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When I originally built my HTPC, I used 2 Freeview cards.  Each Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-T500 has two Freeview tuners in one PCI card.  By installing two of these (and with some registry tweaking) it is possible to build a device that can record/watch 4 Freeview channels at once.

Out of the box the Vista Media Centre GUI is only capable of setting up 2 tuners at any one time.  This is odd since the underlying tuner architecture is actually quite capable of using as many tuners as you can fit in the machine.  Your limiting factor, really, is the speed you can push the data to your hard drive.

So, how to enable the extra tuners?  Here’s the process I followed to make it work:

1. Start Media Centre by pressing the Green Button.
2. Go to Setting -> TV -> Set Up TV Signal.
3. Follow the process for configuring the tuners, in the first run through you will configure the first 2 tuners.
4. Close the Media Centre interface.
5. Stop the Media Centre Receiver service.

   net stop ehrecvr

6. Open the Registry Editor, and navigate to this key:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
   \Media Center\Service\Video\Tuners\{71985F48-1CA1-11D3-9CC8-00C04F7971E0}

   That GUID on the end is the one for the DVB-T tuning space.

7. Under the GUID key there will be one key per tuner device – you need to find the two keys that were just configured by the Media Centre interface.
8. You can locate them by looking for the EnabledForMCE value under the UserSettings key.  If the value is set to 0xffffffff it has been configured, if not it’ll be 0×00000000.
9. Export those two keys to .reg files by right-clicking on the GUID key and choosing Export [Selected Branch Only].  Name each one separately (Tuner1.reg, Tuner2.reg, etc).
10. Repeat steps 1 to 9 for each set of two tuners you have, in my case I just had to do the process twice, once for tuners 1 and 2, then again for 3 and 4.
11. Once you’ve exported all the registry keys, and ensuring the ehrecvr service is still stopped, double-click all the keys to import them into the registry.
12. Close Registry Editor.
13. Start the Media Centre interface.

You can test that this has worked by entering the guide and starting recordings on 4 channels at once.  You should be able to go into Recorded TV and watch the streams of any of the channels as they are being recorded.

Sounds great, right?  So why am I using satellite cards instead of Freeview?  Two reasons: signal quality, and HD support.  We’re in a bit of a fringe signal area, and our aerial is fed via a series of boosters and distribution devices through multiple apartments.  I happen to have a Sky Minidish with a quad LNB anyway from when I used to subscribe to SkyHD.  I can’t put a new Freeview aerial on the roof, and loft-based aerials don’t offer the signal quality necessary.  So I turned to the satellite cards, which offer the benefit of HD content too.  More on them, and why using Satellite under Vista is a pain in the proverbial in the next post.