Ceton Quad Tuner (InfiniTV) Installed and Operational!!!
Last year during CES 2010, Ceton announced a quad tuner PCI card with a single cable input. Since I have been using 2 ATI USB Digital TV Tuners with Cable Cards for the last couple of years and have encountered situations where I really could have used that 3rd or 4th tuner, I was TOTALLY jazzed about this announcement.
Unfortunately, Ceton had some delays (and then more delays) and the card didn’t release until toward the end of 2010. I placed my order with Zones in November of 2010 and finally, I received it last Friday!!!! I immediately installed the card into the computer, downloaded the drivers from Ceton’s website and installed them. On Monday, I placed a call to Cox to have them bring out another CableCard and get it setup for me to use.
The tech showed up this afternoon and after about an hour, I was finally up and running. It would seem Windows 7 didn’t like having the quad tuner and the two ATI devices plugged in so I ended up removing the 2 ATI tuners. No matter what we did, the Tuning Adapter would not be recognized by the Ceton card so I reran the driver installation and voila, the Tuning Adapter was recognized. During the testing, I found that I was only able to receive SDV stations on tuners 1 and 2, but not on 3 and 4. At that point, it dawned on me that the device configuration page allowed me to see the status of the Tuning Adapter and there happened to be tabs for 2 adapters. When I examined the first tab, it showed the Tuning Adapter was activated and working for Tuners 1 and 2. The second tab showed the Tuning Adapter as being disabled.
The Cox technician called back to the command center and they informed him that they were only able to pair one Tuning Adapter to a CableCard so there was no way to activate the other Tuning Adapter. We decided to do some testing by just plugging the other Tuning Adapter (I had 2 to begin with) back in and let it attempt to negotiate a connection. Sure enough, the Ceton card’s configuration page showed that the Tuning Adapter was activated and working for Tuners 3 and 4. I immediately tested and was able to tune to 4 simultaneous SDV stations. The tech shrugged his shoulders, threw up his hands and said, “Hey, looks like it works after all and the command center folks are wrong.”
I will now have to return the unused CableCards and save me $2 per month. I am totally stoked and look forward to recording 4 programs at once!!!
I am including screen shots of the Ceton InfiniTV configuration page for the four adapters, CableCard tab and the Tuning Adapter tabs in case you are wondering what it looks like.
Harold Wong