dual TV tuners in one PC?

[comrade53]

I've got both an Avermedia UltraTV 500 card and a Pinnacle PCTV Pro card. Is it possible to install both in the same PC and have them play together nicely? I was thinking along the lines of being able to watch TV while recording a different channel on the other one.

The Avermedia card has hardware MPG encoding, which I'm told is better as it takes a lot of the workload off of the CPU.

I'm not an expert at this, so if it's a dumb question, try not to be too hard on about asking it.

I saw a post on this site about having two HD TV tuners in one PC, so I'm assuming it can be done...., but I could just as well be wrong.

Thanks for any help!

 

[Bruxbox]

As a general proposition, you can run two different TV tuners in the same box if each tuner uses different tuner chips, requiring different software drivers. If the two tuners use the same tuner chip (the same Brooktree or the same Conexant), then they may not work because one set of drivers may not do the trick.

But, if each uses different tuners, you're going to be OK.

You've mixed in a question about HD tv tuners. The two brand tuners you've mentioned, Avermedia UltraTV 500 and Pinnacle PCTV Pro, are standard defintion TV tuners, not HD tuners.

The significance of hardware MPEC encoding is, as you say, encoding in hardware rather than in software, which involves the CPU doing the encoding. The thing with HD television is that it's digital, and can record directly to the hard drive; i.e., not much encoding is necessary. Standard TV is analog.

Secondly, a standard definition TV tuner with hardware MPEG encoding is required in a Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 system, especially if you are going to add one or two HD tuners. The WMCE will not setup TV channels when only a HD tuner is installed.

As for non-WMCE systems, you don't need an hardware encoder tuner. In fact, in a plain Windows XP box, you can use two HD tuners without needing a standard TV tuner. Of course, the HD tuners should be different brands. For instance, an ATI HDTV Wonder and a Dvico FusionHDTV will work together. I will note that these two models include standard definition tuners as well as HD tuners.

However, each brand has its own different software apps, so you have to deal with that difference.

Some have used SageTV to set it up to do simultaneous operation using the two HD tuners, but I don't know enough about Sage to say anything intelligent about how to do that.