Maximum PC

I held off on making this post, until I had a chance to actually implement the update myself. Finding time to re-run TV Setup is, well, difficult....

Anyhoo. Ceton has released (on March 9th) a driver/firmware/hardware update for the InfiniTV4 (driver version 1.0.1.8-20110309.) Link: http://www.cetoncorp.com/infinitv/suppo ... ngelog.php
Fixes include new drivers for the tuner card, improvements to the Ceton diagnostic program (read: it don't crash anymore), more reliable recovery of misbehaving Tuning Adapters (hoping I don't have to quick-plug the thing anymore!), and updated firmware for the tuner, as well as updated hardware code.

Why did I hold off? Because I had to alot myself 2 hours to do this, due to the need to:
- install drivers, reboot.
- Run diag program, use it to download & apply firmware update & hardware code.
- Shut down machine, pull power, and cold-boot machine (this step applies the hardware code.)
- Re-run TV Setup (firmware/hardware update changes tuner name, and necessitates re-running setup.)
- Find out (I was half-prepared for this) that various Windows updates 'broke' Tuner Salad (I have 3x HDHomerun, all runnning in Clear-QAM mode.) Run Tuner Salad again; reboot.
- Launch MC again, and run TV Setup again. Wait ~15 minutes for QAM scan to complete.
(at this point, I have working tuners & Guide again - Extenders can now connect to the machine.)
- 25 minutes to re-tweak my Guide back to how I hade it before (channel merges, unused channels disabled.) Another 5 minutes of going thru the Guide, and killing off a few more home-shopping channels.

Thread will be updated in a few days, after I've had time to longer-term evaluate the tuners' (and TA's) stability. But, I've heard nothing but good over at thegreenbutton (assuming the FW/HW update didn't brick someones' board) about it.

So, I've now had about 2 weeks to evaluate the new firmware & drivers. And, I'm impressed.
Signal quality looks to be a tad better (IOW, the tuner seems to deal with the occasional signal-level sags more gracefully), channel-change speed is a bit better (~5 seconds, when an SDV channel isn't requested - was ~8 seconds before), and the TA does, in fact, behave better (or, rather, the drivers are better able to deal with a misbehaving TA.)

So, I like it. It's a nice improvement to an already nice piece of hardware.