MCE Tuner options

["Paul Gordon" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey chaps,

=20

I happened to notice while wandering around thegreenbutton forums, that the
nVidia FX5200 range of cards is certified for MCE2005, - great I thought,
since that=92s just what I happen to have in my main desktop PC, so I=92ll
=
try
it out on that without having to make any hardware changes.

=20

Now the card I have is the MSI FX5200-VT128 Personal Cinema, which happens
to have an on-board analogue TV tuner, as well as an external break-out box
for connecting other AV devices.

=20

Whilst MCE2005 does indeed work quite happily with the card; installation
o=
f
MCE detects it just fine, MCE installs its own Microsoft supplied drivers
for it, and it all works pretty well. The MCE interface loads up etc=85
However, it appears that the nVidia TV tuner is *not* supported under MCE,
and is in fact not even detected. MCE says there is no TV tuner present,
an=
d
device manager shows no entries for it =96 nor does it even show any
unconfigured hardware items corresponding to the tuner. MCE appears to be
just completely oblivious to its existence=85.

=20

I=92ve subsequently tried installing a couple of other drivers as
experimen=
ts=85
both the original personal cinema drivers that came with the card, and some
updated nVidia drivers from the nVidia website. Neither of these helped.
(i=
n
fact they made the MCE interface run really slow), so I=92ve uninstalled
th=
em.

=20

Having had a further scour around the TGB site, it would appear that this
nVidia tuner isn=92t compatible with MCE, to it is unlikely that anything I
try will make it work, so I have to think about alternatives. This is a
shuttle box with no other card slots at all, so adding another tuner card
isn=92t an option. Since I have a perfectly good graphics card in that slot
which already works perfectly well under MCE, I=92d prefer not to have to
upgrade this card to another integrated graphics/tuner card which is
certified for MCE (such as some ATI AIW cards for example), so as I see it
that leaves me with just two choices:

=20

a)       Try to get the external AV inputs on the FX5200 working, and
connect an external tuner to that,

b)       Attempt to use an external USB tuner box.

=20

The external inputs appear to be just as invisible to XP MCE as the onboard
tuner is, so I=92m not optimistic about my chances of success with this
pat=
h.
I would obviously need to install alternate drivers to make them active
under XP, and all the alternative drivers I tried so far have been
detrimental.

=20

However, A little more research shows that the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2
external USB2 tuner box is fully certified for XP MCE2005. :-)  This is
available for a shade under =A3100 and seems to be reasonably well
regarded=
on
most of the review sites.

=20

To get to the point:

=20

Has anyone here got or used the abovementioned Hauppauge box? =96 if so,
an=
y
thoughts/observations etc. Specifically, has anyone used it as a MCE2005
tuner rather than just with Hauppauge=92s own PVR software?

=20

Does anyone else have one of the =93personal cinema=94 editions of one of
t=
he
nVidia-based cards, and tried to enable the external AV inputs under XP
MCE=
?

=20

TIA

=20

Paul G.

=20

=20



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