Just a quick report. Smooth Hardware Upgrade.

[Cal]

Just a quick report.

I went from a P3-800 to a P4 3.05 running Raid 5 last night. (3x300GB)

I put 4 tuners in the new box. But only have the 2 sat receivers at the moment.
I put in the 2 PVR 250s that I already had and a NVIDIA DualTV card that I got new.

I have not yet tried to use the Nvidia card however. But it did install without any issues.

Using the built in backup and restore sure makes this a lot easier then last time I redid the system. I did have to rerun the setup anyway. It came up and said there was 0 GB free on the drive but pressing explore and reselecting the common folder fixed that. I also had to retell it what video source was connected to what IR set.

All my Jobs were there.
The Job priority was correct
The history was all intact.
And all other settings seem to be in place such as my VBR settings and so forth.

It went very smooth. I’m very happy. I BTV.

There will be more to report after I get the next two sat receivers hooked up and running and move the box away from the TV and into another room.

May or may not be awhile. This part took awhile since I did a whole new system and this machine is the recycled hardware that I replaced.

I foresee some sort of NAS box happening in the future as well. I wonder if I could do something with the P3-800 I just replaced.

OK. Not so quick a report.

[btvfreak]

Originally Posted by Cal

I foresee some sort of NAS box happening in the future as well. I wonder if I could do something with the P3-800 I just replaced.

Glad to hear things went so smoothly. That P3 probably would be a good candidate for NasLite, FreeNAS, or something similar. The only issue I've found with old boxes it that they do not have much room for several hard drives. I have a couple pld P3s sitting here and they only have 1 3.5" internal bay and 2 5.25" bays.

I just bought a Cooler Master Stacker case (lots of drive room). I might go all the way and buy some new/cheap components, or just gut one of the P3 boxes and do a transplant.

[Cal]

Bell ExpressVu IR Sets below, but first…

To sum up. I went from this

Dedicated BTV 4.5, XP pro SP2 running on a lowly P3-800, 512MB Ram, 20+200+250GB Drives,
Dual Recording via 2 PVR250 cards, VBR, FX 5200, USB-UIRT, UltraVNC, Bell ExpressVu.

To this

Dedicated BTV 4.5, XP pro SP2 running on a P4 3.05, 512MB Ram, 300GBx3 Drives (Raid 5),
Quad Recording via 2 PVR250 cards and an Nvidia DualTV Card, VBR, 9800pro
USB-UIRT, UltraVNC, Bell ExpressVu.


The 250GB in the P3 died a long time ago and I've been limping along without it for awhile. I had them spanned and therefore lost all data at the time. Hence the reason I went Raid 5 in the new setup as well as the new main box.

Wow. Just searched on my ID and see it was a full Year ago that I lost that drive. How in the world did I make it a year with just a single 200GB drive is beyond me? Hmm, guess I should have updated that sig awhile ago... I always meant to replace that drive shortly but just never got around to it.


Much better. This new BTV box is my old main box (the P4) and is now dedicated to BTV.

The current main box is faster (Core 2 Duo), has more raid and water cooled. (and completely silent, I love it.)

The P3 currently boots but is not in active use yet. (Future NAS box)





on with my story.

I bought 2 more sat receivers. The current base model is 4100. While the 2 3100 boxes continued to work the 2 4100 boxes went into screen saver mode giving recordings of the screen saver.

The solution was to turn off nightly updates in the boxes. There have been no further issues in the last couple weeks.





Bell IR Sets.

But the real reason for this post is to post my IR sets. The USB-UIRT can be very picky when learning from the Bell remotes but it does work. You have to hold it at the proper angle and the proper distance. Hold it for 3 seconds, no more, no less, you get the idea. I think I redid each one of the following sets several times each to get them right.

I've posted the 2 I had before and it helped a couple people so I figured now that I finally redid them I'd post all 4.

So if you have Bell ExpressVu here they are. This time they are actually named after the IR set used instead of “old sat box” and “new sat box”.


See Attached file at the bottom of this post. Its a zip containing the the 4 rmt files for Bell IR Sets 1 to 4.


Set your IR channel on each Sat box and then use the above files for the USB-UIRT.
There is no need for Zones if you’re using a Sat box that can be set for different IR sets.

If you’re using Bell ExpressVu you can use the above files. If you’re not, then just pick “unknown remote” and learn each set into the system. If you can’t set the IR chan on your Sat box then you will have to look at how Zones work. I have no info on Zones as I’ve never looked into it.





Further thoughts.

The NVIDIA DualTV card is great. It works nicely with my 2 pvr250 cards. The recording quality for this card seems very good.

I had some concerns because the interrupt for the slots is the same for the 9800pro and the Raid card. But it seems to be working fine so no issues. There was no other way to fit the cards in without having the cables from the raid card get in the way of something.

After the holidays I’ll look into moving the BTV box to under the stairs storage that’s walled off. Lots of room but the furnace is there as well. I’m concerned about heat. The furnace does not pipe heat directly into there but its slightly warmer then the rest of the basement.

Or I could go to a closet on another floor. But the closet I’m thinking of does not have enough room for all I’d want to put in it.

The P4 is ok but not what I’d call silent. Or perhaps I’ll just change the cooling system on it. I never realized how noisy it was until I had the Core 2 box running in the same room. It’s dead silent. It makes the P4 seem very loud by comparison. I think the old P3 is a little quieter then the P4. If I’m going to convert the P3 to a NAS box then I may want to just move both of them to another room rather then redoing the cooling.





Nitpicks

I redid my lineups this past weekend as there have been a couple new channels added. What a pain. I had forgotten that the web site and the chan lineup you see in BTV are not directly related. Ideally this should just be a matter of changing it on the snapstream site and then having a button in BTV telling it to update. You also have to go into setup and retell each source what listing to use. Doing so seems to rename the source back to the default name instead of the friendly name I had given it so I can remember what it’s for.

What is the idea behind “checkmark to show this channel” on the website and “checkmark to hide this channel” within BTV? Pick one or the other, better yet, sync the two lists.

Found out the hard way again. (forgot that I had previously found this out the hard way last time) that running the BTV setup will override any modifications you have made to remote.ini in the BTV section for those of us using the pvr250 remotes. I had an old copy but it took a few minutes to figure out why not all the buttons on my remote were doing what they are programmed to do. Oddly enough it does not override other sections that I had customized.

Keep in mind that these are nitpicks only. BTV is still great. Well worth it.

[oceanborn]

I'm having a helluva hard time making the IR blaster to work...simply put, I can't...None of the codes work....I don't have the USB-UART like you...I have the one that comes with the Hauppauge PVR-150, will those codes you advertised work in my case and if so, where do I save the files? Which directory?
Apreciate your help

[LORENJOHNS]

as far as you questiion about the nas, i just got a copy of windows home server
and will be putting a box together next week i will let you all know what happens
and how snapstream likes it

[Cal]

Unzip and put them in the following directory.

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\SnapStream\Beyond TV\tuner\UUIRT_Remotes

However, they are for the USB-UIRT. You can try using them but I don't know if they will work or not. Please report back if they do work.

[oceanborn]

I actually managed to make it work with one of the millions of preloaded codes...one of them worked so I'm good now, thanks a lot Cal