Originally Posted by jonaslasky Good question.
I guess if you only have the 650 in your system, it's not so complicated. You know you can only record one show in any given time period, so you wouldn't schedule two recordings at the same time. But if you have the 650 and another HD tuner.... how would a DVR application differentiate between the HD tuner and the 650's HD section? I guess you'd have to specify which tuner you want for a particular recording. Otherwise, if it grabs the 650 for the first recording, there wouldn't be an analog tuner left for an analog recording at a later time. Either that or it would grab 650's analog section, terminating your HD recording prematurely.
But then maybe it's not that complicated.
Jonas
Even if the Theater 650 Pro is the only tuner in the system it could be a good deal more complicated then one might expect initially.
Using MCE as an example:
The user isn’t necessarily always aware of what recordings are pending and when. One of the features of a quality PVR is not having to know the details of the “what, when and where (channel)” of recordings. Even if a user tries to keep abreast of all scheduled recordings it can quickly get complicated and erroneous recordings can occur as well if not configured properly.
Also keep in mind that lead-in and lead-out recording time as well as time overlaps can occur and cause problems as well.
Then there is the issue of tuner allocation and logic of the PVR.
MCE, for example, assigns tuner priority in a multi-tuner system (seemingly arbitrarily) by allocating a primary and secondary tuner. In the case of a HDTV Wonder installed with a Theater 550 Pro under MCE you have a 1x SD + 1x HD tuner configuration. Enabling the SD tuner on the HDTV Wonder results in the HDTV Wonder’s SD tuner being assigned as the primary tuner. This means that all SD watching and recording will take place on the HDTV Wonder SD tuner first and the Theater 550 Pro will only be used if the former SD tuner is in use. In such a configuration, dual SD recording can take place but SD + HD cannot because both SD + HD functionality of the HDTV Wonder would be used by default. One must manually assign the Theater 550 Pro to be the primary tuner to allow for both dual SD recording and SD + HD recording. However, in such a configuration the user must still be sure that all three tuners are not used simultaneously. If a second HD tuner is installed it should be possible to assign it as the primary ATSC tuner which would allow for a triple simultaneous SD + SD +HD recording but again all four tuners cannot be used at the same time due to the limitations of the HDTV Wonder.
Basically put, MCE 2K5 isn’t aware of the limitations of the HDTV Wonder and recording conflicts can occur because of it. Perhaps this is why ATI truncated the HDTV Wonder functionality under MCE in the first place by only officially allowing the use of the ATSC tuner. I don’t see how this would change for the Theater 650 Pro.
I need to know how ATI plans to deal with this issue.