Microsoft’s Media Center product is a great DVR, and a neat all-around way to enjoy your media…if you live in the United States, that is. But if you’re thousands of miles away in the remote country known only as Canada, you’re weirdly out of luck. That’s right, Microsoft hasn’t allowed Canadians access to ATSC broadcast–that’s over the air high-def TV, for those who don’t read tech acronym speak. But thanks to some fancy coding from the folks over at SiliconDust (the manufacturer of the popular HDHomeRun external tuner), the high-def dry spell looks to be coming to an end. That’s right: The latest drivers support ATSC broadcasts for Canadians.
A post on the manufacturer’s Web site highlights the quirkiness of it all: “Run through the TV Setup wizard in WMC… set your location to Canada. The tuner will detect as a ClearQAM tuner and the channel scan should pick up all the antenna channels.” In other words, the HDHomeRun pretends to be a QAM tuner (QAM is encrypted digital cable content) in order to get ATSC content into Windows Media Center. Pretty clever! And apparently, you’ve got enthusiast Peter Near to thank for it all.
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