Ive finally plunged into the world of 4 tuners, but not without its minor setbacks. Firstly here is a rundown of my HTPC:
Coolermaster CM Media 260 Case w/
Multimedia Kit
Coolermaster eXtreme Power 430W PSU
Intel Pentium D 920
Asus P5DL2-VM
2x 1GB Legend DDR2533
250GB WD SATA2 16mb 7200RPM
2x DigitalNow Twin TinyUSB Tuners
Leadtek PX6600GT TDH 128MB
16x DVD Rom
Soniq 42" SD Samsung PDP Plasma
Logitech X-530 5.1
Windows Media Centre 2005 RU2
FreeXMLTV
BladeRunner 3
Cyberlink PowerDVD6 Codec
Ive had the setup working fairly well recently and recently Ive found the need for 3 tuners, being that you really need to record over time and therefore end up with a bit of overlap between channels. I figured my best bet was to whack in another Digital Now Twin pack! Now this I thought would be the best way to go as my CoolerMaster Case has 3 PCI Slot Backets, and currently the top one is being used by the video card and the bottom one by the current Twins. After removing the backplane from the case and attempting to install the next pair of Twins I stumbled across a big problem - the tuner's USB ports
foul on the heatsink. (
Top View)So I thought I could
shave down the provided USB cables and I should be able to pull them up just enough so they dont foul. Unfortunately this wasnt the case. Here is what it looked like rigged up:
Pic 1 -
Pic 2
My next option was to bend the support bracket that the Twins mount on. This is what they
look like apart. So I went about bending the bracket - but making sure the antenna wouldnt foul on the hole in the bracket etc. Here is a
Before Shot and an
After Shot.
Ah hah! Much success now. Check out what a
little bending did to the angle!. The gap that was made by only about 10 degrees was just enough!
Here you can see just how much clearance I ended up making with both cards and the video card installed. And finally a pic of
All 4 tuners & video card on the backplane.
I have since used
3 splitters on my setup and not had any recording issues. I did a test using DNTV Live and the signal strength is only down about 6% to 78-80% and the signal quality is still up to 95%. No real great losses.
INSTALLING IN WINDOWS
-----------------------------
The next thing after getting the physical hardware installed is to get Windows to play nice. I utilised the last of my internal USB headers and Windows detected them perfectly and installed the existing drivers from the previous set of Twins. Now one thing I noticed whilst this was going on was a small Tray Icon that looked like the MCE Green Button Logo and 2 green Arrows running left to right over it. Im not sure what this is and at the time I thought MCE was automatically adding the 2 tuners so I could use them straight away. This was not the case. I followed
this Blog on how to setup 4 tuners and it was handy in some respects, but it didnt work as planned. I did learn from this article however on how to determine from the Registry which tuners are being used by MCE and which ones arent so that I could determine how to follow his instructions. To put it simply I pulled my hair out for hours trying to figure out what was happening. This was my method.
- Reset MCE to Defaults
- Rerun the initial setup; selecting 2 tuners.
- Close MCE and run the command of "net stop ehrecvr"
- Run "regedit"
- Determine which 2 of the 4 Tuner entries had been used in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Media Center\Service\Video\Tuners\{71985F48-1CA1-11D3-9CC8-00C04F7971E0} - (note the {71xx~1E0} Folder is Microsofts way of saying its a Digital DVB-T tuner catagory)
**Note** because I was running internal USB headers for my Tuners I didnt want to have to pull them out and unplug them incase i got mixed up, meaning all the tuners would then get a new ID number - stuffing up the entire process. But this made it harder to determine exactly which 2 had been used by MCE before and which ones still hadnt been configured.
- Under the big "microsoft Digital DVB-T tuner catagory" in the registry I could see all 4 tuners with their own "microsoft tuner name" of {04DB44B2-24C6-4731-B51E-73706C868627} etc etc. So there were 4 folders with names similar to this.
- I inspected the User Settings folder which was under each one of these "microsoft tuner names". To determine if it was used by Media Centre in that last round of setup there should be a key in the User Settings folder that is named "EnabledForMCE". If the setting for this key is 0x00000000 then it wasnt used, but if it says 0xffffffff then it was.
- I found 2 tuners with this and proceeded to go back to the "microsoft tuner name" folder and inspect a key called "DevPath". DevPath tells you physically where your tuner is on the system. One of my tuners was on:
\\?\\usb#vid_13d3&pid_3223#0008ffffffff#{71985f48-1ca1-11d3-9cc8-00c04f7971e0}\\{a0f9219e-7c58-4a1d-b8e7-7325f0bc4501}
- now most of that means nothing for this purpose, except in this case whats after the pid_3223# - as this related to a unique Hardware ID. This tuner was 0008ffffffff
- I then referenced that back to what I found in the Details Tab of the Tuner in the Device Manager. I got to it by going to Device Manager, then Sound, Video and Game Controllers and then to the DNTV Live ! TinyUSB device. (or your Tuner Device Driver Name).
- After looking through all 4 tuners and finding the first one I proceeded to Disable that device.
- I went back to the registry and found the next tuner that was used and then did the same thing - disabled it in Device Manager.
- I reran MCE and setup Tuners again; selecting 2 tuners (this is the confusing part because you would think it would be smart enough to say 4 tuners at some stage!)
- From this I now know all the tuners would know all the same settings etc.
- I then closed MCE
- run the command of "net stop ehrecvr"
- I reenabled the other 2 tuners
- Run "regedit"
- I followed the blog about renaming the tuners to an individual Name (Reg key UserPrefName) as I now had 2 instances of Each default device name. (Digital Antenna A and B etc)
- After Setting names A thru to D I went about setting the Watch Order and Record order as per the Blog recommendations. I also set the RecordPrefered key for the 1st tuner and the WatchPrefered key for the 4th Tuner.
- It all looked spot on to his guide.
- Finally I rebooted after all this and ran MCE
- There is no need to setup your TV signal again because if you do MCE will change the registry back to using 2 tuners!!!
- MCE will now record upt 4 channels!
- This step i didnt do after doing the above a million times - and after that it worked.
here is a copy of the appropriate parts of the
Registry for those who want it.
Well hopefully that about covers it!.
JK