VISTA MCE for DVB-S using Hauppauge NOVA-S+

[Davehorne]

Firstly, a note for Hauppauge, should they be listening.

Some of us cannot receive DVB-T and have to rely on satellite for our TV.

Here's my summary of DVB-S to DVB-T emulation under VISTA MCE compared with the same under MCE2005.

(a) MCE2005:
Channels disappear under this scheme (DVB-S to DVB-T emulation) because MCE2005 indulges in something called "opportunistic scanning". This simply means that, every now and again, MCE does a channel scan without you having asked for a scan. Some channels that are off-air at that time (e.g. evening only channels like BBC3 and BBC4) go missing whilst some channels you had previously excluded magically appear.

It's very frustrating but it is a "feature" (sir) of MCE2005. I have researched this thoroughly and I believe there is nothing that can be done about it.

(b) MCE VISTA

MCE in VISTA does not suffer from this problem, the EPG stays very stable. Unfortunately the NOVA-S+ driver support for MCE VISTA does not work and the result is that it often hangs up.

So: you can have unstable EPG with stable Hauppauge drivers in MCE2005. Or you can have stable EPG with unstable Hauppauge drivers in MCE VISTA.

Great isn't it

What are other people's experience of trying to get Hauppauge staellite cards working in VISTA MCE?

[Stiggy]

Originally Posted by Davehorne

Firstly, a note for Hauppauge, should they be listening.

Why not tell them yourself?

[Davehorne]

I have told them myself on the UK Hauppauge board. But no reply.

However, I have had a reply from a German member who reports that starting Vista with only one of the two CPUs of the Intel Duo-core enabled fixes the crash problems.

I have now tried this on my setup, and so far (1 evening) it has worked.

Here's my report as posted on the Hauppauge board - for anyone trying to run NOVA-S+ cards in a duo-core Vista setup.

--------------------
I agree with Okatomy's diagnosis. I have now tried starting Vista with only one CPU of my dual core setup enabled. I no longer have the frequent crashes I was experiencing previously. Re-enable both cores - frequent crashes (TV channel hangs up). Return to one core - no problems, runs fine with all 3 tuners e.g. 2 recording, 1 viewing.

Early days - have only been running for one evening. But I have never run previously without a hang-up for long and never been able to use all 3 tuners simultaneously without hang up before.

Perhaps I can finally de-commission my existing XM2005 MCE edition drive

Is there an issue with this combination of Duo-Core/NOVA-S+/VISTA??

I now also think so!

The is my system spec:

ASUS P5W DH Deluxe board in Zalman HD-160 case. Intel CoreDuo 6300 @1.86GHz. 2Gb RAM. 1000Gb RAID-10 drive for data + single 500Gb system drive (all Seagate SATA). ASUS EN6600-Silent graphics card driving LG 42" Plasma screen. 3 x NOVA-S+ cards using 3 channels of quad LNB pointed at ASTRA 28.2 (SKY). VISTA Ultimate 32 bit OS.