TBS 6220, 6280, 6284 DVB-T2 Tuners - Owner's Thread

Help with tuners from ATI, Hauppauge, AverMedia and more.
tommo

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TBS 6220, 6280, 6284 DVB-T2 Tuners - Owner's Thread

#1

Post by tommo » Tue May 08, 2012 10:02 am

Image Image

What with the Olympics and the Euro Championship this summer it was a good excuse to get a Freeview HD card. Went with this one as it seems to get better reviews than the blackgold and was cheaper.

Any tips advice/tweaks etc
Last edited by tommo on Mon May 14, 2012 11:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

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CyberSimian

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#2

Post by CyberSimian » Tue May 08, 2012 7:45 pm

tommo wrote:Any tips advice/tweaks etc
Welcome to the TBS owners club! I have a pair of the TBS6284 cards, for a total of 8 DVB-T2 tuners (to paraphrase the sage: "Nothing succeeds like excess!"). I hope that you will keep us informed of your experiences with the TBS card. You may also like to monitor the TBS fora, which can be found here (you will spot me in no time):

http://www.tbsdtv.com/forum/

My experiences with the TBS6284 have been mixed, but overall favourable. I have encountered three problems so far:

(1) DVB-T2 signal strengths do not look correct. At my location in the UK this has absolutely no consequence whatsoever.

(2) I have a humungous usability problem -- with my motherboard one of the TBS cards does not sleep correctly, so I have to use hibernation. I am still investigating this, to try to determine whether it is a problem with the TBS driver, or a problem with my motherboard.

(3) I have noticed an occasional audio burble accompanied by the live or replayed video freezing (for circa one second or less). At first I thought that this was random, but then I noticed that it occurred when recordings were starting. I am still trying to pin this down a bit more before raising it in the forum on the TBS website.

However, compared to the problems that the Blackgold users seem to be having (I have no personal experience of Blackgold products), I am glad that I chose the TBS quad tuner card. Even including the problems listed above, the general experience is good -- I can watch live TV (whatever that is), and record live TV, and not have to worry about whether the system will malfunction.

Here is my one tip; this is definitely a Don't try this at home, kids. The tuners seem to get quite hot, and I debated whether to try fitting heatsinks to them. But they have a plastic label on them, which i decided to remove to provide better thermal contact with a heatsink. I was quite surprised to find that beneath the label there are ventilation holes that are (of course) blocked by the label! So with the ventilation holes now open, I did not bother to fit heatsinks. I also have an advantage with my HTPC -- it is a tower case containing a motherboard in the unloved BTX format. BTX fits the PCI/PCI-E cards upside down compared to an ATX, so the card components are uppermost, and that includes the ventilation holes. So there is some possibility of cooling by convection with a BTX motherboard that is not possible with an ATX motherboard. But as I said at the start: Don't try this at home, kids, as it is likely to invalidate the warranty.

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#3

Post by holidayboy » Tue May 08, 2012 7:59 pm

I have a 6280 and the only thing I do after a fresh setup is to rearrange the sources for channels as the tuners are a bit too good - they pick up transmissions from a transmitter that my older cards don't - and Media Center keeps trying to use the 5% signal, rather than the 69% one.

As CyberSimian says, the signal quality for DVB-T2 channels is incorrectly reported in MC.
Rob.

TGB.tv - the one stop shop for the more discerning Media Center user.

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#4

Post by duncane » Tue May 08, 2012 9:12 pm

I'm considering a TBS6284. My BGT3650 is being RMA'd again tomorrow at BG's request. We'll see what they say but it's been in 2 different PC's now which were both fresh installs. My dual BGT3620 works flawlessly in both these PC's so something is up with my 3650.

If they offer to send the same card back because they think it's fine I'll tell them to keep/refund it and I'll go for the TBS6284 I think...
Cheers
Ewan

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#5

Post by CyberSimian » Wed May 09, 2012 6:43 am

duncane wrote:I'm considering a TBS6284. My BGT3650 is being RMA'd again tomorrow at BG's request.
With badge-engineering commonplace in the PC industry, I wondered whether the Blackgold and TBS quad-tuner cards were in fact the same card (based on the same reference design from the chip manufacturer), but using drivers individually customised by Blackgold and TBS. So I had a look at some photos of the Blackgold card on their website, and there is one glaringly obvious difference: the Blackgold card is a half-height card, whereas the TBS card is a full-height card.

Didn't you use a rather compact (and pretty) HTPC case for your recent HTPC build? Is it big enough to accommodate a full-height card?

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#6

Post by tommo » Wed May 09, 2012 7:59 am

all installed.

That was easy, i went from a usb2 dual tuner to the 6280 and it's great. Installation was a breeze with a simple wizard doing everything. Picked up the HD channels and i've had no signal problems whatsoever, before the USB card would have problems with the signal on many channels with stregths around 50-60, with the 6280 the strength is in the 80-90s.

HD channels looks good although not bluray quality but still great for tv viewing. I went into the guide and disabled about 100 channels of shopping, advertisting, encrypted, top up, babestation and then reordered the channels replacing bbc1 for bbc1 hd etc.

Used MychannelLogos to give the channels logos and also increase the amount of rows in the guide.


Overall very impressed

(i'll check that stick/heatsink thing tonight)

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#7

Post by tommo » Wed May 09, 2012 8:01 am

I did want to go for a quad card but it seems everyone is having problems with them at the moment, so I thought i'd wait it out and see when things are fixed.

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#8

Post by duncane » Wed May 09, 2012 5:24 pm

Yip the cards are very different. Yes it will accommodate a full height card as it's fitted via a riser card and it sits flat, or parallel if you like, to the motherboard.
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Ewan

P.S. Yes it is pretty ;-)

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#9

Post by tommo » Wed May 09, 2012 5:34 pm

CyberSimian wrote:
tommo wrote:Any tips advice/tweaks etc
But they have a plastic label on them, which i decided to remove to provide better thermal contact with a heatsink. I was quite surprised to find that beneath the label there are ventilation holes that are (of course) blocked by the label!

hehe, just did this. I just used a pencil and pierced a few holes where the ventilation holes were. Quite surprised they didn't do this as it's quite a big after thought.

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#10

Post by CyberSimian » Sat May 12, 2012 8:40 am

tommo wrote:hehe, just did this. I just used a pencil and pierced a few holes where the ventilation holes were. Quite surprised they didn't do this as it's quite a big after thought.
Those owners who do not wish to remove the labels from their TBS DVB-T2 tuners may like to know that the tuners are in fact made by Samsung.

Err, I will rephrase that: the flat metal boxes in which the tuners reside are made by Samsung (their name is engraved into the top of the box). Whether the tuner residing within the box is made by Samsung...

Tommo, I have sent you a private message.

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#11

Post by dduk » Wed May 16, 2012 7:26 pm

I have the 6280 alongside three other dual, DVB-T tuners in my WHS 2011 box. DVBLogic does the hard work and whilst the channels take a little longer to tune on the TBS, the card has worked brilliantly.

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#12

Post by tommo » Fri May 18, 2012 10:12 am

I notice that switching between hd channels takes a longer than SD channels, i'm guessing that is a limitation of the cards rather than the system horsepower.

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#13

Post by CyberSimian » Sat May 19, 2012 9:41 am

tommo wrote:I notice that switching between hd channels takes a longer than SD channels, i'm guessing that is a limitation of the cards rather than the system horsepower.
My "production" system is still running Vista, which does not support the HD channels, so I have had limited experience of HD so far. However, I do have a test version of Windows 7 in another partition on my OS disk, and have confirmed that I can receive the HD channels successfully at my location. I will observe the channel-changing times when I next boot Windows 7 for a test.

Once I am happy with the TBS cards (or, at least, know and accept their limitations), I will be doing a clean install of Windows 7 to make it my "production" system.

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#14

Post by tommo » Sat May 19, 2012 10:15 pm

it's by no means a long time, just noticeable compared to sd.

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#15

Post by milli260876 » Sun May 20, 2012 2:30 pm

Anyone got a 1st gen core i3 set up used with the cards? HD won't work for me(pixellating etc) however all is well on my 99p shop AMD test rig! Go figure!!!
Lee

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#16

Post by milli260876 » Sun May 20, 2012 2:38 pm

oh and might I add TBS 6280,6981 and 6984 all the same... Good idea by me buying expensive Intel for quality! Lol, the LAN on it is garbage n'all!
Lee

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#17

Post by CyberSimian » Thu Aug 02, 2012 9:12 am

If you have a TBS 6220, 6280, or 6284 tuner card, you might like to follow this thread on TGB:

http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... 831#p22831

or this thread on the TBS web site:

http://www.tbsdtv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=7793

If you actually have this problem on your system, you might like to post to one or both of the above threads. This will give us an idea of how widespread the problem is. Thank you.

EDIT: This looks to be a problem with certain versions of the Nvidia drivers, so only those with Nvidia graphics cards are likely to see this problem. Driver version 304.79 seems to fix the problem.

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#18

Post by CyberSimian » Wed Oct 10, 2012 10:42 am

I browsed the TBS fora yesterday (http://www.tbsdtv.com/forum/).

Crikey! That was a shock to the system. The TBS fora used to look similar to TGB. I think that whoever has redesigned them must be on drugs stimulants medication.

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#19

Post by bobbob » Wed Oct 10, 2012 11:19 am

not sure why you'd bother posting on the TBS forum TBH. a much better response is received by banging your head against a brick wall

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#20

Post by CyberSimian » Wed Nov 07, 2012 8:41 am

It looks as though there might be a new version of the TBS 6284 quad-tuner card within a month or two. A poster on the TBS web site noticed that the TBS 6284 is no longer available from buydvb, and asked about it. This is the response from one of the TBS representatives:

http://www.tbsdtv.com/forum/viewtopic.p ... ead#p26263

He says that the chip is "sold out", but I suspect that he means "discontinued". (( I have monitored the TBS web site over several months, and it is evident that English is not their first language, which leads to some difficulties in responding to users' questions. However, I feel compelled to observe that their English is several orders of magnitude better than my (and others) Mandarin. ))

I am not sure which chip is discontinued, but if it is the tuner chip, it suggests that the 6280 will be replaced too (since the 6284 is simply two 6280 tuner modules on a single PCI-E card).

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