As my close friends are aware, I've been planning an MCE machine for some time.  Don't know what Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) is?  It's basically a TiVo-like device, you build out of a PC (with no subscription) and with far more features.  You can purchase them complete/new, but they aren't cheap.  Most get away with a $400 to $500 PC by custom building, and with close attention to fanless designs you sit it right next to your TV.  Did I mention youc an do HDTV as well?  :)  Read more here with demos.

Ok, back to my post.  So this weekend my RAID 0 array crashed (nothing new, read my other blog post about how SATA OnBoard RAID is a joke).  So after formatting the drives I decided to finally install one of my HDTV tuner cards I have in the back, and install MCE.

First major roadblock: Windows MCE 2005 requires an NTSC Analog Tuner before you can use an ATSC digital tuner card (as I have two of them). 

Oh, this has really made me upset.  I've planned on running two digital tuner cards only, as I don't EVER watch any analog channels.  But MCE 2005, even with thee Rollup2, requires at least one NTSC Analog tuner card installed.  This sucks.  I don't ever plan on using analog, so why I do have to install it?

The digital tuner works fine as I downloaded a demo of Beyond TV 4.0.  It saw my card right away, loaded up and I was watching free HDTV within minutes. 

Does anyone know of a work around for this (registry edit/force using ditial tuner only)?  How come no one ever brought this too light? Searching on google didn't turn up anything about a requirement of an analog before using digital.  I've posted on a number of forums, but it seems no one has a clue as they all have analog tuners.  Am I the only one that doesn't want to use Analog? 

Boo...

Edit 12/20/2005 - We have an interesting discussion going in a thread at AVSForum.com about this.