Two tuners--1 media center

Hi everyone. I want to configure media center to recording from hd and clear qam. I have two tuners--Hauppauge 1600 and Hauppauge 1850. I have the 1600 attached to my stb(comcast) via s-video. The 1850 is attached via coax cable.
The problem is that I can record hd, but when i try to record hd and qam at the same time it's a no go. Can you record qam and hd at the same time? I have been researching for two days and cannot find an answer. I have not recieve an error message from WMC. It just doesn't recording the show. Any assistance will be appreciated. deanie44

deanie44 said:

Hi everyone. I want to configure media center to recording from hd and clear qam. I have two tuners--Hauppauge 1600 and Hauppauge 1850. I have the 1600 attached to my stb(comcast) via s-video. The 1850 is attached via coax cable.
The problem is that I can record hd, but when i try to record hd and qam at the same time it's a no go. Can you record qam and hd at the same time? I have been researching for two days and cannot find an answer. I have not recieve an error message from WMC. It just doesn't recording the show. Any assistance will be appreciated. deanie44

Well there's certainly nothing to prevent two tuners from being used on a single machine and single WMC, and supporting both tuners through WMC so that simultaneous recording can occur.

For example, I myself have (a) ATI TV Wonder 650 PCI 1-tuner card for OTA/ATSC use, and (b) Ceton InfiniTV 4-tuner card for cablecard-enabled use. Both cards are defined to WMC, they each suck in their own separate Guide info (based on provider and my zipcode, including digital OTA/ATSC as well as TWC/LA). And I can be doing up to FIVE simultaneous recordings, using all five of my available tuners... with no problem.

So, are both of your tuner sources defined to WMC? Note that WMC itself does not support S-video directly as recordable input, so how is your Hauppauge 1600 connected to the PC? As long as it's not S-video you shouldn't have a problem.

But if you're feeding it using the S-video cable from your Comcast box and using the Comcast box as the "tuner", I think that is your problem. You cannot specify S-video (i.e. "line input") for recording using WMC, even if your Hauppauge 1600 supports S-video source.

Note that other TV programs (e.g. BeyondTV) DO support the use of S-video (i.e. "line input") for viewing and recording. But WMC does not.

Hi dsperber. Thank you for answering my post. Everytime I go through the setup of WMC. the tuners are defined, but with the same guide information. I have the s-video coming from the back of the stb feediing into the Hauppauge 1850 and I have recorded two tv shows in hd. My question is how do give each tuner its own separate
guide info and If I cannot use s-video to record hd; how do I setup up the tuners to record in hd.

deanie44 said:

Hi dsperber. Thank you for answering my post. Everytime I go through the setup of WMC. the tuners are defined, but with the same guide information. I have the s-video coming from the back of the stb feediing into the Hauppauge 1850 and I have recorded two tv shows in hd. My question is how do give each tuner its own separate guide info and If I cannot use s-video to record hd; how do I setup up the tuners to record in hd.

You cannot use S-video as input to WMC.

Also, S-video does not provide HD. S-video is strictly for 480i 4:3 SD content delivery. If you have your Comcast box "tuned" to an HD channel (16x9 and 720p or 1080i) it has been down-converted to 4:3 480i for delivery out from its S-video connector. There is no way around that.

The only way you can view/record HDTV is through either (a) OTA/ATSC 8VSB tuner card, with a roof antenna or indoor antenna connected to its RF coax input connector feeding the OTA/ATSC digital signal to the tuner card, or (b) QAM tuner card accepting coax cable input from your cable company for delivery of "in-the-clear" non-encrypted copy-freely cable channels, or (c) cablecard-enabled QAM tuner card such as Ceton InfiniTV 4-tuner card accepting coax cable input from your cable company for ALL CHANNELS, both in-the-clear non-encrypted copy-freely as well as encrypted and copy-once content.

There may also be outboard tuner devices connected via USB, but I'm not familiar that whole technology. Again, NOT S-VIDEO.

And again, WMC simply does not support S-video as an input. It's only capable of managing true tuners.


So, assuming you actually have two tuner cards in your PC installed properly and configured properly within WMC (you'd go through the proper Settings -> TV setup for each tuner card), you will automatically get ONE OR TWO Guide ID numbers assigned, depending on what their setup specified as their "content provider".

In my own case as I described earlier, my ATI TV Wonder 650 PCI 1-tuner OTA/ATSC card accepts roof antenna input. That means it needs Guide info for "digital OTA/ATSC channels in my zip code". My other Ceton cablecard-enabled 4-tuner card is fed from TWC/LA's coax. So it needs Guide info for "TWC/LA in my zip code". These are two separate and different Guide ID numbers (from Zap2it, which is the Guide provider for Microsoft) and my WMC configuration understands all of that perfectly. Twice a day, every 12-hours, WMC updates BOTH of these Guide ID databases on my machine, keeping them both ongoing and current.

(1) my OTA/ATSC Guide setup:



(2) my Ceton TWC/LA Guide setup:




Note that the sum of the two Guides is what appears in the complete channel number listing, for me to choose from to watch, record, and build "Favorite channels" lists from. For example the OTA/ATSC channels are 2.1, 4.1, 5.1, 7.1, etc., whereas the cable channels are 402, 404, 405, 407, etc..

ALL of the combined channels understood by both of my tuner cards are listed, and when I view the Guide cells the sum of all channels is shown in one combined presentation.

OK, How did you integrate the ATSC OTA Tuner with the ClearQAM Tuner? I have HDHOMERUN Dual Tuner card and MC only allows me to setup one or the other. Am I missing something?

pharmeceutikle said:

OK, How did you integrate the ATSC OTA Tuner with the ClearQAM Tuner?

Well the Ceton tuner is not a "ClearQAM" tuner, at least I wouldn't use those semantics. It's a cablecard-enabled 4-tuner device that supports access to all form of QAM-delivered content, both copy-freely (unprotected and unencrypted) and copy-once (protected and encrypted) content.

When WMC is originally set up (going through the TV setup wizard process) it simply detects BOTH of my tuner devices, and then proceeds to perform the appropriate setup for BOTH of them, first one and then the other.

In other words, I didn't do anything special myself to make this happen. WMC simply recognized my available hardware and did whatever it needed to do, asking me for whatever information it needed. At the end, I had both tuner cards fully and separately installed with two unique channel lineups retrieved and combined into my Guide info.

I have HDHOMERUN Dual Tuner card and MC only allows me to setup one or the other. Am I missing something?

I honestly don't have any firsthand knowledge about HDHomeRun.

Have you contacted the hardware vendor to enlist their support, or ask questions?

Also, you might join "The Green Button" which is THE forum dedicated to all things Windows Media Center related. Hardware, software, extenders, whatever... there are discussion sub-forums for all of it.

Though once its own independent forum (actually sponsored by Microsoft), it has now been absorbed into the general "Windows Experts Community" of forums and is actually and officially supported by Microsoft. You just need to use your general Windows Live ID to sign in (or register and get a Windows Live ID).

Browse through the "Windows Media Center Hardware" sub-forum I pointed you to above, and see if you can get existing answers to your questions. Otherwise, post a new question and I'm sure the "real experts" there can provide more assistance to your specific hardware issue than I can.

Thanks for replying. I am also at TGB. It just that I never knew this is possible until I stumbled onto your post here. I would love MC to combine both my tuners because there are certain channels my wife likes to watch OTA. Mostly the ethnic channels that are offered by the local cable co. I ran setup several times before and it only let me choose one or the other so I googled all over the net and nobody had the same setup so I gave up thinking it was not possible, but then I came here for another issue and truthfully you are the only person I've seen or know to get this to work natively.

pharmeceutikle said:

Thanks for replying. I am also at TGB.

AHA!!! I saw your thread over at TGB... and it appears that within a few hours you finally had a resolution from another member's instructions!!

Excellent! Glad it now works as you wanted.