Upgrading Media Center from a Single to a Dual Tuner
A few days ago I received my ordered Terratec Cinergy 2400i DT - MCE dual freeview tuner.
The card has two tuners on the one plug-in card and takes care of splitting the TV signal internally. Wow! Now I should rarely get the conflict message when picking something that collides with another program that I've already scheduled. The trouble is, I use the MCE system so much that I was frightened to install it - everything was working so well! It was no good though, after a few days of walking around it salivating, I decided to install it and to post my findings on here.
I shut down the MCE PC (it's normally on 24/7) and unplugged the mains lead. This is important because certain PCI card hardware remains powered up even if the PC is switched off and you might not get a clean boot sequence with fresh hardware otherwise.
I removed my existing VideoMate single tuner card, smiled at it and said 'thank you'.
I unwrapped the Terratec card and gazed at it lovingly, although I've spent enough after-midnight hours with errant hardware to know that something that looks good still might not cut the mustard. There is remarkably little documentation provided with the card, I guess its all on the CD but since I decided I would only need the drivers for MCE I did not dig for information any further. The first thing I noticed as I tried to plug it into the PCI slot was that it wouldn't. It was a PCI express card. I sighed, but thankfully my Intel motherboard was only a few months old and had two unused PCI express slots. I screwed it in.
I started up the PC and whilst windows was booting I placed the Terratec CD into the drive. Soon, the 'found new hardware' wizard appeared and loaded various files from the CD. (I think there is PVR software supplied but I ran no CD applications). That was that.
I started MCE and went to Settings, TV, 'Set up TV signal'. This gave me the following screens:
After this tuner screen, I was returned to the main settings list. Great! No change to the guide or any scheduled recordings.
From there I went to the guide and picked a live program, watched it for a few mins, set it recording and went to another live TV program. All worked fine, total time about 20 minutes PC case open to closed. For about £73 inc VAT its got to be a great upgrade.