quad tv tuner support for vista

well ive been tinkering with my vista machine and looking to enable quad freeview tv tuner support for vmc (vista media center), this is something that vmc does not support by default (only supports 2 tuners), but if your brave enough you can get this working by enabling it through the registry.

firstly i would like to say this info was taken from the awesome greenbutton website (www.thegreenbutton.com) so i cant claim this as my own hack :-).

1. Stop the Media Center Receiver Service (net stop ehrecvr)
2. Open Registry Editor (regedit.exe) and open this key:
3. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Video\Tuners\{GUID} where {GUID} is either {71985F48-1CA1-11D3-9CC8-00C04F7971E0} for Digital (ATSC or DVB-T) or {A799A800-A46D-11D0-A18C-00A02401DCD4} for Analog (NTSC or PAL).
4. Under the {GUID} key, there will be one key per tuner device.
5. Select the first tuner's key.
6. Select the UserSettings key.
7. Set these DWORD values as follows (case sensitive, all values in hexadecimal), creating them if they do not exist: EnabledForMCE = 0xffffffff UseSTB = 0
8. Create a REG_SZ value named UserDefName and set its value to "Tuner X", where X is the tuner number (1 for the first tuner, 2 for the 2nd, etc.)

If this is the FIRST tuner:

RecordOrder = 0

RecordPrefered = 0xffffffff

WatchOrder = number of tuners -1, e.g. for 4 tuners set this to 3

WatchPrefered = 0

If this is the LAST tuner:

RecordOrder = number of tuners -1, e.g. for 4 tuners set this to 3

RecordPrefered = 0

WatchOrder = 0

WatchPrefered = 0xffffffff

If this is a tuner somewhere in the middle:

RecordOrder = whatever you put for the last tuner +1

RecordPrefered = 0

WatchOrder = whatever you put for the last tuner -1

WatchPrefered = 0

The idea here is that you increment the RecordOrder by 1 for each tuner, and decrement the WatchOrder by 1.

RecordOrder starts at 0 on the first tuner and goes up to #Tuners -1;

WatchOrder starts at #Tuners - 1 and ends at 0 on the last tuner.

RecordPrefered is true (0xffffffff) on the first tuner, false (0x00000000) everywhere else;

WatchPrefered is true on the last tuner, false everywhere else.

Repeat steps 7 - 10 for each tuner, adjusting the values of RecordOrder, RecordPrefered, WatchOrder and WatchPrefered as appropriate.

Close Registry Editor.

Start Media Center. Voila!

I hope you guys can follow this, ive done this on my system and yeah its a little fiddly, but it works!!, i can now record 4 different channels at the same time :-).