Vista Media Center & Hauppauge HVR-1250

It took me a couple of days but I finally figured out the key to getting my Hauppauge HVR-1250 TV tuner to work properly with Windows Media Center.

First off, I'm running Vista Ultimate x64.  I am also using the beta drivers for the card.  I knew that the card worked since I could get video in the horrible WinTV application.  Media Center was almost working since I could get the audio but no video.  I tried some other applications (SageTV, BeyondTV) and they could not pull in video as well.  After a couple days of trying different combinations of things, I looked in the Media Center event log and found this:

Media Center is unable to communicate with the TV tuner Hauppauge WinTV 885 BDA Tuner/Demod. See ErrorCode 0x80004005 for more information.

I tried searching Google for some results on this and it eventually lead me to a post that said you need to have the SoftPVR software installed as well (along with the SoftMCE software) to trick Media Center in to playing video.

So, in order to get my tuner working with Media Center I had to additionally install:
- SoftPVR
- SoftMCE

Both of these will be in the driver package you download from Hauppauge.

Now, I'm off to reinstall Vista x32 since ClearQAM does not work with Vista x64 and Media Center.  After all, this is the primary reason why I bought the damn thing.