The interesting thing is to wonder how many people use NTSC off the air vs from cable. There is no reason the cable companies won’t continue to broadcast via NTSC long after 2009. The air broadcasters have to stop analog broadcasts on 2/17/2009, but since cable doesn’t use broadcast spectrum, they are fine to use whatever standard they want. (They could use PAL if they wanted to distribute the cable boxes)

I’m in a mode right now of trying to decide if I want to keep paying the cable company, or just make do with the Samsung ATSC tuner and Terk55 antenna I’ve got. If I could easily get my TiVo working with the HDTV Tuner, I’d make the move right now.

Hi, Richard from SnapStream here. It’s definitely not any sort of implicitly technical requirement, as you might have guessed just by thinking about it.

Usually there’s a legacy assumption in the code that would require changing a lot of cod to fix it.

Just guessing, since we don’t write MCE…but there’s likely an assumption in their product that the guide will always be referring to an analog tuner. (which was valid in 2002, but not now)

That’s highly unlikely. Check my links as the DTV transition was approved by both the House and Senate and then ratified into law by George W. early this year. The emergency public services need the analog spectrum and the gov’t needs the several billions of dollars estimated as a result of auctioning off the analog spectrum; that “revenue” is already in the federal budget.

Don’t be surprised if that deadline get’s moved. That deadline has moved many times ALREADY. The FCC is the unknown component here. The broadcasters also are a HUGE unknown. If the broadcasters decide to put up a fight, they have enough control to move this date.

Shahn, I’m with you on the updates. The rollups and patches get delivered as promised. You’re spot-on with the “trick” to WMCE. I figured this out the hard way last year and keep an external USB NTSC tuner in my home office solely for this purpose. See: http://www.hdbeat.com/2005/11/29/sub-grand-wmce-4/

I almost forgot–one “trick” is that you can setup the TV part of Media Center with an analog tuner, then remove it and you can continue to watch tv etc. This “trick” works much better in the current build of Vista than it did in MCE 2005. However, it’s still a pain to remove my only analog tuner from my main media center down stairs and install it in my office computer which has the HD tuner in it.

Oh, I agree! I think it’s a glaring item that needs to be addressed. I doubt it will be addressed in Vista by RTM. However, the MCE team does have a good record of releasing close to yearly updates. So let’s hope they resolve this issue in the next iteration.

That could be Shahn, but I’ve used the other DTV PVR software I’ve mentioned and I can get guide data without an NTSC card. I don’t doubt what you’ve been told, but I do question why that’s a requirement for Microsoft when other software companies can do it without that requirement.

Kevin,
I’ve inquired about this requirement before and Microsoft has stated that they key the guide data off of the analog tuner–so it’s required.