As Media Center 2005 rolls into view, the hardware vendors are preparing their latest offerings, Hauppauge specifically have 2 new cards and another 2 revamped ‘MCE’ editions.
‘The WinTV-NOVA-T-MCE is a digital TV receiver which receives television on the DVB-T format, and can be used to watch and record digital TV shows under Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.’
What this offers you essentially (providing you have a good quality signal) is up to DVD quality TV pictures and higher quality sound than analog TV (as there is no analog to digital conversion when the signal gets to your MCE PC). Several cards have offered this functionality since last year, such as the GDI Black Gold and several OEM only cards such as Emuzed. The vanilla Nova-T has been used with Media Center 2004 for DVB-T, but it did involve some work to obtain drivers compatible with the particular chipset used by the different versions of the card (from 3rd parties). This –MCE edition should simplify this as it will be shipped with drivers for both Windows XP and Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. The downside with digital TV is that you do need a good percentage of the signal or you will see nothing on screen, so if you do invest in some DVB-T hardware its always worth borrowing a set top box from a friend to checkout how well you're antenna is doing.
Hauppauge also have three new analogue tuners, the PVR150MCE, PVRUSB2-MCE and PVR500MCE. The 150 is a new lower cost version of the PVR250MCE (same video quality, but lacking hardware Video CD encoding). The PVR500MCE is an interesting beast; it offers the same features as the current 250MCE but has two TV tuners and two hardware video encoders on a single card which could be handy in small systems with limited PCI slots. However Media Center 2002/2004 does not support dual tuner functionality, and no announcement has yet been made regarding that feature in Media Center 2005. Though reading the Hauppauge page for the card it does infer that 2005 will support this.
To compare the WinTV PVR Products see http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/compare_pvr.html
(Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial (DVB-T) is digital TV format used in the U.K (‘Freeview’), parts of Germany, Australia and Taiwan. This format is not used in the United States, which currently uses ATSC for higher definition digital broadcasts.)