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Media Center Upgrade

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Given the success of my “new” Media Center I thought it deserved a little more money spending on it to avoid the “Media Center would like to change channel to record xxxx” scenario. Prescribed: Dual tuners.

Dual tuners allow you to either watch one channel and record another or record two different channels at the same but, last time I looked, a dual tuner card cost a lot more than I was prepared to spend. Nowadays, USB tuners are commonplace (and cheap) and they even come in dual tuner flavours.

DVB-T399U_product_01

I opted for a KWorld 399U DualView DVB-T primarily because it was cheap as chips (£20 including postage on eBay – worth a gamble). It turned up this morning. I plugged it into a spare USB port on the Media Center (not that easy given it’s a “booksize” barebones system) and grabbed the drivers from the KWorld support site.

That seemed to go well so I headed off into Media Center settings, re-scanned for TV services and did the guide setup again (which had gone a bit wrong anyway – I think some extra channels must have been added recently) and hey presto!

I now have dual-tuners and reckon it took me no more than 10mins from start to finish. Here’s a picture of the beastie in his new home.

 

 

DualTuner

My limited testing so far has established that you can record “Diagnosis Murder” at the same time as watching “Dickinson’s Real Deal”. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

Technorati Tags: media center,vista,windows

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 11, 2009
    PingBack from http://www.clickandsolve.com/?p=21193

  • Anonymous
    March 12, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 12, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 12, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 12, 2009
    Hi Frosty. I use the USB stick exclusively in Vista's Media Center - I've never tried it with the software supplied. I've just tested the channel change speed and I'd say there's little to choose between the USB stick and changing channels on the TV itself. Channel up/down takes 2s max for the new channel to appear. Mike

  • Anonymous
    March 12, 2009
    The last time I tried a KWorld tuner it had a glorious setup program to hide the fact that the driver was not signed. When I found out that the driver was not signed I took it straight back. Hopefully things have improved since then.

  • Anonymous
    March 21, 2009
    Paul, Just because the driver wasn't signed, doesn't mean it was any kind of malware. It does mean however that the driver would fail to load on Vista (and newer) x64 editions. I use the KWorld DVD Maker 2, and it has signed drivers now, it runs fine on my 2008 "Server/Workstation"