With multiple guides, tuner pooling became a necessity and a neat feature. They're now able to enhance their systems with any type of tuner they like. For example, the few users with digital-cable-ready PCs (systems using CableCARDs) were limited to the tuners that shipped with their systemsprobably two at best. This is far more important than it may seem. Before TV Pack, Windows Vista wouldn't allow you to set up signals that required different TV guides (though there were hacks to get around that limitation). If you're a real TV enthusiast, the more the merrier, of course.Īdd that many tuners and you're bound to have different television sourcesan over-the-air antenna in addition to a high-def CableCARD feed, for example, or a cable box combined with a QAM tuner. TV Pack increases the limit to four tuners per tuner type. Working with Tuners: Prior to TV Pack, a Vista Ultimate Media Center system could support two tuners of three different types (NTSC, ATSC, and CableCARD). So, why is this big? Well, because before TV Pack, you couldn't get HD content from a cable plugged into your PC. Depending on where you live and your cable provider, you may receive even more stations via Clear QAM, such as MTV and TNT. But many channels are unencrypted, or "clear," since Cox, Cablevision, and most other big providers make ABC, CBS, NBC, and the other basic channels available on their networks by remodulating the over-the-air ATSC broadcast into QAM. Most of it is encrypted, requiring either a CableCARD or a cable box to decode. QAM, or quadrature amplitude modulation, is another way of describing the video signal your cable provider supplies. Here in the U.S., it's, or unencrypted digital cable. These last two are essential for anyone in Europe who wants to receive digital TVthough the last-minute elimination of support for the H.264 codec means high-def content there is still mainly a no-go. In Europe, it's Digital Video BroadcastingSatellite (DVB-S) and Terrestrial (DVB-T), as well as Multimedia and Hypermedia Experts Group (MHEG-5). In Japan, Media Center now works with Integrated Services Digital BroadcastingTerrestrial (ISDB-T) and Broadcast Markup Language (BML). According to Ben Reed, product marketing manager at Microsoft, it's the primary reason TV Pack exists. New Digital Formats: The biggest new feature in TV Pack is support for new television formats. Then we'll walk you through how to use them and how to make the most from Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008. First, we'll examine the new features in greater depth. Why install verboten code? TV Pack includes important new features, such as support for new television formats (particularly outside of the U.S.), a polished and enhanced TV guide, heterogeneous tuner support (Engadget's Ben Drawbaugh accurately describes it as "far cooler than it sounds"), and more. And in spite of Microsoft's caution that TV Pack should be installed only on a clean copy of Windows Vista SP1, many users are reporting success with the new software. Of course, enthusiasts across the Web have found places to download TV Pack (including the chat boards at Engadget HD and Microsoft-owned The Green Button), neither of which have been asked to remove the links. With even less fanfare (not so much as a press release), the company officially launched TV Pack at this year's CEDIA (Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association) show in September, where manufacturers such as Life|ware and Niveus Media released computers with the new code. In fact, there are only a handful of places on Microsoft's collection of Web sites that mention it at all visit Media Center's main digs on the corporate portal and you can't even tell that there's been an upgrade. It's intended for release to manufacturers only, and there's no guarantee they'll offer it as an upgrade to current users. Here's the bad news (or, maybe, not-so-great news): It's an OEM-only upgrade, so you can't download it through Windows Update or from. The TV Pack was released on July 16, replacing the existing Media Center code in Vista with a new version.18273. That means high-def cable for the rest of us! The Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008 software lets PCs receive high-definition cable content without requiring specially certified systems (though CableCARDs are required for premium, encrypted content). And the good news is that the media-centric interface just got its biggest overhaul since Vista launched. What's the neatest feature in Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system? The answer is simple: Windows Media Center. How to Set Up Two-Factor Authentication.How to Record the Screen on Your Windows PC or Mac. How to Convert YouTube Videos to MP3 Files.How to Save Money on Your Cell Phone Bill.How to Free Up Space on Your iPhone or iPad.How to Block Robotexts and Spam Messages.
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