I'm suprised no one has posted this yet. Meet Medusa:

http://www.snapstream.com/Community/Articles/medusa/default.asp

I realize that this is Snapstream, but hey, it works.

We really need to figure out how to access the live TV stream from MCE.  I dont even know where to start with it.

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What are you trying to do with the live stream?

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Bryan Socha
Media Center MVP

Sorry my head was somewhere else when I wrote that.

I have been trying to access live tv from my other computers on the network. it doesnt work.  but thats for another thread.

 

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Ahh.. I haven't tackled that either. But orb does it

On another note, I was able to get the digital tuners to send out ir blaster commands. Its just copying registry entries over. However I still have not found how to get more than 2 ir emitters into an mce machine. I dont mean how to get mce to use them, I mean not killing the remote and existing ir blasters in the process.

Can anyone recommend anyway or any product that might be able to do this? Even if it means changing the remote.

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Bryan Socha
Media Center MVP

From: HackRx3c

Thx for the great info on how to do this hack to make mulitple tuners work in MCE...I have a couple questions before i attempt doing it this weekend...If you have a second to reply, i'd appreciate any info...Here's my scenario...I have a Dell 8400 with two tuner cards: a Dell Emuzed Dual tv tuner card and a Emuzed Maui III tv tuner card w/ FM...Both cards are already installed in the pc...When i went to the registry, all three cards are listed under the "tuner" entry...your example appears to show the dual tuner card installed only...and in your example, you export the entries, fire up the new card and then complete it...so -- my question is: should i follow your steps exactly -- uninstalling the single tuner card and then installing it as you say?!...it's not clear if the hack works when both cards are installed and the three tuner entries are in the registry already...thx for any help...R

If you know which cards are which, you can do it my way, ignoring the third card until after you have deleted the other 2.  Then run the TV set up, which will in ecsence turn the card on. 
If you look at the new cards settings now, you should see that it is missing most, after you run TV setup they will be added.

Did that answer your question? If not just delete all 3 cards disable the new card run setup on the other 2, then follow my howto.

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Doesnt orb stream out to the internet then back in to the computers?

Either way it requires internet access and that makes me nervous.

I wish VLC could read the DVR buffer files and we could hmm force MCE to always "watch" tv on all tuners.

 

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Oh and orb doesnt support my NVTV card

 

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Scuffs, there is a way to get to the livetv stream, but you need to do some coding

Stephen Toub's article on postitionchanger showed how to get to MCE's play graph. Once you have access to the graph you can get to the StreamBufferSource which is the filter that reads the livetv buffer. Then you can get the name of the buffer file. Once you have the name, you can from another program create another StreamBufferSource, tell it to load the same name and then it is also reading from the same buffer file that livetv is using. Now you have access to the livetv stream. I dont know enough about VLC to know what you would need to do to stream it into VLC then. I haven't written the code to do this but Stephen managed to get to the graph, finding the start of a graph is standard directshow stuff, getting the name of the file is standard IFileSourceFilter stuff and having 2 StreamBufferSources reading the same StreamBufferSinkis standard StreamBufferSource/Sink stuff.

Success!! 3 tuner working good so far. Just got my PVR-550 delivered today. that plus my PVR-250MCE makes three stable tuners. Had to remove the OEM Freestyle. It caused problems. Maybe because it has the older MPEG encoder and shares the same driver with the PVR-20MCE. Could not find 1 driver that made these 2 card get along. The PVR-500 uses it own driver.

I am happy with 3 tuners for right now. All Cable TV input. The PVR-500 tuner looks slightly better than the PVR-250. I notice the difference when viewing FOX news and watching the news ticker scroll.

I set one of the 500 tuners as the preferred Watch tuners and the other 2 as preferred Record tuners.

I am using the driver for the 500 that came on the CD 2.0.18.22316

The PVR-250MCE is using .22254 from SHSPVR.COM site. Not as good as shady's 4 but close.

Hmm....Maybe order another PVR-500 or NVTV for comparison then it would be 5. Time to fill up my NAS device with Recorded TV shows. Thanks again for showing us how to do this.

Now in order to make the multiple tuners a real success it will require multiple ir blasters. This seems to be a big hurdle that no one has quite figured out with MCE.

td

My problem with ir emitters right now is just the availability of them. I am not finding any that look like they might work easily.

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Bryan Socha
Media Center MVP

Awesome work guys! I just got my 3 DVICO Fusion Plus DVB-T cards working. Thanks!

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Would a second MCE remote receiver with ir blasters work?

This could potentially provide ir blaster support for up to 4 STB's, right?

I should start another thread on that instead of clogging this one up with non-tuner related issues

So here it is

http://www.thegreenbutton.com/community/shwmessage.aspx?ForumID=30&MessageID=107484

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