Tuner Pooling AND InfiniTV 4 same PC

[Snigle]

I have a launch day InfiniTV PCI 4 that is working great and has served me well over the years. I have this installed on my primary HTPC.

I also just received an InfiniTV 6 ETH. I have multiple HTPC's on my network. Ideally this is what I would like to do (assuming the InfiniTV 4 and 6 can both be used on the same PC).

Keep the InfiniTV 4 on my main HTPC, and also use the InfiniTV 6 with pooling, this would allow me to use the InfiniTV 6 to pool tuners on my two other HTPC's.

Essentially I suspect my main HTPC will use 4-8 tuners, and my other two PCs will use 1 or 2 tuners each. On my main HTPC 4 tuners would be from the InfiniTV 4, and the rest would be pooled off of the InfiniTV 6. Is this possible?

If not, would this work?:
Install the InfiniTV 4 on my main HTPC, and network bridge 2 tuners to each of my other 2 HTPCs. This would leave 0 free tuners on my main HTPC off of the InfiniTV 4. But I could then dedicate all 6 tuners on my InfiniTV 6 to my main HTPC.

I do like the appeal of tuner pooling, and I am trying to keep all of my TAs in my media closet and connected to my main HTPC.

Let me know if the first setup (InfiniTV 4 dedicated and 6 tuner pooling) would work. Or, if the InfiniTV 4 networked tuners, and 6 dedicated would work.

Thanks!

[Motz]

Yep that first scenario is exactly what I would do. Tuner pool the ETH that way pcie is always dedicated to that main PC.

[JohnW248]

There is something to keep in mind, that is the way MC allocates and finds tuners. Your main unit with the internal PCIe 4 should remain just the way it is, then add the Ethernet device. Now you will have to re-run tv set-up on the main machine as well as tv set-up on the others. On the main machine you can let it find all 10 tuners and set-up that up, on the others it should find 6 tuners and set that up.

Now what will happen is that MC uses a different priority for live tv and recording. To check this you need both the four tuner and six tuner "tuner temps" html pages. Tune a channel on the main machine and find which tuner it used, then set a recording for that channel (stop it first) and see what tuner it chooses. That will give you first choice live tv and first choice recorded tv. You can move that around by going to edit channels and edit sources and move tuners around but whatever you do will be different for live tv and recording.

Now with tuners local to a machine, MC knows what tuner to choose and what tuners are in use, with tuner pooling it doesn't so it just goes to first choice and if its busy on a recording, it'll roll to the next tuner. I haven't run into an issue with live tv, but potentially it could happen since MC doesn't "roll" when it gets a tuner not available for live tv so that's something you'll have to play with. You might want to move tuners around on one of your other machines so that the choice orders are different.

But just be aware of the way MC chooses tuners and with local or bridged tuners it knows inventory and makes choices, with pooling it is different ballgame.

[Phil Seastrand]

There are registry settings that specify the tuner priority for live TV and recorded TV. Make sure the local InfiniTV tuners are top priority on the local machine.

[richard1980]

There are registry settings that were carried over from an earlier version of WMC, but they do not function correctly in W7.

[Phil Seastrand]

interesting! I didn't know that. Thanks.

[JohnW248]

I wonder if you can do both pooling of tuners and bridging of tuners at the same time?

For example on the main machine with the internal PCIe4 card, assign two additional tuners via bridging for a total of six tuners on machine one.

For machines 2 & 3 set up tuner pooling for the remaining four tuners.

That way recordings on the main machine wouldn't run into inventory issues and the auxiliary machines would have the ability to choose from four tuners for the two machines for live tv or more limited recording.

I just don't know if you can do both with the same device.

[Snigle]

I had some issues getting TWC to activate my 2nd cable card that took a few weeks to resolve, but I'm finally online with 10 tuners! I want to setup tuner pooling-- does anyone have any instructions or documentation on how to do this? I've tried searching around but haven't had much luck.

[erkotz]

I had some issues getting TWC to activate my 2nd cable card that took a few weeks to resolve, but I'm finally online with 10 tuners! I want to setup tuner pooling-- does anyone have any instructions or documentation on how to do this? I've tried searching around but haven't had much luck.

There is no real set up for tuner pooling. As long as you have the beta firmware installed (non-beta does not have pooling support) it "just works" - simply set up the tuners on 2 (or more) PCs.