Originally Posted by Multimedia Mike Hi,
So regarding all this about mixing SD and HD, Theater 650 Pro will let you watch both on MCE. So you can just switch channels to whatever SD or HD ones you have.
Well one would really expect such a thing to be seamless and trouble free. Its when recording becomes an issue that problems can arise not simply watching TV.
Originally Posted by Multimedia Mike Regarding recording scenarios with other tuners, I'll have to try some things and will get back to you about it. If there are issues though, they would most likely be caused by MCE rather than the card because the app has to take care of what tuner is used for what recording. Regarding lead-in, lead-out times, it's again mostly an app thing, but don't forget you can only watch/record one thing at a time. So you can kind of ignore whether it's HD or SD and just think of it as one recording at a time.
But there in is the rub. If an application like MCE isn’t aware of the inherent limitations of the Theater 650 Pro it will more then likely step outside its workable bounds resulting in corrupted or missed recordings.
There are ways to avoid this but it may be best if ATI worked with companies like Microsoft to assure the best user experience.
Basically, if a global rule is setup to prevent simultaneous NTSC/ATSC recordings on the Theater 650 Pro and generate an error message when such an attempt is made the problem will be successfully avoided. This is not the case with the HDTV Wonder when both NTSC/ATSC components are enabled in MCE. Granted, it is an unsupported configuration but it does illustrate what can go wrong when a card is not capable of dual simultaneous recordings and has both NTSC/ATSC functionality.