Good point.  I would also love a Dual Theater 550 card, if anyone has one I would love to see a clip off it.

I just got Windows Media Center edition up and running with 3 tuners. I am using one old standard edition Hauppauge PVR-250 and one new Hauppauge PVR-500MCE. The PVR-500 has two tuners, so together with the 250 I have three.

It took some experimenting to get this up and running, so posted some of my experiences here:
Windows Media Center Edition with 3 tuners

_eirikso

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http://www.eirikso.com

I'm having a major problem. I'm using a hardware decoder (Canal digitaal) to receive extra channels like discovery and film channels and this decoder is connected through the S-VHS or composite input on my PVR 500-MCE card and I'm not able to receive this signal in MCE 2005.
Since I watch for about 40-50 % of my viewing time these specific channels it bothers me a lot and I've spent hours of researching on the net and other forums to find a solution.

Does anyone know if there is a tweak to solve this problem ? (e.g. to connect the S-VHS input to an empty channel on the tuner).

When I try to receive through the setup of a set-top box I can perfectly receive the S-VHS or RCA input, but then I don't receive the normal television channels anymore.

Does somebody can come up with a solution for this problem ? Perhaps first configure a settop box, export the registry settings and then the normal Tuner settings and combine them ? I hope this could work but I have no clue how to start with this setup (I have the possibility to use a pvr-500mce as a dual tuner for television and an other single for S-VHS or RCA input ...)

So if anyone has any suggestions regarding my problem, please feel free to contact me ... hopefully .... !

Many thanks,

Kurt.

Kuno

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Kuno

What you want at this time Can Not Be Done Sorry but it just wont work.

The problem is MCE will only think there is 1, you make it understand there are two.  You can set it up so it will use both, but the guide will only show 1.  You cant chose which tuner to use on the fly.  this means you cant use the second tuner, unless you tie up the first tuner.  Then since you cant use 2 guides recording is hard.

Its confusing.

I received my PVR500 yesterday and installed it.
After fighting with it and calling Hauppauge, they determined I had a bad card.

MCE "detected both tuners but the onboard Tuner 1 doesn't receive a valid signal."
Tuner 2 receives it fine.

The weird thing is that Tuner 1 receives audio but no video.

I also tried with the included tuner app on a different machine and Tuner 1 is bad. :-(

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Vista Ultimate with TV Pack
Core 2 Duo E4500 @ 2.2GHz (OC'd to 2.9) / 4 Gigs Ram
c: 80 Gig d: 500 Gig SATA
Tuners: PVR-500 / HDHomeRun x 2 / WinTV 1600
Extenders: DMA-2200 / DMA-2100 x 2

Linksys V1 extender (for sale..anyone interested?)

People keep saying the NVTV card has a crappy picture.  i just dont see it.  My NVTV cards work great, and IMO look much better than my 150, and almost identical to the 500, but my machine ran so much better with just NVTV cards in it. shrug

I wouldn't say the NVTV picture is crappy, but it could benefit from adjustments.
Do you know how to adjust its settings? contrast, sharpness, hue, etc? There are tools in the download section for adjusting these for Hauppauge and AverMedia.

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Vista Ultimate with TV Pack
Core 2 Duo E4500 @ 2.2GHz (OC'd to 2.9) / 4 Gigs Ram
c: 80 Gig d: 500 Gig SATA
Tuners: PVR-500 / HDHomeRun x 2 / WinTV 1600
Extenders: DMA-2200 / DMA-2100 x 2

Linksys V1 extender (for sale..anyone interested?)

"I received my PVR500 yesterday and installed it.
After fighting with it and calling Hauppauge, they determined I had a bad card."

...interesting. I had to return my PVR-500 because it was not able to scan all my channels. The new one I got works fine.

Seems like Hauppauge might have a quality issue with a range of the 500 cards.

_eirikso

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http://www.eirikso.com

Dual Theater 550's someone REALLY needs to make one.

3 Hauppage 500MCE's up and running with MCE 2005!

Gotta love it!

http://www.nrstech.com/6channelsrecording.pdf

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Vista Ultimate Intel Q6600
2 Hauppage MCE 500 1 Pnnacle 800e
4096MB Ram
(4)750GB Raid 5 (2)500GB SATAII
XFX 8800GTS 640MB
2.0Tb Video Storage 500GB OS 500GB Misc.
Sony Dual Layer +/-DVDRW
C. Master Cosmos Case
Zalman 850W PS

The NVTV Single Tuner and the Dual Tuner use two different chips.  The single tuner version I feel has the best image quality of any hardware tuner for MCE.  The dual tuner version however is lower quality.

Has anyone else had the problem that the 3 tuners work fine when manually recording, but when using the guide it still only thinks there are 2 so therefore thinks there is a conflict?

I have 2x DVICO DVB-T cards and a Twinhan DVB-T card - they all work well together except scheduling recordings from the guide.

Has anyone been able to fix this?

Thanks,
Shane.

Ive never had that problem, have you tried starting again to see if it can be fixed by redoing the tuners?

 

Thanks Scuffs, I'd thought I would throw in that I have got the setup working using an ATI 550 based tuner, and a Happauge 500MCE card for three tuners total.

I'm trying the scheduling recording tonight. I don't forsee any problems though.

Scuffs +1 Genius

Im Running 5 Tuners 2xPVR-500MCE + 1x PVR-150MCE

 

All works like a charm, Though You MUST Rename each Tuner (in the UserSettings) To A Unique Name) Otherwise you will get the Two Tuner issue....

 

Regards,

 

OhmegaStar

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SilverStone Lascala LC-16M (Black) - Intel D925 MB, P4 3.4ghz, 1gb ram, 1x1.9TB SATA Raid (on MediaServer) + 1x200gb SATA Local, Pioneer 110D DVD Drive, Antech Fanless 500W PSU, Geforce 6600 Fanless, Logitech diNovo 2.0 Bluetooth Mouse & Keyboard, 2xPVR-500MCE, 1xPVR-150MCE Tuners.

+ three other mce machines of various (also home-built) types