fwiw, i would agree then. it sounds like you know what i was saying and it must be a driver limitation. i see nothing on the tuner website that mentions using more than one of them, which also points at that being an issue. i would guess they didn't bother to make dual card drivers since there is/was a 2 digital tuner limit in MCE2005.

---

MAIN:Gigabyte EP45-UD3P, E8500 C2D, Radeon4550, Silverstone LC16B-M case, 3xAverMedia M780, VistaView Saber DA-1N1-e, Vista Ultimate TV Pack.
Bedroom: HP SL4282N Media Center Extender TV
Basement: P35-DS3R, E4400 C2D, 8600GT, ATI 650PCI, VBox DTA 150

So I am graduating from MCE2005 to Ultimate since I went big on the Video card 8800GTS I only have 2 dual tuner cards instead of 3 however I did add an HD USB over the air tuner.

I install x64 ultimate and do everything as usual and it works very badly.

Now I have 2 x PVR-500 Hauppage tuner cards

2 x 500GB Hard drives, 1 OS one Misc.

I have 4 x 750GB drives in a raid 5 config for TV/Video

Intel Q6600, 4GB RAM

Basically it skips, stutters and spits when trying to watch and record more then one channel, sometimes all the tuners don't work etc.

Anyone have any input?

 

---

Vista Ultimate Intel Q6600
2 Hauppage MCE 500 1 Pnnacle 800e
4096MB Ram
(4)750GB Raid 5 (2)500GB SATAII
XFX 8800GTS 640MB
2.0Tb Video Storage 500GB OS 500GB Misc.
Sony Dual Layer +/-DVDRW
C. Master Cosmos Case
Zalman 850W PS

Graduate is the wrong word :(.

I own an IT company and have been using Vista Ultimate, Business and Home Premium on the 5 computers that I own, 3 laptops and 2 desktops without any issues. In our office we have been using Vista business for about 6 months and it's rock solid.

The only issues we have run into has been legacy programs which are all but history in this day and age, not that we haven't had to figure out our fair share of issues with our many clients but in the end it all worked out.

Vista in my opinion was probaby the most stable Windows release ever.

The media center option looks amazing aside from some small refinments to the functionality it's very nice. Almost 3 years ago I set up my 05MCE box and had similar challenges and eventually it all worked out and I am acutally selling it to a client minus the many tuners of course.

So yes I say I am Graduating to Vista Ultimate X64 ;)

---

Vista Ultimate Intel Q6600
2 Hauppage MCE 500 1 Pnnacle 800e
4096MB Ram
(4)750GB Raid 5 (2)500GB SATAII
XFX 8800GTS 640MB
2.0Tb Video Storage 500GB OS 500GB Misc.
Sony Dual Layer +/-DVDRW
C. Master Cosmos Case
Zalman 850W PS

I had the opposite experience. Not for a couple more years for me!

Re-installed with 32bit Ultimate and guess what works like a charm :)

2Tb raid 5 for video :)

and man 5 channels 4 analog and 1 HD.

Conclusion... MF's need to make 64bit mpeg2 codecs that work ;)

P.S. Sonic mpeg2 decoder is the best for XP and Vista IMHO

Well I guess I am good for another few years ;)

---

Vista Ultimate Intel Q6600
2 Hauppage MCE 500 1 Pnnacle 800e
4096MB Ram
(4)750GB Raid 5 (2)500GB SATAII
XFX 8800GTS 640MB
2.0Tb Video Storage 500GB OS 500GB Misc.
Sony Dual Layer +/-DVDRW
C. Master Cosmos Case
Zalman 850W PS

shaunc:

Has anyone managed to get 2 Terratec 2400i pcie cards (4 tuners in total) running at once in Vista? I can get 1 terratec and one other tuner (Twinhan) to work together giving 3 tuners, but not the Terratecs together. I suspect Vista gets confused having 2 cards the same?

I've done it with MCE 2005 and it works really well.

matttaylor:

shaunc:

Has anyone managed to get 2 Terratec 2400i pcie cards (4 tuners in total) running at once in Vista? I can get 1 terratec and one other tuner (Twinhan) to work together giving 3 tuners, but not the Terratecs together. I suspect Vista gets confused having 2 cards the same?

I've done it with MCE 2005 and it works really well.

Damn you ! I had all but laid this project to rest, and now i'm gonna be inside my htpc again. MCE 2005 and VMC are just about the same when it comes to this tweak - Which driver revision did you use?

Ta.

shaunc:

Damn you ! I had all but laid this project to rest, and now i'm gonna be inside my htpc again. MCE 2005 and VMC are just about the same when it comes to this tweak - Which driver revision did you use?

I started off with one Cinergy 2400i card and then added another about a year later.
I've always used the .255 drivers. It seems only the .266 drivers are available on the Terratec website at the moment but I'm afraid to try them seeing as nothing seems broken. ;)

You do have to make some registry tweaks that enable MCE to use more than two tuners but that is made simple by the application mentioned by this blog.
Worth donating a few pennies to the application developer too if you get it working because I imagine it is a real headache saver.

It is also worth noting that when I installed my first Cinergy 2400i card I never really had all the problems that most seemed to have had even though I first installed it during the period of all the shouting over at AVForums back in Jan 2006. I think I got lucky by installing the card with the .255 drivers straight onto a fresh build.

Regards,

Matt

I just noticed that this thread is still in the top 10 most popular threads. 

An update on my previous post:

I eventually got around to trying the .266 driver for the Terratec tuners and have been running them for about 6 months. It actually seemed to fix some guide problems that I had not actually attributed to the tuners but to MCE.

After updating to the .266 driver my media centre has not been experiencing the guide crashes and complete loss of channels that it used to. Upon first updating to the .266 driver I immediately noticed upon setting up the guide that it had managed to link up most of the channels by itself where before I would have to go through and manually assign a lot of them. So I am guessing that that is one of the improvements made that is helping.

There is one new problem that has been introduced though. :(
Since the .266 driver my media centre will randomly just put up the blue "no signal found" screen whilst watching a channel. This can happen on any channel. Flicking through the channels does not help often, they all say "no signal".
What will fix it though is if there is a channel that is recording, I can switch to it and back again and the picture will resume.
Seems like for some reason the tuners just lock up randomly. On one occasion I had to reboot to get the picture back.
This is really annoying when it happens to something I have recorded which is too often to ignore and I didn't have this problem with the .255 driver.

My next step it to try the next version of driver from Terratec which were on beta when I last looked.

Regards,

Matt

Hello all..

Have any body tried the new Hauppauge HVR-2200 Dual tuner cards and got then working in XP MCE 2005 as 4 analog tuners ?

I have tried all the options i can find on the web, but cant get the machine to record more than 2 chanels at a time

 

Regards !

I tried this but I can't get it to work. When I import the old top.reg and bottom.reg I got this after a reboot:

-Tuners
   -{A799A800-A46D-11D0-A18C-00A02401DCD4}
      -{04CBCD6F-0EFE-4E52-9209-43B6AC9D4217}
        +TuneRequest
        +UserSettings
      -{54B4E960-C8E5-42A2-AC64-98A586B7BEA2}
        +TuneRequest
        +UserSettings
      -{BAF147BF-2181-466D-96FE-48020D0861DD}
        +TuneRequest
        +UserSettings  
      -{BD0BAF14-3462-354CD-96FE-48020D0861DD}  <--- Not exact reg address, but for show I got reg's for 4 tuners but only have 3 and it is not complete and got error when I want to start the record number tree or 2 recoreds and 1 live TV - WHY?  : Any one see somthing like tihs?
        +TuneRequest
   +DVR

Please help - anything missing the HOWTO in TheGrennButton info?

Did you ever get it to work?  I dont know how I missed you asking for help.  If you still need it let me know.

I have had lots of problems with my 3 tuner set up. Most notably, every time a recording stopped, the program I was watching at the time would go "no signal".  Always invariably at 3 minutes past the hour/half hour.  Also, I kept getting "cant record becasue of no tuner available" errors even though tuners were available.

I just ran across this posting over on the Australian MCE site and it gives different settings for the recordprefered registry setting.  Making these changes solved all my problems so I'm passing this on.

http://www.xpmediacentre.com.au/community/tuners-vista/28390-easy-instructions-adding-extra-tuners-vmc-update.html

Summarizing,

Instead of setting the tuners as given in this thread like this:
3 Tuner Config
-------------------------Tuner 1----Tuner 2----Tuner 3
Record Order----------2------------1-----------0
Record Pref------------0------------0 ----------0xffffffff
Watch Order-----------0------------1-----------2
Watch Pref ------------0xffffffff----- 0-----------0

Set it like this:
3 Tuner Config
-------------------------Tuner 1----Tuner 2----Tuner 3
Record Order----------2------------1-----------0
Record Pref------------0------------0xffffffff----0xffffffff
Watch Order-----------0------------1-----------2
Watch Pref ------------0xffffffff--- --0-----------0

The link I gave goes into the reasons for this.  I'm a happy camper now.

-dickm