Yup, Win 7 x64…
Imagine my surprise when I was setting up Media Center and my TV tuners and finally had a version of Windows [i]that recognised and could actually USE the NTSC tuner [/i] of my ANCIENT FusionHDTV3 Gold QAM PCI tuner card!!!!
Ya… Now that ANALOG IS HISTORY! MS supports it… sigh…
Could have used this 4 years ago – when this Fusion was much newer.
Here’s the whole story. I use my “old” Gigabyte 690G MB in Franken HTPC. The IGP doesn’t quite cut it, so I have an 8600GT in the PCIe slot and my A64 X2 4200+ with 2gb of Dual Channel RAM. Also there are the very first FusionHDTV tuner I ever bought – the FusionHDTV3 Gold QAM (with daughter card!) – a marvel of original ATSC tuning AND an AverMedia M780.
The AverMedia’s analog tuner is connected to Cable, the digital tuner to my OTA antenna as is the Fusion. Win 7’s Media Center recognised and gave me the options to tune analog OTA, digital OTA, analog Cable, and QAM. I didn’t re-do the connections (it was late) so I settled for analog Cable, analog OTA, and digital OTA (although I was confused at that point and didn’t fully understand it was going to use my Fusion as an analog tuner!).
Once I started up the Guide (which I hate), I realized I had all 3 programming sources avaliable. I’m going to connect the digital tuner of the M780 to Cable and see if I can do all 4 (with 2 tuners) – QAM, ATSC, analog Cable, analog OTA…
I was pretty stunned that I could record NTSC OTA television and analog Cable at the same time. I’ve never been able to do that. [i]I won’t be doing it in the future either.[/i] It’s just “nice” that MS has finally done what they should have done years ago! They should have had this capability (we were all asking for it!) on MCE 2005. We were shocked they didn’t include it in Vista. AND – Now that it’s practically useless, they support it in Win 7! What a world we live in….
OK, back to 7MC: I like most of the new features of 7MC – EXCEPT! – [b]I just hate the Guide.[/b].. I know, I know… [i]But in MCE2005 and VMC, all my digital channels were grouped nicely together.[/i] I didn’t have to go far to find my HD programming. Do you know how many analog and Cable channels are listed between digital 3.1 and 61.1??? (You’d think it was only about 57, wouldn’t you? It’s not. There’s 4, 5, 5.1, 6, 7, 8, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 and on-and-on…)
Ya, I know, I can show HD programming only…
I still like the [i]old way[/i]!
Overall though I really like Win 7 so far. It’s more “trim”, resource-wise. Runs very nicely on FrankenHTPC.
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