Media Center Upgrade

Given the success of my “new” Media Center I thought it deserved a little more money spending on it to avoid the “Media Center would like to change channel to record xxxx” scenario. Prescribed: Dual tuners.

Dual tuners allow you to either watch one channel and record another or record two different channels at the same but, last time I looked, a dual tuner card cost a lot more than I was prepared to spend. Nowadays, USB tuners are commonplace (and cheap) and they even come in dual tuner flavours.

I opted for a KWorld 399U DualView DVB-T primarily because it was cheap as chips (£20 including postage on eBay – worth a gamble). It turned up this morning. I plugged it into a spare USB port on the Media Center (not that easy given it’s a “booksize” barebones system) and grabbed the drivers from the KWorld support site.

That seemed to go well so I headed off into Media Center settings, re-scanned for TV services and did the guide setup again (which had gone a bit wrong anyway – I think some extra channels must have been added recently) and hey presto!

I now have dual-tuners and reckon it took me no more than 10mins from start to finish. Here’s a picture of the beastie in his new home.

My limited testing so far has established that you can record “Diagnosis Murder” at the same time as watching “Dickinson’s Real Deal”. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

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