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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.