I already have dual-tuner Freeview reception in Media Center and that has worked flawlessly for the last 2 years, however to get HD has been an itch I’ve needed to scratch and for that it has required DVBViewer. (I know that hacking the TV Pack for Vista also allows HD channels but I haven’t bothered with that method – too many things to go wrong.)

I’ve been able to watch BBC HD in the free PowerCinema software that came with the Hauppauge card for ages, however the PowerCinema software has little ability to successfully configure the HD reception meaning that it defaults to the narrative track on BBC HD (annoying) and won’t receive ITV HD at all.

So I finally bought and installed DVBViewer this week and ran the simple wizard setup, then scanning the 10847 frequency I picked up BBC HD. I’ve also edited the channel listings in DVBViewer to make the AC3 channel a favourite. (N.B. AC3 filter is neccessary for AC3 audio!)

Once BBC HD was happy it was then a case of Googling the ITV HD settings which gave me the frequency 11428 to scan and the channel id of 10510(Radio). Then editing a few more settings on this 10510 channel I added it again as a favourite and now I can simply load DVBViewer and by selecting favourite channel up/down I move between BBC and ITV HD. Great!

Another nice touch of DVBViewer is that it can be set to disable AV (mute audio and video) when minimised to the taskbar so that it won’t interfere with Media Center program watching.

DVBViewer will do until Windows7 is released this summer.