It works

Well, from what I remember, Windows MCE and XP only ever supported digital terrestrial TV, and satellite support was lacking, no matter what hardware you had, I never managed to get it working.

Well, they've amended that with W7, and it's fantastic. Essentially, I have all of FreeSat, inculding BBC HD fully guided, working and recordable. My PC has just turned into a funky Sky+ box for all Freesat with the ability to record, record TV series link, etc. Of course, none of the Sky channels are available, but for everything else, it's brilliant. For the £50 it cost me to get a decent DVB-S2 (S2 gives MPEG4 / HD compatibility), I have full Sat TV, HD with dolby digital come to life

Tut.. have moved your post to the tech shed... you should know better

This is good news. the flat im in at the moment only has a single sat connection, so i cant justify paying for a Sky+/HD sub, but i am looking into a decent HTPC setup to replace the rather power-hungry eggbox+pc combo.

IIRC the win7 part of MCE has been back-ported to vista/xp MCE too if you look in the usual places

Out if curiosity waht card are you using for the freesat

A Technotrend S2-3200 budget PCI (clicky. It has the expansion slot for the CAM addon. But I wanted to get one that was S2 / h264 compatible for future HD possibilities.

You can get cards with twin tuners and you can gang multiple cards in one system. Some chap has effectively 6 tuners so he can record 6 different programs or record 5 and watch a 6th :eek:

but surely your limited by the number of sat connections? :confused:

but surely your limited by the number of sat connections? :confused:

Indeed, but an 8 output LNB can be had for peanuts on ebay. Then just run the 8 feeds into your house and its all sorted.

There are some pretty funky systems being shown at NAB for dealing with HD and more which look stunning, but a bit more than the £50 you quote.

What sort of power does the PC have to process it all?

SWMBO's PC which has the card is pretty old. An early X2 athlon, 1GB RAM. I remember it not being able to handle HD very well because of the limited CPU power, but with W7MC, it's running a lot better, presumably because it can offload to the GPU which is a 7950GT so not too bad.

Hmm that's nice to know, might have to look at hunting down a card at some point and having a play

Will have to see how much room I have in my HTPC case.