TV recording computer - multiple tuners

[Freakitchen]

This is a bit of a long shot but does anyone have any experience in how many tuners I can use to record Freeview TV at the same time?

For my job, I'm looking to set up a computer that will record between 6 and 8 freeview channels 24/7 simultaneously. I have found motherboards that will physically support 4 PCI-Express tuner cards (with dual tuners onboard), but am not sure about the software. Looks like Windows Media Center will only support 4 tuners of the same type, but struggling to find any info on the alternatives (GBPVR, Mediaportal, Hauppauge WinTV).

Any ideas?

 

[MadMatty]

With compro cards and software, you might get away with recording everything. I dont know if you can attach each instance of a running program to a particular card, but if you can, you could record al 5 or 6 mux's and have every freeview channel contained in the 5 or 6 streams. Seperate the channels and programs later.

I only have a single freeview tuner so can only record one stream at a time, but its just an idea, dont know if its possible to run more tuners at the same time.

 

[errata]

There are ways to increase the number of tuners that can be used in media centre, not sure about the upper limit and other software. If you register theres a good forum at the hauppauge website that knows a lot about their WinTV software.

But you should really look at devices that dump channel groups (the MUX or multiplex). A comaptible single tuner should be able to dump a MUX, so several could give you the coverage of many dual tuners just recording a channel each.

It makes more sense to dump a group of channels to disc rather than have say 6 or 8 tuners contending for disc access.

Various softwares can extract the channels depending on what you want to do with the data. There are restirctions on what you can do with recorded TV, braodcasting it does not make it public property.

At standard broadcast rates you will be using upto 2gb per channel per hour have you got the disc space?

USB tuners are pretty good as are pci ones and are usaully cheaper than the pci express ones.