One of the features that the Ceton InfiniTV4 was poised to offer was tuner sharing.  This would allow you to have your InfiniTV4 in one HTPC and assign tuners to other HTPCs in your home.  Unfortunately CableLabs put the kibosh on this rather quickly.

Luckily, they’ve seen the light and as of Friday, tuner sharing is now approved in OCUR devices.  That means you can install multiple tuners in a single PC and spread them throughout your home.  While Ceton will obviously be the first to benefit from this new feature after a pending firmware update, it was all but mandatory for Silicon Dust’s upcoming networked tuner.

While not important to Media Center users, CableLabs also approved DRM Free Copy Freely content.  What this means is that other HTPC software will be able to utilize CableCard tuners for Copy Freely content.  While this won’t get you HBO or Showtime in SageTV or Myth, it will get you any content that your cable company has not flagged with copy restrictions.

Jeremy Hammer, VP of Systems Integration for Ceton has stated that the company is already working with the developers of MythTV to bring the InfiniTV4 to the popular Linux based HTPC software.

Ever since CableLabs approved CableCARD devices to enable tuner sharing owners of the Ceton InfiniTV 4 have been waiting for Ceton to release the firmware that would turn this functionality on. While it hasn’t been released to the public yet, beta testers of the quad tuner CableCARD device can now do just that. Tonight I installed the latest beta firmware, bridged the connection between the tuner card and my ethernet adapter, and setup a secondary PC to use the InfiniTV 4. Once everything is setup on both ends, you simply go through the standard guided setup process on the secondary PC(s) to setup the tuners, as you would any other tuner device. After that it works just like any other tv tuner. I was able to instantly start watching live HD television immediately, without any noticeable lag from the streams being broadcast across my network.

Again, this is currently only available to Ceton beta testers, but this is definitely good news. Hopefully it means that the firmware, and corresponding software, will be released to the public very soon.

Are you one of the many Media Center users already running a Vista Media Center and planning to upgrade to a new Windows 7 install? If so, it’s likely that you’d want to move your recording schedule over as well. For those planning to do a simple upgrade the process should be automatic, however, if you’re planning a clean install it’s going to take a bit more planning and effort. Media Center developer Danny Ton has posted the method to getting this done over at The Green Button for those planning on a clean install of Windows 7 from Windows Vista.

This method will work for anyone who is moving from a basic Windows Vista install, without the Fiji pack installed, but will only copy the recording schedule. This means that the channel lineup and other custom settings will not be carried over and will need to be setup by the user. The recording schedule works by scanning the TV lineup for shows listed in the schedule then marking them for recording. The schedule is actually more of a list than a schedule, containing a list of shows and a set of rules for recording than a list of times, dates and channels to be recorded.

To get started, the files we need to access are located inside a hidden folder so we should enable the viewing of such folders. In the Control Panel, select Appearance and Personalization then Folder Options. Under the View tab in Folder Options select the Show Hidden files and folders option and press OK.

Once you’ve enabled the viewing of hidden folders open Windows Explorer and navigate to C:Program Data\microsoft\ehome\recording. Copy the contents of the folder to a backup location such as a flash drive or network storage location. Now proceed with your clean installation of Windows 7.

Once you’ve completed your clean install, follow the steps above to show hidden folders once again and locate the C:Program Data\microsoft\ehome\recording directory (or create it if it doesn’t exist). Now place the recordings.xml file you backed up from Windows Vista into the folder before running the Windows 7 Media Center setup.

During the initial setup of Windows 7 Media Center the recordings.xml will be converted into the Windows 7 Media Center recordings schedule and all of your recordings should be processed once the TV guide listings have been processed. If you’ve already run the initial setup you can also achieve the same results by running the TV Signal Setup from the Settings area.

Once the machine has had time to scan the TV guide listings for your scheduled show recordings you should be able to view scheduled recordings from Recorded TV’s view scheduled area. That’s all there is to it! You should now have a completely transferred recording schedule from Windows Vista into Windows 7.

Source Article:
Bringing a Recording Schedule from Vista to Windows 7

There may come a time when you want to edit the metadata of a WTV or DVRMS file manually. Luckily, Windows 7 includes a built-in editor allowing the editing of metadata of both file formats. Much like music metadata editor provided in previous versions of Windows the metadata editor for WTV and DVRMS files can be accessed by right-clicking the file in Windows Explorer and selecting the properties window. From inside the properties window, selecting the Details tab will bring up a basic editor for viewing and modifying the current metadata of the file.

Just hover over the value area for any given detail and a text entry box will appear allowing editing of that value. Unfortunately, not all the values are displayed or editable inside this basic metadata editor. There are a number of additional meta values that can be used to customize the categorization of files such as genre and whether or not a particular file is a movie.

Fortunately, there is a third-party program created by Steven Toub that’s perfectly capable of editing these hidden metadata values in both DVRMS and WTV files. His DVRMS metadata editor is quite old at this point but still works quite well with both file types. When opening a WTV file you’ll just need to adjust the file filter dropbox to show all file types and select the WTV file you’d like to edit.

As you can see, Toub’s editor provides a much more comprehensive listing of metadata values available inside DVRMS and WTV files than the built-in editor. Having access to the genre and movie meta tags and well as title, description and HD designations makes this an excellent tool for anyone looking to convert their movie collections to the new WTV format standard in Windows 7.

There are a few reasons some may be considering converting their collections to WTV, not least of which is the ability to play the format on any Windows Media Extender. This means not having to deal with the issues that seem to plague other formats such as .mkv on extenders. We’ll be covering more on this movement as software becomes publicly available to facilitate the switch such as the next version of DVRMSToolbox from Andy VT’s blog.

When you’ve finished editing metadata details inside Toub’s editor just hit the Save Metadata button to commit the changes and that’s all there is to it.