With 16 digital channels here in Brissie at the moment and the TV channels’ annoying habit of running over time (which is apparently illegal in some countries. Ahh… to live in those countries…) I often found I had 3 or more channels I needed to record & watch simultaneously. Luckily my Media Centre is just a PC at heart so it’s a dead easy job to add another dual tuner card (in this case a cheap and cheerful Leadtek PCI DTV2000DS to my existing Hauppauge Nova-T-500 MCE).
Unfortunately it’s not that easy though. For some strange reason Microsoft never considered that anyone would need or want to record and watch more than 2 different channels so they only designed Media Centre to work with 2 tuners. The Media Centre application can see all 4 tuners easy enough in its setup wizard but it only allows you to choose 2.
Thankfully the hard work has already been done and I found the bulk of the “how to” in the forums at XPMediaCentre, in particular this thread. Each installation is unique though so I thought it was worth summarising my particular technique which went as follows:
- After performing a clean installation of MCE 2005, install both tuners then download and install Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.
Note: You can save previous record settings such as series recordings etc by backing up the \WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Ehome\recording folder then restoring it to the same location on the clean installation. Don’t forget to backup any programs you’ve recorded too if you want to keep them. These can be found in \Documents and Settings\All Users\Shared Documents\Recorded TV. - Run the MCE setup wizard choosing the first 2 tuners.
- Setup the guide and add listing to channels as per usual.
- Close the media centre application.
- Download and run MCE Tuner Config utility.
- Ensure the box to enable each tuner for MCE is ticked and each tuner has a unique name.
- Open regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Media Centre\Service\Video\TunersKey.
- The 4 keys for all 4 tuners should be obvious at this point and each will have values listed for Record Order, Record Pref, Watch Order and Watch Pref.
Set the values as follows:
| Tuner 1 | Tuner 2 | Tuner 3 | Tuner 4 | |
| Record Order | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| Record Pref | 0 | 0xffffffff | 0xffffffff | 0xffffffff |
| Watch Order | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Watch Pref | 0xffffffff | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Now test by attempting to record and watch 4 different channels.
Problems:
- If you find more than 4 tuners listed in the registry, delete them all, reboot and start over from point 2 above. (Windows will automatically recreate the keys on reboot). This sometimes happens apparently due to Windows being confused with all of the PCI to USB controllers that most of these TV cards employ. For more information and other workarounds to this problem search the XPMediaCentre forums for ghost or phantom tuners.
- If a channel scan reveals no channels or there’s several missing when previous scans picked them up without issue, then delete the EPG data found in \WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Ehome\EPG and try the scan again.
For more help try the forums at XPMediaCentre and TheGreenButton.
