Using multiple identical cards? Primarily 3 Twinhan 1025's

[dimitry]

I'm happy to report that after some initial trouble with DVBDream, I finally got it to work on a clean install of Windows 2003 Server. I am very pleased, CPU usage is much lower than with MyTheatre and the PIP record function is amazing!

I have 3 Twinhan 1025 cards installed in my machine. I've had good results running DVBDream alongside with Mytheatre using 2 of the cards:

With Video off/Renderless mode in the two programs, only 41% CPU usage on my $30 Celeron! Renderless mode is perfect, because I
don't plan on watching anything on this machine anyway. Instead, files are accessed over the network and played on my iMac.

For a short time, I was even able to run DVBDream and 2 instances of MyTheatre using its command line switches. CPU Usage was in the 90's though and now it doesn't work at all. I've tried everything to reproduce that behavior again, but it just won't happen. The second mytheatre just hangs now with CPU usage red-lining at 100 and I have to force quit out of it.

And now, to the true topic at hand:

I read in this forum that it may be possible to launch two instances of DVBDream utilizing separate cards by using command line switches. This would be perfect for me, because I find DVBDream a lot more efficient on CPU usage than MyTheatre and I absolutely love the PIP features.

I've tried launching DVBDream with /device=1 and device=2 switches, as well as launching dreamstart.exe (not sure what the difference is) all to no avail! In fact, when I bring up DVBDream's devices menu, this is what I get:



I imagine the numbered selection in the lower left corner should be able to cycle through my 3 separate cards. Has anyone had success with this? I know people have used more than one card with DVBDream, but did they have to be different cards in order for this to work? That is, 3 identical 1025's like mine will not work because they are the same?

Contrary to DVBDream's devices window, MyTheatre recognizes all 3 cards:


Any help would be truly appreciated! Thank you very much in advance and I hope other readers of this forum may find something informative in my findings and observations.



P.S. And lastly, here are some pics of the hardware:


The 3 Twinhan 1025's.


Many thanks go out to genpix for his explanation of the LNB out ports on the Twinhans. Otherwise, I would've never attempted this. In case anyone else is wondering, the LNB out ports passthrough the signal sans any diseq or 22khz commands. So you can't watch/record 2 different satellites using this method, but you sure can tune multiple transponders from one satellite!

[jerryt]

Nice pictures !!!

That system needs three coax feeds badly.

I thought when receivers share one coax that they all had to be on the same TP?

[dimitry]

Nice pictures !!!

That system needs three coax feeds badly.

I thought when receivers share one coax that they all had to be on the same TP?

Not at all, usually same polarization, but since i have DishPro, the frequencies are bandstacked and polarization does not need to be switched. I mainly need channels from the 119 location, so having 3 separate coax feeds is not really necessary. Saves a lot of work and expensive switches

[genpix]

I imagine the numbered selection in the lower left corner should be able to cycle through my 3 separate cards. Has anyone had success with this? I know people have used more than one card with DVBDream, but did they have to be different cards in order for this to work? That is, 3 identical 1025's like mine will not work because they are the same?

I believe, device driver was compiled with "single device support".
It's possible to support multiple cards with the same driver (need to recompile the driver; but you need to have a source code for it ).

But you can not run multiple copies of DVB dream, I believe.
Thus, I don't see much point in that.

Several instances of TSReader, at the other hand, could run very happy.

[dimitry]

Thank you as always for the detailed reply genpix!

I believe, device driver was compiled with "single device support".
It's possible to support multiple cards with the same driver (need to recompile the driver; but you need to have a source code for it ).

Do you mean DVBDream's internal device driver (don't even know if there is such a thing) or the Twinhan's? If the twinhan's, how does MyTheatre facilitate being able to use 2 cards?

But you can not run multiple copies of DVB dream, I believe.
Thus, I don't see much point in that.

That's what I suspected... But there's talk on these forums about using command line switches as I mentioned in the original post. Was that a legacy feature removed from the newer versions?

Lastly, since I already have you here Do you know if MyTheatre supports running more than 2 cards at once?

Thanks again genpix, I greatly enjoy your informative replies!

[rel]

DD's Twinhan WDM device interfaces ("Direct" and "SDK" on DD) do not support multiple cards. I don't have enough information about how to support multiple cards on WDM driver and Twinhan doesn't reply emails on the subject. So it might be alternative to give a try to Twinhan BDA driver tho.