Lack of Hybrid Tuner Support in VMC TV Feature Pack 2008

[PeterAlt]

After installing the feature pack, I was shocked to discover that hybrid tuner support had been disabled and that support for hybrid tuner cards is nonexistent. I then continued to try to get hybrid tuner functionality to work via the “kram” registry hack and no luck. VMC with this latest upgrade will recognize hybrid tuners as analog tuners with automatic setup. With manual setup, you can specify whether the card is digital or analog but not both. Once its setup manually, you’re stuck with either analog or digital for that hybrid you’re trying to set up with no option later on to add the other.

Hybrid cards use a single tuner to receive both hardware encoded analog and digital ATSC signals. Combo cards, which work without any problems with the new VMC upgrade, use two tuners: one dedicated to analog hardware encoding, and one dedicated to ATSC (or QAM) digital. The newer ATI-based 650pro PCIe cards use the combo tuner approach and should have no problem with the upgrade. But the older ATI 650pro-based PCI cards are hybrid tuners and can only be used as either analog or digital with TV Feature Pack 2008, not as both, which is what these cards were designed for.

Making matters even more frustrating is the fact that Hauppauge has released (in my opinion) the perfect card (the WinTV-HVR-2250), which has two hybrid tuners on a single card. But if you want to receive both digital and analog channels, the card is no better than having a combo card (with the VMC upgrade). That’s really a shame to have to be forced in deciding whether to sacrifice analog in order to have dual digital tuner capability!

Now, if all channels go digital (which may very well happen in lieu of the FCC’s mandate for broadcast to go all digital next year), then analog reception won’t be needed and all hybrid tuners can be designated “digital” and there’s no loss. And if that happens, hybrid tuners will have no apparent advantage over digital tuners (other than maybe FM and video capture). And, if that’s the case, the new Dvico Dual PCIe digital tuner card may be a better choice than the new Hauppauge card.

For those considering an Avermedia card, VMC will see the PCIe Combo as two tuners (one analog, one digital) and you will have no problem with the upgrade. However, the Bravia uses a hybrid tuner and you will have to decide if you want to use it (within VMC) as analog or digital but not both.

A good thing to note about the new VMC update is that it will do QAM on any digital card you install. Another thing I like is that it actually identifies the channels it finds as it scans the channels for QAM signals and automatically maps it to the EPG. On the down side is its lack of h.264 support, which is beyond frustrating as this prevents native support for Blu-Ray and even Hauppauge’s HD STB capture box.

So I thought I could make up for VMC’s short-comings by installing SageTV. Well, guess what? Since the VMC update also updates the tuner drivers with QAM support, it appears that the updated digital tuner drivers will cause SageTV to have a nervous meltdown, if you try accessing them through SageTV. Analog tuner access through SageTV is unaffected.

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