Thanks, I will try (albeit I personally prefer Server 2008 R2 Datacenter, but I can use it on my Home Server 2011 VM)
Just use Storage Server 2008R2 Essentials (a.k.a HomeServerStandard). It's the same as WHS2011 (a.k.a, HomeServerPremium) except it can join domains, allows more users, and you can easily add Hyper-V, domain controller role and possibly other server features missing on home servers) Running WMC in a Standard/Datacenter 2008R2 is a pain, they lack too much TV/BDA/Streaming bits to be a viable option. Don't ask why HomeServerStandard has more features than HomeServerPremium, don't ask why all 2011 servers are called 2011 while this one is called 2008R2. MS naming has always been a mess.
Sure, but it's not like you have to marry the DDA, a quick test requires minutes, and theoretically not even a reboot, then if it doesn't, it doesn't work... But if does work (no reboot or other nasty things) you have all the time to experiment. Also keep in mind that one of the nice features of HV is that you can move around a critical VM w/o even turning it off. If all is planned correctly you can move temporarily a VM to another machine, with a downtime of say one second or even less. That was very important on analogue transmissions, digital ones are very different (unless you are really in a rural place in the middle of the mountains). In my place (which isn't a big city) I get more than 350 channels even using the cheapest USB single tuner dongle I have (a realtek based one that I paid something like 5 euro, shipping included). Speaking of multiple tuners... personally I have no use of more than two tuners, but if I need more I have just to plug the two dual tuner Haupauge dongle at the same time and connect the antenna to both of them with the Y adapter that was bundled with one of the two, so not a big problem either. A PCI tuner still have an advantage in cable management and consequent cleaner look of the HTPC, but if is an important thing, USB dongles can be installed internally, and connected to an antenna socket mounted in the rear panel. A bit of more work in change of a lot of money spared.
The thing is not all DDA-related bugs are immediately visible: reports show it can work flawlessly for weeks or months and suddenly crash for no apparent reason, sometimes even affecting the host to the point you need to restart it (and it's not a guarantee that the device will be correctly reattached to the VM). I can't afford my main server to crash when I'm not physically here to fix it. Maybe if I find another mobo that supports SR-IOV, I'll give it a try on a different test machine. Getting channels doesn't mean you have a perfect reception: digital broadcasting drastically improved the reception quality and stability, but bad weather, difficult terrains and transient conflicting signals still have an impact on the reception and error correction can't fix everything when too much data is lost in transit. Having a card that has better shielding and a better reception means you're more resilient to transmission issues. And the least thing you want is audio/video artifacts in your WMC recordings
Ok, clearly each situation is different, mine were just random thoughts, not necessarily aimed at you personally. A lot of people read w/o never posting and a lot of WMC users aren't super experienced people that may find useful some of the random info shared here. Look, although I spent half of my life on IT, the other half was spent fixing TV and installing antennas, and I can assure that I know the matter fairly well. I repeat I had zero issues with USB dongles since the DTV become mature enough, which was more than one decade ago. Think that recently I realized that my antenna power supply was slowly dying (it was a 10 cent electrolytic capacitor), so the antenna amplifier very slowly got worse over time. I realized that it was a process that lasted 5 years or so. But until the moment it become really unusable I keept receiving less channels but I didn't care because they were useless ones. Main channels ran perfectly, no matter the weather, no matter if the antenna was covered with 10cm of snow, no matter if I used a cheap no brand tuner or an expensive one. I live in a 200+ years old home, so the walls are 1M thick, so a good external antenna is mandatory, but if I move to a nearby modern home I can get 100+ channels just touching the central pole of the antenna plug with a screwdriver . And this is a place where analogue TV was always been problematic, and required expensive antenna setups even to get a good reception on 10/15 main channels. On the IT side analogue receivers made more traffic, and the CPU was heavily taxed by the analogue/digital conversion. At the time a good PCI tuner (especially ones with HW decoding) was just so hugely better than USB ones that discussing the matter was just wasted time. But now we are discussing of a problem that simply doesn't exist anymore
As you said, every situation is different and many factors come into play: the distance, the effective radiated power of the transmitter at which it is operating, the position of the receiver (most transmitters are precisely tuned to transmit harder in certain directions, to account for the relief), the presence/absence of a 4G filter in the antenna (depending on whether nearby frequencies are shared or not), the number of tuners present in the card (the more the signal has to be split into separate tuners, the more losses you have), etc. In my very specific case, the transmitter operates at 50 kW on all muxes except one (42 kW) but it's not in my county and my antenna is in the attic (which certainly doesn't help ): if I compare my PCIe quadHD with a USB dualHD from the same company, I can clearly see a difference: with the USB tuner, I'll have a few glitches on a 2-hour recording and nothing with the PCIe version that has 2x tuners. Yet, these two cards have both the same tuners (Silicon Labs Si2157) and the same DVB demodulators (Silicon Labs Si2168): only the circuitry differs (the quadHD version has a better shielding). Anyway, I suspect we're slightly off-topic
Sure, no doubt on that. But, at least here the DVB transition and the further moves made to free the upper UHF spectrum, was used to reorganize better the transmissions, to avoid interference in region borders where the coverage overlaps, and also to avoid troubles with 4/5G telephony. Even international problems were taken in account. I live less than 20Km from the French territory, in straight line, but the Alps are a perfect barrier, so no problem here. But still there are places where international interference must be taken in account, think to Nice/Menton/Ventimiglia area, or people who lives in southern Corsica/northern Sardinia, the Elba iland, and even Tuscany, just to limit the discussion between France and Italy. A vastly better situation than the analogue era. Think that most of the Piedmont was served by a transmitter in VHF that used the C channel which was not standard, because it was the first transmitter installed in Italy, before the frequencies were standardized. It was the only transmitter in the whole world that used that frequency, and it partly overlapped with FM radio channels, which were standardized later. It remained active until the DVB transition because in VHF a channel change implies also an antenna change, like 2/3 million of antennas in our case. In short DVB improved the receiption not just because the digital thing, but also because the frequency are better organized. And I believe other countries followed a similar path. I suspect your glitches are more due to USB traffic than tuning problems, just a guess obviously, but clearly PCIe tends to have less data transfer problems. It has to. A internal device has way more chances to catch interferences from other PC internals, you can have the VGA card on the next slot, just a couple of cm away, and the whole thing is enclosed in a almost perfect Faraday cage, which means bouncing signals multiple times, ground loops are always waiting around the corner and so on. Albeit I never faced problems with tuners, in internal audio cards is pretty common to hear noises from the speaker each time an HDD spins up or the mouse moves the cursor. To be fair I'm always amazed that the whole PC works most of the time, rather than being surprised when an interference or ground loop surfaces. I consider the last few messages more like a back to the basics, rather than OT part. (I hate in-topic Nazis )
Also it is possible to bring back 8.0 WMC to Server 2012 R1 Essentials as well as bring back Vista WMC to Storage Server 2008 Standard and Small Business Server 2008?
For Win8/2012 is surely possible, but no one patched the needed files, and that's not among not my skills. I tried to port the W8.1 flavour with partial success (it works but it closes w/o errors after 30 second or so) so, for now, the only option is via SKUwitch. The same is applicable for Vista/2008 with the added problem that 2008 doesn't have a sku equivalent to WHS/Essentials so there is the addeditional problem of BDA/TV/codecs missing
Also do Windows 7 WMC will work on Windows MultiPoint Server 2011 and Windows Small Business 2011 Standard/Essentials?
Frankly I never tried it, but 2008R2 SBS lacks the TV/BDA/Codecs, although it belongs to the the same 2011 family of WHS2011/2008R2 Essential/ Multipoint 2011