I went to Fry's yesterday with the intention of purchasing an Antec Fusion Black 430 HTCP case. I have an older Antec NSK2400 but it lacks the VFD and IR receiver of the newer models. I chanced upon a closeout of an older version of the Fusion for $80 (actually, $75 as an open-box buy) instead of $220 for the newer version. The primary difference in the two appears to be the integrated IR sensor (which also allows remote power on/off).
With the difference in price, I decided to try out TV tuner- preferably one with Clear QAM support. I also purchased the AVerTV Bravo Hybrid PCI-E tuner for $70. It is an unusual tuner in that it supports digital or analog signals- but not both at the same time. Vista detects it as an analog Cable tuner with an Atlanta Comcast cable connection or as an ATSC tuner with an OTA antenna.
Initially it appears that QAM support is only for the included AVerTV Media Center software. A little more research indicates that there are beta drivers/QAM mapping software to allow MCE integration available for download from:
- ftp://ftp.aver.com/Bravo/
- login: beta
- password: betatest
There is a PDF with setup instructions also available on the site.
After installing it should allow basic QAM support with MCE- but at the expense of the channel guide. In other words, you will be able to watch live QAM channels in MCE but without the benefits of a channel guide it is not possible to schedule recordings (save via old-school VCR style scheduling).
So I am back to analog TV scheduling on MCE (and using my Comcast cable box for Digital/HD recordings).
It looks like I chanced upon a simple codec configuration for Windows while I was setting up TVersity that includes FFdshow, Haali Media Splitter and the AC3 Filter codecs...
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