freshseasons said:
Thanks ravi_9793, Chota Cheeta and GX_saurav.
Ravi i think if the card works in Media Center 2005 , Then it will also work in Windows Vista.
Media Center i don't know why seems to have a problem with non-standard cards, or may be they purposely left out certain cards ,as they believe that not having a good card will make the media center experience bad.So they have a site where they specifically ask Manufacturers to submit their TV Tuner Cards.
Windows XP MCE had one specific requirement that the TV Tuner must support hardware encoding for recording Videos, timeshifting, pause etc. When u watch TV on MCE, it also records it in the background so that u can simply pause Live TV, while recording continues in the background. This takes lots of CPU so a hardware encoder in TV tuner was required.
Due to this, it was an OEM only OS. Hauppauge WinTV, & some other MSI TV tuner cards were compatible with this. ATI TV Wonder HD was the first TV Tuner which was XP MCE certified despite of having a software encoder.
With Windows Vista, this isn't the case, All you need is a Vista Certified Driver for the TV tuner card & whether it is hardware or Software based it will work with Vista Media Center. Pinnacle released Vista compatible drivers for there old card which are available on Windows Update. My TV Card works in Vista but due to some other reason ehshell.exe crashes every time I launch Media Center. I am using ChrisTV & in a dier need of Pinnacle TV Center software
The Pinnacle TV Tuner cards I showed are also software based, means they use CPU Power for the recording etc, so unless you have a powerful dual core CPU, forget about direct recording in MCE at high quality.
So far I have not seen any other TV Tuner in India other then Pinnacle which is Vista MC compatible.
Even if the card doesn't work in MCE, don't worry. Pinnacle cards comes bundled with either Pinnacle Media Center or TVCenter so you won't miss anything on Vista as far as TV is concerned. After MCE was released by Microsoft, almost all companies ripped the concept & UI including Pinnacle, Apple, SageTV, Media Portal
Have a look at PCTV Tuner Kit for Windows Vista. This is certified to run in Windows Vista