analog tuner of this device. Can you email me a log file for failure to watch a channel? yaobing at jriver dot com

Also did you try double-clicking  the channel entry instead of clicking on "Watch" button?

I didn't find anything useful on this forum either.
----
I'd like to be able to use the WinTV device from MC 12 and MC 13.  Right now, I can't use it from either one.

Any suggestions from JRiver or from fellow users?

Bill

Does digital tuner on this device work?

[Listener]

We may need to tweak our code for analog tuner of this device. Can you email me a log file for failure to watch a channel? yaobing at jriver dot com

Also did you try double-clicking  the channel entry instead of clicking on "Watch" button?

Does digital tuner on this device work?

I emailed log files from MC 12 and MC 13 attempts to you.

I did try double-clicking on the channel 4 line in the channel list in MC 13.  Since the scan did not complete successfully in MC 12, there were no channels listed.

I don't know about the digital tuner.  My cable service is analog.  I can try later to rig up the tiny digital TV antenna that came with the WinTV device but I don't live close to any transmitters.

Bill

[Yaobing]

Thanks for the log files. The logs show a "WinTV HVR-950 Capture" device. I suppose it is the same as WinTV-HVR-850?

Did you keep "This device requires a cable to route audio to sound card" unchecked?

For some reason the video capture pin on the device can not be rendered.

[Listener]

> The logs show a "WinTV HVR-950 Capture" device. I suppose it is the same as WinTV-HVR-850?

The specs appeared to be about the same.  I have no more information.

> Did you keep "This device requires a cable to route audio to sound card" unchecked?

Yes.

> For some reason the video capture pin on the device can not be rendered.

So where do we go from here?

Bill

[Yaobing]

> The logs show a "WinTV HVR-950 Capture" device. I suppose it is the same as WinTV-HVR-850?
The specs appeared to be about the same.  I have no more information.

Make sure you install the correct driver.

> For some reason the video capture pin on the device can not be rendered.

So where do we go from here?

I am not sure what the right course is. Some of these hybrid devices do a bad job in their analog portion. I will try some tweaking in my code. You will have to wait until a new MC13 build comes out.

[Listener]

>>> The logs show a "WinTV HVR-950 Capture" device. I suppose it is the same as WinTV-HVR-850?
>> The specs appeared to be about the same.  I have no more information.

> Make sure you install the correct driver.

T
As I said in my original post, I installed the driver s/w that came on a CD with the hardware.  And then downloaded the latest drivers from the Hauppauge web site.  I see drivers for the Win-TV-HVR-850 NTSC capture device listed in Control Panel/System/hardware/Device Manager. 

So XP recognizes the device as an 850 rather than a 950.  It is possible that Hauppauge has made mistakes in providing the right drivers or that there are mistakes in the .INF installation files.  I can watch and record analog channels with the Win TV application that comes with the hauppauge hardware.

> I am not sure what the right course is. Some of these hybrid devices do a bad job in their analog portion.

It would be useful if the JRiver site provided much more specific information (in one place) about what devices MC works with and what features aren't supported.  I don't consider the current situation to be satisfactory.

> I will try some tweaking in my code. You will have to wait until a new MC13 build comes out.

I'll be waiting to try the next round.  However, I have not yet bought an upgrade license for MC 13.  I will upgrade when I'm satisfied that it is stable enough for daily use.

bill