The drivers are still in beta, but they were tested with QAM and have worked.  The qam drivers should be released very soon.  I suggest that anyone interested in having qam support in MCE should go order their HDHR soon, because I have the feeling that they'll sell out pretty quick once the drivers are complete.

Everyone should go look at the Silicondust forums for information about the release of MCE drivers.

http://www.silicondust.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=19

or go to the main page to see a description of the HDHR.

http://www.silicondust.com/

 

 

for those that don't want to register for yet another forum, can you hum a few bars about whats involved in the setup and what channels your seeing above the normal expected broadcast.

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Bryan Socha
Media Center MVP

I should note that the installation for QAM is still unknown.  The developers only got it working last night.  I would guess that with the speed that they came out with the ATSC drivers that the QAM drivers will be released for beta testing later today or at the very least sometime this week.  MCE doesn't support the QAM epg, so the solution right now is to map the ATSC channels to the QAM tuner.  This means you can only add channels that are available OTA at your location.  Personally, the only HD channels I get on QAM are the same ones available OTA, so I'm happy with that.  I've been unable to tune any OTA channels at my location, so I'm very happy to finally have a way to use HD programming with MCE without buying a new Vista/OCUR rig.

Hopefully they have some sort of channel map in the driver/tuner so it will just build an atscperfs.xml file for you.

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Bryan Socha
Media Center MVP

One of the posts says to run the guide info for digital cable, then associate those digital channel infos for the qam channels. Then, I guess just unmap the digital channels that are encrypted on the guide to get them out of the way.

Sounds like hdhomerun is about to see a surge of business.

Not from me..  I'll garuntee you antenna is better quality.  cable networks hate they are being forced to carry the locals and are lowering the bitrate.

Now from a lot of friends in nyc that can't use antenna, oh yeah.

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Bryan Socha
Media Center MVP

Didn't realize there would be a difference in quality, OTA vs QAM. Guess I'm off to do some more research.

Sounds interesting to have this qam support, if anything just to have less worries about signal interruptence/dropouts.

I'd agree that quality will be better OTA, but I'm in an area where I would at the very least need a large directional antenna to pull in channels.  I'd probably have to re-aim it for different channels, and deal with dropouts in bad weather.... I'll take a slightly compressed signal anyday to gain reliability.   The compression really isn't that bad either, the HDHR config utility lists what the stream rates are for the channels.  I'll have to look again to see what the rates were.

jeonunh:

MCE doesn't support the QAM epg, so the solution right now is to map the ATSC channels to the QAM tuner.  This means you can only add channels that are available OTA at your location.

I'm not certain of that you only can get the OTA channels, I would think you could add all clear QAM channels (of course by hand), and remap them. It's got to be a simple 1:1 mapping (somehow).

Also note that only 1 tuner works so far...

I don't know enough about mapping digital channels to say.  I've never been able to use OTA where I live.  It's probably possible.  Most of the qam stuff I get is garbage, so I'm really only interested in the major networks.  I'll worry about the gravy stuff once we have the OTA stuff mapped.

I am using the HDhomerun with SageTV now, and will switch to MCE once the QAM driver is there. I am able to receive a ton of channels with this thing. Luckily for me my cable company digitally re-broadcasts all the analog stations, and the quality is far superior to what I get over analog.

Accident, I have heard people say the quality is lower with QAM HD, but I have not noticed this at all. In fact, I recorded Lost in HD with both a Fusion (QAM), and Fusion on MCE (OTA), and I swore the QAM quality was better. For some reason the colors just seemed better.

Hello magic-bullet!  Now, if these guys can get QAM working in MCE, I'm incredibly curious why AverMedia can't get it working with the A180!??  Anyone have any ideas there?

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Ghostlobster
Very happy convert to SageTV! Finally, watching ESPN-HD in real HD on my HTPC without having to deal with the CableCARD fiasco!

What tuner cards are people using to get qam support to work? Does this mean that we can expect all mce qam tuners to work?? Has anyone tried this with the dvico fusion card with qam support?
 

batman31:

What tuner cards are people using to get qam support to work? Does this mean that we can expect all mce qam tuners to work?? Has anyone tried this with the dvico fusion card with qam support?
 

Nope, no dice. I have 3 Dvico cards (2 usb and one pci), and alas no it won't work. Same with Avermedia.

The trick here is that the HD Homerun is a networked device with a virtual BDA driver, it will trick MCE into thinking it's an ATSC OTA dual tuner card, but have all the channels remapped through the Cable QAM channels streamed through ethernet cable.

My card shipped today, finally I will get HiDef NBC on my MCE box! (and all the networks twice (2 cities!) in SD without the crappy cable fuzziness).

Funny thing is the developer got ATSC to work late Saturday night, reported it, got some feedback that people really wanted QAM support in MCE then got that to work (but not yet released), within hours (still only 1 tuner though, but seeing how fast that turn-around was, easily in the next 2 weeks 2-tuners)

He didn't realize that QAM support was so highly desired. (just like Microsoft, do all these people live in some wonderous over the air HDTV Nirvana?)

Baldbear,

This is HUGE!!! So what do I need?
Sorry to sound like a TOTAL 'Tard but...
When you say your "card shipped" your talking about this HD HOMERUN networked device??

Is this all external?
Anything needed internal?
Support for mce 2005.. or only vista?