Ceton tuner installed on virtual Windows 7 machine under hyper-v / Server 2008 R2

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  • June 15, 2011 at 7:08 pm #26070
    RevMen

      For the last couple years I have had great success using Windows 2008 R2 as a central server for music, videos, and live TV.  I installed dual Hauppage 1600 tuner cards and got the MediaPortal TV Server running under 2008 R2 to distribute Live TV, and the MediaPortal clients throughout the house also access TV shows (MyTVSeries is still the best plugin for anything anywhere).  I run Subsonic as a music server that I share with my friends.  It all works very well, except that the time has come for us to switch from OTA television to cable TV.  Enter Ceton Infinitv 4.

      I understand I won’t be able to use MediaPortal for live TV anymore, and that’s fine (though sad).  What I really want to do is continue to use my server as the distribution point for live TV.

      The Ceton card won’t run in Server 2008 R2, of course, as there is no Media Center.  So my thought was to install Windows 7 Pro on a Hyper-V virtual machine.  I have no problem with that part of the project.

      What I don’t know how to do is pass the Ceton to Windows 7 and make its tuners available to the client PCs on the network.

      Any help, hints, pointers, and anecdotes will be very appreciated.

      June 15, 2011 at 7:20 pm #30324
      mikinho

        Hi RevMen.  Unless you plan to use the virtual HTPC as a recording system there is no point to having it.  At least not w/ respect to the InfiniTV.

        The InfiniTV drivers install w/o issue on Windows 2008 R2 (and even WHS 2011).  If you want to be able to use the Ceton InfiniTV Diagnostics tool on the 2008 R2 host then you’ll need to enable two services which are disabled by default on 2008 R2.

        1- UPnP Device Host

        2- SSDP Discovery

        From there follow Aaron’s guide to manually configure bridging the InfiniTV.  Three basic steps:

        1- Enable “Network Bridging Support” on the InfiniTV network interface

        2- Change the InfiniTV to Static IP or DHCP Client mode via the InfiniTV Device Webpage

        3- Bridge the InfiniTV w/ your physical network card

        If you did want to use a virtual HTPC you could bridge the InfiniTV with a private or internal virtual network card instead.  You could also pass the InfiniTV to the virtual.  But I don’t recommend it if you want to use clients w/ Live TV anways.

        June 15, 2011 at 7:33 pm #30325
        RevMen

          Wow, I’m a lot closer than I thought I was.  Thanks very much for the help.

          I did hope to use the server to also record shows centrally, since it will be the only computer that’s guaranteed to be on all the time.  But it’s not critical, as there aren’t many shows we’d want to record.  At least not right now.

          So if I understand correctly, I don’t need Windows 7 on the server at all to share the InfiniTV tuners with my client PCs.  Server 2008 R2 is capable of handling this on its own.  I did notice that the Ceton card seemed to install just fine on my server.  I hadn’t got much further than that.

          I need to learn more about using Media Center, which I have never tried.  Is there a way to cause all recorded shows to be recorded on the same machine, regardless of where the command to record those shows came from?  Basically, can a set of computers running Media Center be made to act like a MediaPortal installation with a central TV server?  If it’s possible to assign all recording duties to a single machine, perhaps the recording machine could be a VM on the server.

          June 15, 2011 at 7:36 pm #30326
          mikinho

            It is not natively possible but Andrew (babgvant) has written Recording Broker for that purpose.

            The caveat to this approach is that only Copy-Freely content can be viewed on remote clients.  Depending on what channels you subscribe to andor cable provider that may not be an issue though.

            September 23, 2011 at 7:43 pm #31432
            drsreym

              I started those services and set them to automatic but the application still crashed with the latest and beta drivers.

               

              Any ideas?

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