We reported a few weeks ago on the Entertainment 2.0 podcast that Ceton was advising users of their InfiniTV tuners not to upgrade their home theater PCs to Windows 8. This was due to changes that were made to Windows Media Center in Windows 8. Some users were able to make it work, but it wasn’t officially supported. Today however, Ceton released beta support for the new operating system. If you’re planning to stick with Windows 7 for a while then you won’t have any use for these drivers. If you’d like to move up to Windows 8 then the new download will include an updated Media Center plugin along with the new drivers.
There is one big piece of information to be aware of though: network tuner sharing from a Windows 8 host is still not supported. That means that if you rely on network tuner sharing, that you need to keep the InfiniTV tuner installed in a Windows 7 box. You will be able to use Windows 8 PCs as clients to a network tuner bridging setup though.
They also released a beta of the Ceton Companion Service for Windows 8 today. You’ll need to install this beta release on any Windows 8 HTPC that you would like to connect to with any of the Ceton Companion mobile apps for Windows Phone, iPhone, or Android.
Download the Windows 8 InfiniTV 4 beta drivers here.
To learn more about the Ceton Companion apps and service, and to download the Windows 8 beta, head on over to the Ceton Companion page.
[…] We suppose there might be a few out there that have been wanting to upgrade their Windows Media Center machines to Windows 8, but have been held back by the limit of only supporting four TV tuners of each type. In Windows 7 there are work-arounds to allow you to have as many tuners as you would like. One of those comes from Ceton with their InfiniTV drivers, but only their Windows 7 drivers supported it. Ceton has just released drivers for their InfiniTV CableCARD tuners that allows Windows 8 users to remove the tuner limit. That driver (version 13.3.20.313) is only supported on 64-bit installations of Windows 8 Pro. They have also released a beta driver (version 13.3.29.753) that supports the USB version of the InfiniTV 4 to be used in Windows 8. For those looking to build a Ceton-equipped Windows 8 Media Center machine the only thing that could still be holding you back is the lack of support for network tuner sharing. […]