4.13.2007

Back to the Drawing Board

After screaming at my computer for several minutes, I decided that Vista isn't ready for the new hardware yet- more likely the device manufacturers are torn between making drivers for a huge market base (XP) vs. the early adopters; I would guess the #1 rule in that situation is make as many people as you can happy and then work on the rest of them...

So I am back to Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.

I tried out a new tuner card: a KWorld PlustTV HD PCI-115 (also known as the ATSC 115) as it features an analog tuner and a digital tuner with ASTC/QAM-64/QAM-256 support. First note is this thing does not work at all under vista- it is just a dead signal when I try to tune anything- so I formatted and went back to XP MCE 2005.

The analog tuner works very well under Vista. The digital tuner is giving me some grief- mostly due to the fact that neither of the MCE systems (Vista or MCE 2005) support QAM tuners. There are supposedly some hacks out there that map QAM channels to other channels and present these to MCE as a different tuner, but so far no luck. I am also having problems with QAM reception using the bundled ArcSoft TotalMedia 3- i am only getting about 6 channels (out of 333) and I do not think they are all encrypted (my roommie can get almost all the channels on her Philips TV- without a cable box!). I suspect that some of the setting need to be tweaked...

I am still trying to get Ubuntu working with MythTV, but that has slowed a bit since I went back to XP and I can now watch TV on my XP MCE. (It has also slowed a bit thanks to Super Paper Mario)

No comments:

Post a Comment