Dual Tuner Analog & Digital in Vista MCE

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tonyb

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#16624 19-Oct-2007 08:10

Hi,

I have setup a HTPC box with Vista Home Premium, and have installed a Hauppauge Nova-S-Plus (Digital) and a PVR-150 (Analog) tuner cards.

I have applied the reg patch to get the DVB-S card recognised as DVB-T and can go thru the TV setup screens, and select Antenna, then Digital DVB-T and it finds the channels on Freeview and I can watch them.

I then go thru the setup screens again, this time selecting Antenna, Analog and it scans and finds the std analog tv channels, and I can watch them also.

What I cannot see is how you can have both functional, and be able to choose channels from each card ???

all I want is to have 1-4 coming thru Satellite (Freeview) and Prime thru Analog

Anyone manage to get such a setup working or can help in any way ???

chiefie

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#91641 19-Oct-2007 08:42

At the moment (for both XP MCE and Vista MCE) is that you either have all cable, digital, or analog, and not part analog/digital, or part analog/cable or part digital/cable.

Reason is, it uses both or all tuners to aggregate recording when viewing another channel, so tuner 1 maybe current viewing, while tuner 2 may be recording. But the next time you're on, tuner 2 maybe your viewing tuner, and tuner 1 maybe your recording tuner, or when recording 2 channels, both will tune to their channels for recording. All tuners are pooled together to share the workload, hence you can't have a digital tuner for one, and analog for the other. This is the limitation (and a let down) of XP/Vista MCE.

What's scary is that, sales person in big stores (like HN or DSE etc) do not tell customers of this, whether they're not awared or just don't know it at all.

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sbiddle

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#91642 19-Oct-2007 08:48

Both XP MCE and Vista MCE have serious limitations when used as a serious PVR. They are fine for basic use but start trying to do anything more than recording from a basic single tuner card and it becomes very cumbersome.

Your best bet is to run something like GB-PVR or Media Portal on top of Vista MCE as your main PVR application. Hopefully the promised MCE updates to Vista will offer many of the enhanced features that people want however these are unlikely to appear until well into 2008.

tonyb

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#91643 19-Oct-2007 08:52

Thanks for the info, was thinking that might be the case - its just that I have spoken with a local company re their HTPC setup, and they tend to infer their box does both analog, freeview & sky all using MCE in the one box - maybe just a bit of creative marketing ?

openmedia

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#91657 19-Oct-2007 09:55

tonyb: Thanks for the info, was thinking that might be the case - its just that I have spoken with a local company re their HTPC setup, and they tend to infer their box does both analog, freeview & sky all using MCE in the one box - maybe just a bit of creative marketing ?

Tony - Care to share which outfit you were talking to.

Our unit, myPVR, can do all 3. We prioritise the tuners so that freeview is used where possible, and Sky is a last resort. This means that the Sky tuner is usually kept free for sky channels.

For example we could record
TV 2 off freeview
Prime off analogue
UKTV off Sky
plus watch an old recording at the same time.

Steve

Generally known online as OpenMedia, now working for Red Hat APAC as a Technology Evangelist and Portfolio Architect. Still playing with MythTV and digital media on the side.

tonyb

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#91658 19-Oct-2007 09:58

Sorry - I should have clarified, their setup is based on Vista MCE

Regs

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Snowflake

#91734 19-Oct-2007 17:46

what you are trying to achieve has actually been done, i didnt have the time to try it myself though before I sold my analog card.

try this forum post for hints and good luck :) : http://www.xpmediacentre.com.au/community/xp-media-center-2005-software/10380-dtv-analog-tv-works-together.html

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tonyb

9 posts

Wannabe Geek

#92009 23-Oct-2007 08:32

Thanks - tried this over the weekend, got it to work a couple of times, but very unstable - will have to spend a lot more time on it to work out the issues.

The main one was detect the channels for DVB then I applied the patches, added the analog channels and had the complete list (both DVB and Analog) but when you tried to view a Digital channel, it just seems to freeze with a spinning circle.

Got it actually working once, then after a reboot got the above issue......next step a fresh install I think