Vista Media Center - Sunday, August 17, 2008 11:30 - 0 Comments

Support for more than 2 TV Tuners, Media Center

Currently I have one of those cool dual tuner cards for my Vista media center. I wanted to add another one so that I could get 4 tuners active at once but woooah hang on, Vista limits you to just 2 tuners max no matter what you do.

This seems to be a crazy limiation. Since these cards all generally encode video the host machine isn’t ever under much load so why can’t we have a bunch of tuners. Two really isn’t enough, not when you’re using it as a whole house DVR. Lets say you have 4 rooms, well that means you can only watch 2 different channels at any time and wouldn’t be able to record anything.

The only solution besides supporting x tuners is to have more than one media server which share the recorded TV. (Yes that is already supported, Yippy)