Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005: Feature and Performance Investigation

Watching Two things at Once

One of the big features of MCE 2005 is its support for up to three tuner cards. Now the tuner cards must be actually supported with MCE drivers, but you can mix and match them. The benefit of having multiple tuners is obvious: with only a single tuner if you're recording a program, you cannot change channels. With two tuners you can record one program while watching another channel and with three tuners you can record two programs while watching yet a third. Simple enough?

For our tests we used a pair of ATI eHome PCI TV tuners, which are supported under MCE 2005 with drivers from ATI.

Alongside the MCE 2005 release, NVIDIA is introducing a dual-tuner single PCI card made specifically for MCE 2005 machines as a part of their NVTV tuner card line. We could not obtain a sample for this review but we will definitely keep our eyes out for one.

MCE 2005's integration and acceptance of multiple tuners is seamless. If you have multiple tuners in your system when MCE is installed, then going through the initial TV configuration wizard will allow you to select how many tuners you would like to configure. Or, if you're not big on details, you can let the configuration wizard detect that you have multiple tuners and automatically configure them for use.

If you're adding a tuner after the fact the setup is almost as simple, you need need to take one additional step. Head into the TV settings and select Set Up TV Signal from the menu; you will then be taken to the same configuration wizard you had the first time you setup the machine and you know the drill from here.

The functionality of the additional tuners is instantly activated. If you have two tuners, Media Center will no longer complain if you have two shows set to record with overlapping times. However, attempt to record a third show and the trusty conflict manager will pop up:

The same functionality applies to having three tuners installed, but be warned, with three tuners you're going to want to have a reasonably fast system.
There is no support for a picture-in-picture mode in Media Center even with multiple tuners installed, so the functionality is limited to recording multiple shows or recording while watching.

If there were a million different ways Microsoft could have implemented multituner support in Media Center they picked the one that was most seamless to the end user; it just works.