Pinnacle Dual Dvb-t And Dual Dvb-s Experience And Pbs

[sl91]

Hello ,

 

Being a user of DVBViewer since July 2006 and owning two pinnacle PCTV pinnacle pci cards(dual DVB-T and dual sat pro), I would like to share my (small) experience. I had Windows xp pro until January, then Vista home premium. For the sat config, I have two LNB connected to the sat dish, with a disecq 1.0 , installed by a professional. Until, two days ago, although DVBViewer recognized the 4 tuners perfectly, it found only a part of the Astra 19.2E channels, almost none from hotbird and absolutely none from the DVB-T card.Thus, I had three problems:

 

1. No DVB-T channels were found on both two tuners of the dual dvb-t card.

2. On the sat, only approximately a half of Astra channnels were found.

3. On HotBird, almost no channels were found. It is clear that this is a problem connected to the disecq.

 

Solving Pb1:

 

After reading several posts on this forum (what a great forum it is ), I understood why I did not find DVB-T channels. I suffered from the problem of the 166hz offset. I tested many others DVB-T pci cards and USB adapters which were suffering from the same problem (pinnacle 3010iX PCiexpress, 310e USB,…).

 

Solving Pb2:

 

Thanks to the forum, I saw that the drivers (stargate) of the pinnacle dual sat had been updated. This update was not available on the official site of pinnacle!!! After updating...a miracle… on Astra all channels were found, approximately 1200 for the video , including encrypted ones.

 

Unsolved Pb3:

 

For this last problem, I found an indication on one post of the forum describing the same behaviour and stating that this was related to a disecq management issue. It was recommended to modify the setup.ini file, in the hardware section and to replace the line vendor=… Unfortunately, I did not find such a file in the DVBViewer folder. Maybe because the version of DVBViewer I have installed is too recent (3.6.1.20)? So this (last) problem is not solved and if one has a suggestion, it would be welcomed!

 

sl91

[Griga]

It was recommended to modify the setup.ini file, in the hardware section and to replace the line vendor=…

Only applies to TransEdit and DVBViewer GE. However, the latest versions should be able to identify the Dual DVB-S as Pinnacle device and apply the correct method for setting the DiSEqC params without the Setup.ini resp. TransEdit.ini patch.

 

Previous versions checked the device name (as displayed in Options -> Hardware) for the sub-string "PINNACLE PCTV", without success in case of the Stargate tuners. Now only for "PINNACLE". I'm quite sure it has also been fixed in DVBViewer Pro 3.6.1.2, and I wonder why it doesn't work in your case.

 

Did you perform a device detection (Options -> Hardware) after updating to the latest Dual Sat driver and DVBViewer Pro Version? If not, do it.

 

If this doesn't help: Go to About -> Info -> Version Info, click on the configuration path (opens an explorer window) and close DVBViewer. Then delete the file hardware.xml in that folder and restart DVBViewer Pro, thus forcing a complete new device detection.

 

If this doesn't help: Try if it works with TransEdit (-> members area). If yes, it's a DVBViewer Pro issue. If not, something different.

 

A whole lot of ifs I hope one of it works.

[sl91]

Thanks for the response,

 

I have tried all what you suggested. deleting hardware.xml don't help. Transedit behaves like DVBViewer. Then I switched the two cables connected to the LNB. Then, DVBViewer was able t find correctly all hotbird channels and almost none from astra (just 26). This cinfirm that my problem is connected to the LNB handling. DVBViewer (and transedit) is able to find all the channels from the LNB phyically connected to port 1 of the LNB and has much troubles with finding channels coming from port 2. By the way, I am sure that this problem comes from DVBViewer software because both pinnacle TVcenter pro 4.7 and cyberlink powercinema 5 are able to find all the channels from astra 19 and hotbird 13.

Thank's again for your help .

 

Best regards

 

Sid

 

 

Only applies to TransEdit and DVBViewer GE. However, the latest versions should be able to identify the Dual DVB-S as Pinnacle device and apply the correct method for setting the DiSEqC params without the Setup.ini resp. TransEdit.ini patch.

 

Previous versions checked the device name (as displayed in Options -> Hardware) for the sub-string "PINNACLE PCTV", without success in case of the Stargate tuners. Now only for "PINNACLE". I'm quite sure it has also been fixed in DVBViewer Pro 3.6.1.2, and I wonder why it doesn't work in your case.

 

Did you perform a device detection (Options -> Hardware) after updating to the latest Dual Sat driver and DVBViewer Pro Version? If not, do it.

 

If this doesn't help: Go to About -> Info -> Version Info, click on the configuration path (opens an explorer window) and close DVBViewer. Then delete the file hardware.xml in that folder and restart DVBViewer Pro, thus forcing a complete new device detection.

 

If this doesn't help: Try if it works with TransEdit (-> members area). If yes, it's a DVBViewer Pro issue. If not, something different.

 

A whole lot of ifs I hope one of it works.

[Griga]

Bad news. Most likely the Dual Sat Pro requires a different method of passing DiSEqC parameters than other Pinnacle devices, because it is based on a different design (Stargate). Unfortunately Pinnacle refuses any support for developers of third party applications - we have already tried, and got as reply

 

we don't actually offer any support for anyone who wish to make their own software like this, we only offer standard support for the use of our products with the software the came with. We can not give details about this matter out to the public.

 

In that particular case we managed to find it out by other means, but we have no starting point for the Dual Sat Pro yet. I thought it would work with the known method, but after digging through reports in the German forum again, I must admit that there was no confirmation for it.

 

Sorry to say - at the moment there is nothing we can do about it...

[sl91]

Thanks again Griga for your help. I don't understand why pinnacle don't want to give the low level code for their hardware. I confirm that their technical support is very very very bad (at least here in France). They gave me wrong advissement often. We are far from the time when it was Miro (and bt848 chipsets)

 

Any way,, I can tell you that DVBViewer is, by far, the best software to use with DVB devices. Believe me, I tried much of them (almost all) with many adapters. With DVBViewer, we really feel that one is able to use all the possibilities of the hardware and in a very convinient way. I hope that the team will continue to develop this software...next competitor is really very far behind

 

Sid