Windows MCE and TV cards...

Howski · 28 Jan 2006 at 17:03

Hi,
I was thinkingof geting a windows MCE pc up and running. I can get a Lifeview Fly TV platinum FM card for free but I'm not sure if it will work? The site lists only XP and 2003 drivers so I'm not hopefull. Can anyone tell me if it will work and if so where to get the drivers/plugin.
Cherrs
-How.

csmager · 28 Jan 2006 at 20:03

The site needs to have BDA drivers - most sites list them as specific to MCE. So the fact they don't list MCE drivers would lead me to think that it wouldn't be supported.

The card's also only an Analog TV card - they may not have made drivers available because MCE requires a hardware MPEG2 encoder.

Digital TV cards would give you more channels (Freeview) and slightly better quality. The BlackGold cards are pretty good, and they do a deal on a pair of them (for dual recording capability). Not free, I know - but I'm quite impressed with mine!

Psyk · 28 Jan 2006 at 21:26

How come MCE needs different drivers? What's a BDA driver?

csmager · 28 Jan 2006 at 21:39

found a quote somewhere:

"BDA = Broadcast Driver Architecture, is a MS standard for how a TV card device driver should be written. It is part of the MS DirectX family of APIs and is the core of how TV is implemented in their Media Center Edition (MCE).

It basically allows the use of any BDA compliant application (eg ShowShifter, Webscheduler BDA, etc) to work with a device that has such drivers."

Psyk · 29 Jan 2006 at 15:24

That makes sense, thanks. So does that mean a normal XP driver would work, but only with the software that came with the card?

csmager · 29 Jan 2006 at 15:27

Yep. The BDA drivers would be needed for 3rd party software, like MCE, Showshifter etc.