New Tuner(s)

I bought a new Pinnacle PCTV Dual DVB-T USB tuner recently, to extend the capability of my media centre PC. I chose this device because it follows the now relatively standard BDA interface which will let it work with Windows Media Centre for example. Given it uses this interface, it should also not be too hard to get it to work under Linux if necessary.

Being compatible with lots of software, I felt confident that I would be able to adapt my TV guide application to set recordings on it and, albeit a lower priority, I hoped that the Nebula DigiTV software would also recognise it.

The latest version of the DigiTV software states that it will work with BDA compatible devices. Unfortunately it appears that it won't (at least with this tuner anyway), but I don't see that as too much of a problem because there's every likelihood that the next Nebula version will recognise it better.

In the meantime, I have a choice of methods to set recordings:

• Windows Media Centre. I like the interface a lot, but it is a bit fiddly to get to where you want quickly which does not make it my player of choice. It has however proven to be a useful application for testing the new tuners. Another downside is its choice of recording being only MS-DVR format which is not directly playable by many applications. There is a recording API in .NET which I can call direct from my TV Guide which is handy, but because of the reasons above, I probably won't use it.
• Pinnacle Media Centre. This is a pretty horrible looking application from Pinnacle and only stayed installed for the day whilst I was testing it. There's no comparison (IMHO) with either MCE or Nebula's software.
• DVB Web Scheduler Pro. I discovered this recently and I like it because it does pretty much exactly what I want it to do. It's an application which sets up a small website on your computer which you can then use to schedule recordings. It works with any BDA compatible tuner, and records in a number of formats. It will support multiple tuners, and multiple simultaneous recordings from the same multiplex. It costs AUD 29.95 and seems to work fine. From my TV guide perspective, because it uses a web UI, it's easy for me to adapt it to work with my guide using just a new timer plugin.

The plan for now is to add a plugin to the TV guide so that it can talk to DVB Web Scheduler, and use the two new tuners primarily for recordings. It's unlikely that the third tuner (Nebula) will be required then for day-to-day Tivo like operation so the Nebula can be used for viewing live TV instead.

Once I have it set up like that, I'll extend the TV guide so that it can use the Nebula if it needs to, but will use the other tuners in preference. That should give me the best of all worlds.

One interesting point about DVD Web Scheduler is that an early version (which I was testing) allowed streaming of live TV over the network, something which I've not managed to do until now. I followed the instructions on the VideoHelp forum, and to my surprise it worked seamlessly! It also has the advantage of controlling the streaming via the web front end - meaning I could change channels remotely too!

Oddly however, that functionality has disappeared from the latest version. I'm not sure why yet, but already there appear to be workarounds.

I'll give it a go and report my findings..