4 HD Tuners

Months ago I bought a ceton 4 tuner HD card.  Its been sitting in my computer picking up over the air HD channels.  Though nice, it wasn't using the full potential of the card.  I finally call the cable company to get someone out to install a CableCard and Network tuner.  Technically, they are required to let me do this for free, but insisted  on sending someone out and charger us for it.  Mainly because they have issues with CableCards not working the first time.

The CableCard worked the first time and I was able to pick up cable channels on the card.  A small issue happened when tried to watch the HD channels.  Seems all the HD channels use SDV (switched digital video). To watch SDV channels, you need a tuner adapter.  Because there are so many cable channels now, they can't send them all down the pipe at the same time.  The tuning adapter is an extra box that connects via USB to the computer.  The computer tells it which channel you want to watch and it reports back what frequency that channel will show up on.  

The tuner adapter did not connect to the computer the first day, or the second.  I opened a ticket with Ceton about it, they were quick to respond and had me send a few diagnostic logs.  Then, a few days later it just started working on its own.  Might have had to do with the fact the computer finally auto installed SP1 on it.

Now that its working correctly, I have to say its pretty nice.  I'm able to watch 1 channel and record 3 others at the same time.  I can even share the tuners over the network so other computers can watch tv too.

Some things I'm sad about.  Media Center will not allow you to watch 2 channels at the same time, ala Picture in Picture.  The hard drive in the computer is TOO small.  I used an old 80gb laptop one I had laying around.  This is not even close to what you need when recording HD video.