PCTV nanostick 290e problems with WMC

WhiteChristmas

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I'm having a bit of a problem with this tuner. When I go through TV setup, Media Center will find the tuner and tell me it's supported but won't be configured (doesn't tell me why - not very helpful).

I have added the software that comes with the CD to be able to use it with Media Center and also increased my tuner limit to 8 via tunersalad, just in case (as I already have two PCI tuners, a single one for satellite, which receives HD, and a single card with two tuners). I thought the card was being picky with my signal so I bought a new booster and spent ages fiddling with the aerial yesterday but to no avail.

To double check it wasn't the signal, I installed the PCTV software and it found about 108 channels (all SD at 100%, HD at 49% - but they play fine). It is really annoying.

Anybody have any ideas?
 
Do you have any other DVB-T tuners? If yes, don't pool the stick with them when setting up the tuners in MCE because if you do MCE will do a channel scan with one of the other tuners and not find the HD channels.

Instead, create a separate DVB-T tuner for the stick and MCE will scan and find the HD channels (and merge all other channels with those of the other DVB-T tuners so don't worry about duplicates).

Hope this helps, took me about 5 hours to work it out on Friday...

PS: MCE recognises the stick as two tuners, one of which won't be configured. That's fine and nothing to worry about, DVBLink does the same thing but works fine with just the one.
 
Do you have any other DVB-T tuners? If yes, don't pool the stick with them when setting up the tuners in MCE because if you do MCE will do a channel scan with one of the other tuners and not find the HD channels.

Instead, create a separate DVB-T tuner for the stick and MCE will scan and find the HD channels (and merge all other channels with those of the other DVB-T tuners so don't worry about duplicates).

Hope this helps, took me about 5 hours to work it out on Friday...

PS: MCE recognises the stick as two tuners, one of which won't be configured. That's fine and nothing to worry about, DVBLink does the same thing but works fine with just the one.

Thanks for the reply, I'm a bit confused though. I've have a dual DVB-T tuner along with a satellite S2 card. It picks up three separate tuners and then tells me there is another one available that won't be configured (the 290e).

I was allowing WMC to scan everything automatically, how do I create a separate DVB-T tuner for the stick?

Thanks again for your help.
 
Once MCE went trough the tuner detection, say that you want to configure your setup manually.

Let's assume you have 2x DVB-T, 1x DVB-S and 1x DVB-T2 (my setup). The way to configure this is as follows:

Create 1 terrestrial tuner, select the stick.
Create 1 terrestrial tuner, select the two other DVB-T tuners.
Finally, create 1 satellite tuner and select the DVB-S card.

Then let MCE scan the channels and it will find all satellite, T and T2 channels.
 
Once MCE went trough the tuner detection, say that you want to configure your setup manually.

Let's assume you have 2x DVB-T, 1x DVB-S and 1x DVB-T2 (my setup). The way to configure this is as follows:

Create 1 terrestrial tuner, select the stick.
Create 1 terrestrial tuner, select the two other DVB-T tuners.
Finally, create 1 satellite tuner and select the DVB-S card.

Then let MCE scan the channels and it will find all satellite, T and T2 channels.

Thanks for your help Alex.

I really had a tough time with this one but have now got it working.

I went through it manually and set MC up to scan the stick, then the 2 x T2 and satellite but because it was taking a long time to scan I decided to minimise WMC to allow it to carry on scanning in the background while I did some surfing (you know, multitasking and all that :)) but MC didn't like this as I was told after each (pretty quick) scan that there were no channels found. After the third or fourth attempt, I just let MC scan the stick to see if it could find the HD channels - after a long time, it did.

I then set up all the tuners again and left MC alone to scan - it took AGES to scan everything - hence why I didn't reply last night (more like early this morning)!

Now I just need to sort out the guide as it's showing no info for the HD channels. I've tried using big screen EPG, etc but they all seem like such a faff - haven't investigated further but can I get the stick to pull the info from the air? I would use GuideTool to sort out all my channels/guide but I've never been able to get it to connect to my machine (always get the message 'connection actively refused').

Anyway, thanks again for your help, it's much apprecated.
 
Now I just need to sort out the guide as it's showing no info for the HD channels. I've tried using big screen EPG, etc but they all seem like such a faff - haven't investigated further but can I get the stick to pull the info from the air? I would use GuideTool to sort out all my channels/guide but I've never been able to get it to connect to my machine (always get the message 'connection actively refused').
You can just add the SD listings for BBC One HD and Channel 4 HD. BBC HD listings are available via satellite, so if you are using DVB-S you should be able to access them via 'edit listings' in MC.

I don't find GuideTool very user-friendly either!
 
You can just add the SD listings for BBC One HD and Channel 4 HD.

I did just that and it worked well. Only 'minor' issue is that if you use 'My Channel Logos' to add logos to the guide the same logo shows for both the SD and HD channel.

Also, I tried Big Screen EPG over the weekend but found it rather complicated to use and setup. Ended up messing up my guide data a lot and had to reset MCE and start setting up again...
 
Okay, I've eventually got GuideTool working now (well, last night)!

I hadn't ticked the 'GuideTool addin' box in the Setup menu/extras (hadn't realised it was there).

However, even when I had ticked it, guide tool would only work if WMC was windowed, ie, not full screen, not open and minimised - windowed on the screen so you could see MC and the guidetool.

Very handy tool as it allowed me to merge all my tuners in one go, rather than the laborious process of doing it through MC.

I assumed it would allow me to pull the EPG data for 4HD/ITV1 HD from the Sky or Virgin lineup but it didn't seem to do anything - maybe I didn't leave it long enough to populate, has anyone else successfully done this?
 
I assumed it would allow me to pull the EPG data for 4HD/ITV1 HD from the Sky or Virgin lineup but it didn't seem to do anything - maybe I didn't leave it long enough to populate, has anyone else successfully done this?

I tried to pull EPG data for BBC 1 HD and ITV 1 HD using EPG Collector (which gets the Open TV EPG data from the satellite feed using your DVB-S card) and then import the data into MCE using BigScreenEPG but there doesn't seem to be any data for these two channels. All other 120 channels I set-up to receive guide data in the same way work fine...
 
The EPG data is broadcast on Freeview - is there no way you can pick it up from there?

Just read a thread on the DVBViewer forum about this card and they say DVBViewer picked the EPG for all 4 channels up straight away from the Freeview broadcast stream.

The thread seems to come to the conclusion that DVBVoewer supports DVB-T2.
 
Don't suppose anyone has found out a way to convert the HD .wtv to dvr-ms ?
 
I tried to pull EPG data for BBC 1 HD and ITV 1 HD using EPG Collector (which gets the Open TV EPG data from the satellite feed using your DVB-S card) and then import the data into MCE using BigScreenEPG but there doesn't seem to be any data for these two channels. All other 120 channels I set-up to receive guide data in the same way work fine...

Correction: I tried again and EPG Collector is picking up data from the satellite for the HD channels now. Plus, BSEPG is inserting the lovely HD logos when loading the data into MCE so all is well!
 
I tried to pull EPG data for BBC 1 HD and ITV 1 HD using EPG Collector (which gets the Open TV EPG data from the satellite feed using your DVB-S card) and then import the data into MCE using BigScreenEPG but there doesn't seem to be any data for these two channels. All other 120 channels I set-up to receive guide data in the same way work fine...

120 channels? Is that more than you expected to get?

The author of this review gained an extra 43 channels with his BGT3620, but didn't explain why:
Exclusive Hands On Review of the Black Gold BGT3620 Dual DVB-T/T2 Tuner Card | Using Windows Home Server

Perhaps the DVB-T2 tuners are more sensitive? Are you picking up channels from another transmitter which you weren't getting before?
 
Correction: I tried again and EPG Collector is picking up data from the satellite for the HD channels now. Plus, BSEPG is inserting the lovely HD logos when loading the data into MCE so all is well!

That's good news - glad you put me onto EPG collector as it seems a lot less faf than some of the others. I'll give it a try tonight with BSEPG and see if I can get it working.

A couple of question, I've already linked my HD channels to the SD equivalent, do I just edit channels back to 'no data' before running this or will it inject the EPG data over the existing info? And will there be any issues following the merging of all my channels?

Cheers guys.
 
I've already linked my HD channels to the SD equivalent, do I just edit channels back to 'no data' before running this or will it inject the EPG data over the existing info? And will there be any issues following the merging of all my channels?

Well, BSEPG is supposed to replace the guide info in MCE with its own but it didn't work for me. Instead, I found it easier to import the BSEPG data into MCE and then change the listings for each channel to the ones imported. This is fairly easy if you assign channel logos BEFORE the import as they will show up when you decide which listing to use. So even if there are several listings for Channel 4 just pick the one with the logo.

And doing it this way you will have seperate entries for 4 and 4HD for example as you will import them as 2 channels.
 
Well, BSEPG is supposed to replace the guide info in MCE with its own but it didn't work for me. Instead, I found it easier to import the BSEPG data into MCE and then change the listings for each channel to the ones imported. This is fairly easy if you assign channel logos BEFORE the import as they will show up when you decide which listing to use. So even if there are several listings for Channel 4 just pick the one with the logo.

And doing it this way you will have seperate entries for 4 and 4HD for example as you will import them as 2 channels.

I got EPG collector to work but then discovered that my trial for BSEPG had expired so didn't want to take it any futher as I understand it would only give me 4 days worth of EPG.

I tried another tool, which looked promising (and far less complicated than BSEPG) - tvguidehound, however this kept falling over ('tvguidehound has stopped working') when I tried to populate the channels. What a pain!

Anyone got any other - simple - solutions?
 
Personally, I think BSEPG is well worth paying for - after all it's $20 for 2 years and it is a very good tool.

Yes, scraping EPG data off the air only gives you 7 days of data but that's not BSEPG's fault. If you want more data you could investigate (and pay for) the DigiGuide option...
 
Personally, I think BSEPG is well worth paying for - after all it's $20 for 2 years and it is a very good tool.

Yes, scraping EPG data off the air only gives you 7 days of data but that's not BSEPG's fault. If you want more data you could investigate (and pay for) the DigiGuide option...

Don't get me wrong, I'd be happy to pay for BSEPG if I could have got it working before the trial ran out so I could see the real benefit (not BSEPG's fault, I just found the whole thing a bit complicated so gave up). I didn't realise OTA scraping only gave you seven days.

I had a look at DigiGuide and it looks cool but I don't really thing it's the solution for me.
 

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