Media Center Round 2

My tuner card arrived. I’m a little disappointed in that it’s not like the original Home Wonder card that had multiple inputs and a handy port extender, but this is the tuner that will work with MCE. I didn’t order the FM option, so the card has a single coax connector on it. I popped it in the box and updated the drivers for it.

Media Center had a wizard to go through to set up the TV signals it found and then download the guide for local TV listings. Once that was done I could easily setup to record “Hart’s War” on the FX channel to test out the recording. Since the program ran past my bed time I checked it this morning and it seemed to have recorded just fine. I’ll have to watch the movie to pick up if it had any jumpy parts or how well it did. The approx. 3 hour recording took up about 8.5 GB and was set to record at the “best” level. It looked pretty good when I just checked that it worked.

So now I have to get a 50 foot coax cable so I don’t have a cable running across the floor in the study (I need to run it along the wall, but the cable I have isn’t long enough for that). I’ve set up MCE to record the Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis series on Sci-fi. These are pretty much the only shows my wife and I watch on a regular basis, but we constantly miss the episodes since they are on Fridays. Now we can watch them whenever. I’ve heard some mixed reports on the reliability of MCE recording, so I’ll do some redundancy with the VCR for a while.

Next up will be burning a DVD of my recordings to see how that turns out.