Windows Media Centre

[Kimberley Scott]

I have windows media centre for a while, though I have never used it, recently purchased a 24 inch monitor and usb tv card. Now I have been playing with it for a while, it gliches somewhat, I dont know if it is a vista/media centre RAM guzzling fest or what. Also I cannot download a list of what is on tv, this is no good as you cannot organise a recording list.

Any tips or advice from user would be much appreciated, any insults and usless comments are more than welcome to.

Scotty

[xrdreaming]

I have had a few media center PC's both XP and Vista. The first few were clone machines put together with different tv tuner cards and such.

I always had glitches with drivers and stuff. I bought a HP Media Center machine about 6 months ago running Vista and it runs fine and never seems to crash or have errors.

It does such that Microsoft don't have EPG for Australia yet though, I set manual recordings for my shows.

[Kimberley Scott]

Cheers for that, I was running a few programs in the background, will try again on its own.

Scotty

[bonza]

windows media centre is a waste of time. everything that WMC does windows xp does just as well with 10 times more reliability. you won't have any trouble finding drivers when using windows xp either. wmc is fluff that doesn’t actually do anything useful.

best set up would be a machine with windows xp installed and if you want the fancy media centre user interface use something like media portal, http://www.team-mediaportal.com. this way you have the stability of windows xp but with the fancy features of a media centre. to me a media centre is useless without an electronic program guide (EPG).

Best EPG around would have to be ICETV, http://www.icetv.com.au. it cost a few dollars subscription a year but its fair dinkum awesome. Best feature would have to be, if you wanted to record anything motorsport related simply type 'motorsport' into the search and it will automatically be set to record anything with 'motorsport' in the program's tile or synopsise description. so you can pretty much set what you want to have recorded in advance without sifting through the program guide. It also supports all our channels down here in OZ.

there is also some software out there that will periodically churn through the HDTV captures that you've recorded to your hard drive and convert them to divX file format for you. I cant think of the name of it atm, but I'll try find out. I personally havent put any of this into action atm but I plan to. One of the cashed up private all girls schools was using this setup with great results as a way of recording tv programs for teachers to use as class material.

[Guest newl]

And for those a little more adventerous, MythTV is good bang for the buck (free as in beer) and comes plenty feature packed.

[PURVIE]

Hey buddy,

I am currently running a Vista Media Centre Box. What type of TV tuner card are you running in your MCE machine? I run the Fusion HDTV PCI & USB tuner and both do glitch on occasions, but it only usually occurs for 5-10 seconds or so when you select the channel. Its kind of a hard one to troubleshoot, but if you are running decent hardware it shouldnt be a problem. What is your TV signal like on a normal TV? Is it grainy or anything like that? I have really really bad reception where I am so I put it down to that. I also installed PureVideo DVD decoder (made by nVidia) which clarifies and smoothes out the MCE video stream. Give it a download and try it out.

As for your MCE guide data, Australian MCE's need to have 3rd party applications to be installed for it to function correctly. As bonza said, IceTV is awesome, but it costs money. I use FreeEPG, and have had no issues, they use the same EPG data as ICETV, just bundled by another company AND ITS FREEEEEE! (The website is epgstream.net) sign up as a user, download and install the application, and select your region. The installer is self explanatory. Then you need to setup the EPG within MCE as per normal, which can be a bit of a pain if you havent done it before.

I know a fair bit about them so if you have any more questions send me a PM and ill give you my mobile number, but initally setting them up can be a bit of a task for a novice user, if you are one of course

Let me know how it goes!

Cheers

Matty.

[Kimberley Scott]

Cheers for all the answers guys, I agree, I am not a fan of Vista, nor am I a fan of media Centre. However this box was bought in my abscence and it is what I have, plus its all good and well me knowing how to do things, but my wife and daughters need to operate as well.

My computer knowledge, is outdated at best. So I may invite a mate over soonish and go through this thread with him.