Tvheadend

roswell grey wrote:

Found out (the hard way) that this snippet (from a post a year ago) is very good advice

Mark Clarkstone wrote:

What are you running on? Is the stick on its own USB bus? I ask because many of these DVB-T2 sticks play up if they don't get the full use of the bus ......

What tuner are you using that's giving you trouble?

So, just wondered if anyone has any recommendations for a pci/pci-e usb card that is happy on linux and will co-exist with the on-board mobo usb buses
(Objective is to create an additional usb bus for an additional tuner)

This can be a bit hard to answer as all motherboard vary, but most of usb ext cards should work without issue provided that they're supported. Look for one that meets your requirements & do a little research on it, make sure it doesn't use the same chipset as the belkin you mention.

I would have thought that any old card would be ok, but am asking the question as I tried an old Belkin card I had knocking around and it is not happy at all (maybe it has failed, not sure ...)

Am currently running 2 x Hauppauge SoloHD sticks.
And they work really well as long as they have a usb bus to themselves.
(my mobo/chipset has 2 USB2 buses)

Put both of them on the same usb bus and continuity/transport errors start to become a problem

Add a 3rd tuner (a PCTV nano) & it (obviously) ends up sharing a bus with one of the hauppauges, and errors start to increase quite nastily.
(reducing the number of PIDs on the PCTV didn't help in this case btw)

Will continue the usb card research, or try and find a cheap pci(e) dvb-t card. Thanks for the thoughts

roswell grey wrote:

Am currently running 2 x Hauppauge SoloHD sticks.
And they work really well as long as they have a usb bus to themselves.
(my mobo/chipset has 2 USB2 buses)

Put both of them on the same usb bus and continuity/transport errors start to become a problem

I have the August T210v2 that uses the same chipset as the SoloHD (Silicon Labs Si21** - only difference being the revision & usb interface) & have experienced the CC/TS errors you describe. From what I've read this can be caused by the tuner being put into a low power mode & waking up incorrectly. Mine are quite happily sharing a bus & have very few issues, minus the odd hiccup relating to signal (yay low signal area & engineering works!).

Add a 3rd tuner (a PCTV nano) & it (obviously) ends up sharing a bus with one of the hauppauges, and errors start to increase quite nastily.

I'm guessing either the 290e or the 292e? I have one of those (290e) as well & that one can be real fussy if it doesn't 'think' it's getting the whole bus!

(reducing the number of PIDs on the PCTV didn't help in this case btw)

Will continue the usb card research, or try and find a cheap pci(e) dvb-t card. Thanks for the thoughts

All of the above tuners - along with a dual S2/T2 pcie and a single S2 pcie card are running quite happily in my old HP Microserver N36L (or N40L I can't remember, I have two).

Do you have power save disabled for all devices (it's an option for each tuner in Tvheadend)? And for the hauppauge's try setting the retune value to 2 & see if that helps.

The PCTV is a "73e SE"
Definately have the power save option disabled on all the sticks (the server spends most of its time shutdown, and only wakes up to record/share, so it never made sense to enable it)
Starting to think the bus sharing is a chipset "issue" - all chipsets are not created equal, and mine might not be terribly good at realtime streaming/timely sharing of the available bandwidth.
Thanks for the retune param value suggestion - will give it a shot ...