Remember last week when I wrote about the difficulties of troubleshooting CableCARD installations?
The context was the new Media Center machine I’m setting up, with a pair of CableCARD tuners attached. It took the installer less than an hour to track down the source of my troubles, which had nothing to do with PC hardware, software, drivers, or the CableCARDs themselves. The culprit was a loose wire on the coax cable in the wiring closet, which was degrading signal quality dramatically from that point on. He replaced the defective connection and now the signal is rock solid on three separate CableCARD devices.
That one little fix actually cleaned up a host of niggling little problems, and in the five days since then performance has been impressive, without a single error or glitch. Even the analog cable signals look good again.
I’m working on a detailed report of this system and how it’s set up. Got any Media Center questions you want me to answer? Leave them in the comments and I’ll incorporate them into my next post.
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
This poor Canadian can only dream about CableCard. Right now I have to rely on good old analog cable when using Media Centre. I may invest in a good antenna and get some of those digital signals from Detroit.
It’s interesting how poor signal quality affect digital and analog signals and how replacing a cable or a splitter will vastly improve signal quality.
A basic quesion: can cablecard support be added to an existing Vista Ultimate box? How? I’d like to stop renting recording boxes from the satellite company, and I have a Vista box with plenty of storage space, but I’m not clear on how to get the HD satellite feed into the PC so I can record it. Thanks.
Ah, those danged cables and wires!
When I worked for a AM radio station the antennas kept getting out of phase causing interferrence with other stations and making the FCC very unfriendly. After months we finally accidentally discovered a tower lighting ground wire that would sometimes contact the tower, changing the specs.
At a FM station, we kept dropping one stereo channel. Listeners were yelling at us. Turned out to be a improperly seated connector in a junction box in the elevator shaft. Every time the elevator stopped at that floor it vibrated the thing off and on.
Can you discuss your storage layout? For example,
Where is your ‘Recorded TV’ folder? What size drive do you use for this folder? What do you do when it gets full?
Do you keep your music on your MCE or on your WHS?
Same with pictures, do you keep them on your WHS or somewhere else?
Do you use the hack to enable MCE to view the ‘Recorded TV’ folder over a network in order to connect multipe PCs running MCE?
Do you backup your ‘Recorded TV’ folder or just decide that if something were to happen, its just television?
Thanks.
Aaron
Are you run TV Pack 2008 on your test system? if so do you have a Zune? can you sync recorded content from your cable card recorded content on a 3.0 updated zune?
Josh