Do you have a Media Center Edition Vaio?

[earthling0001]

Hi, I have a Vaio PCV-RZ which is identical to the Media Center Edition ("MCE") one. Mine didn't come with MCE but I installed it via my MSDN subscription, and bought a remote.

All I'm missing now are the special drivers for the Sony TV Tuner/Capture card. Apparently the MCE Vaio comes with special updated drivers. They're not available yet at the Vaio Support page.

Can someone here with the MCE Vaio please Zip and e-mail me the TV Tuner/Capture drivers. They're normally in a backup folder in the c:\ drive. I'm assuming it's the same card I have as they're all RZ-series machines. In Device Manager it's called "Sony
TV Tuner (4830) WDM TVTuner" and "...WDM Video Capture". If I look at the
PhTvTune.inf file in the driver folder, it mentions ASUSTek. The driver
version of TVTuner is 1.6.0.2 and Video Capture 2.2.1.1.

E-mail address: christian at the-simpson dot tv

Thanks in advance! Please post a reply if you e-mail them, so I can look out and so nobody else needs to.

[earthling0001]

I don't think the Vaios with the 7134 TV Tuner card have realtime hardware MPEG2 encoders. I have pulled out the board that I thought could be the encoder board, and it has a Ricoh R5C475II chip on it. A quick look at Google http://tinyurl.com/ro3s shows this is part of the PC Card reader's PCMCIA > PCI bridge.

The only other cards in the machine are:
nVidia GeForce 5600
Agere Systems AC'97 modem

The 7134 TV Tuner card itself only has one chip on it, and that is the Philips SAA7134 which the Philips site confirms does *not* do MPEG2 encoding. It does however accept an external MPEG2 encoder board. However there is no other board in the machine, there is no MPEG2 device in Device Manager, the spec for my machine make no mention of MPEG2, and attempts to install the Sony MPEG2 Encoder Board driver from their web site fail saying the hardware is incompatible.

This leads me to the conclusion that my PCV-RZ322 with 7134 TV Tuner does *not* have any hardware MPEG2 encoder, instead it is done by software.

As MCE insists on hardware, I am therefore going to buy a new card and swap it. Problem solved, in a way. If you disagree, let me know. Quick!