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Watching DVB-C cable TV in Media Center using Anysee E30C

Getting digital cable TV (DVB-C) to work in Windows 7 Media Center (MCE) can be really difficult and there isn’t much information available on what to do. Watching encrypted digital cable TV isn’t even supported by Microsoft so how do we solve this? Well, there are a couple of products that can help and one of them is the Anysee E30C digital cable TV card. It has a pretty cool driver that pretends to be a DVB-T card (which MCE supports) and it properly handles encrypted pay TV channels (provided that you have a valid smart card and subscription of course).

Preparations

This should probably be obvious, but the first thing you need to do is to install the latest drivers for the Anysee card. The drivers on the CD you got when you bought the card are probably outdated so make sure you get them from the Anysee website.

Remember to reboot after installing the drivers! Installation doesn’t require you to restart but I’ve had weird problems when I skipped this…

Now, before even trying to get the card working in MCE you should ensure that TV works in the Anysee Viewer application. (You may need to manually scan for channels if your network provider is not one of the supported ones.)

Watching Canal Digital Sweden

The Anysee card comes preconfigured with settings for different cable TV networks around Europe. However, Canal Digital Sweden is not one of the supported providers. We need a little bit of investigation and configuration to make this work. (This is something you can do for your provider too if needed.)

First of all we need to figure out the settings that Canal Digital uses in Sweden. I did this by examining the information menus in my set top box which had a screen listing channel information with frequencies and symbol rate:

This revealed the channel frequencies and that symbol rate 6952 is used. Some searching on the internet also revealed that QAM 64 is used (which I think is the most common modulation in Sweden). After we have this information along with the frequencies for the channels we are ready to start configuring.

Configuring Anysee CNO

The Anysee CNO application is responsible for simulating the DVB-T card that MCE uses for watching TV. By default it resides in the C:\Program Files\anysee\Driver directory (or C:\Program Files (x86)\anysee\Driver if you are running 64-bit Windows).

If you look in the subdirectory Transponders\Cable you will find a bunch of preconfigured files for different networks. Unfortunately there is no settings file suitable for Canal Digital Sweden here with QAM 64 and symbol rate 6952. What I did was that I just copied a similar one and renamed it to EU_64QAM_6952.TPL as shown below:

Then I edited the file to make sure the symbol rate said 6952 and verified that the frequencies matched the ones listed by my set top box. In my case everything looked alright so all I had to do was to change one line in the .TPL file:

Symbolrate: 6952

After adding a new settings file we also need to tell the CNO application about it. This is done by editing the CNO.CNO file found in the application directory C:\Program Files\anysee\Driver:

In the CNO.CNO file at about line 143 or so you should find a [Cable-List] section. Just add your new file here similar to what I did:

It should look something like this when you are done:

[Cable-List]

// ±¹°¡ÄÚµå, Áö¿ª, ¼­¹ö½ºÁ¦°øÀÚ, ¸ñ·ÏÆÄÀÏ

-1, , Europe_64QAM_6875, .\Transponders\Cable\EU_64QAM_6875.TPL

-1, , Europe_64QAM_6900, .\Transponders\Cable\EU_64QAM_6900.TPL

-1, , Europe_64QAM_6952, .\Transponders\Cable\EU_64QAM_6952.TPL

-1, , Europe_128QAM_6000, .\Transponders\Cable\EU_128QAM_6000.TPL

-1, , Europe_128QAM_6875, .\Transponders\Cable\EU_128QAM_6875.TPL

-1, , Europe_128QAM_6900, .\Transponders\Cable\EU_128QAM_6900.TPL

-1, , Europe_256QAM_6875, .\Transponders\Cable\EU_256QAM_6875.TPL

-1, , Europe_256QAM_6900, .\Transponders\Cable\EU_256QAM_6900.TPL

358, , Iisalmen_Puhelin_Oy(IPY), .\Transponders\Cable\Finland_IPY.TPL

358, , TSF, .\Transponders\Cable\Finland_TSF.TPL

358, , Entire, .\Transponders\Cable\Finland_Cable.TPL

Now you need to restart CNO and change the settings. You can exit CNO by right clicking its icon in the tray bar and selecting Exit.

After shutting down CNO just relaunch it from the program files directory (C:\Program Files\anysee\Driver\CNO.exe). Then locate the tray icon again and select Settings from the context menu. This will bring up the settings dialog where you can now find your new settings file that is suitable for the Canal Digital Sweden digital cable TV network:

Configuring Media Center

Next thing to do is to actually get it working in MCE so start it up and go to the Settings->TV->TV Signal to setup the new card:

In the next screen select Setup TV Signal and then select your region and enter your postal code. I’ve experimented a bit with these settings but as far as I know it doesn’t matter if you enter 00000 for postal code or the correct one. I suspect it may have something to do with the guide listings but I’m not sure. Things seems to work no matter what I choose here but try entering correct data to make sure you don’t screw up things.

After agreeing to the license you get to choose the type of signal to receive and this is important. You need to select “Antenna” here because that is what MCE supports best and it is also what Anysee CNO simulates:

Then select “No” for set-top box and in the following screen choose Digital Antenna (DVB-T) signal:

When it asks if you want to set up any other TV-signals select “No” and then proceed to scan the channels. This should take a while but when it is ready you should be able to watch Live TV in MCE using your Anysee card!