i am huge in japan

Thursday, May 04, 2006

PVR

Media Center totally went wrong. I installed a certified MCE codec and then suddenly I couldn't playback recordings OR watch tv. I reapplied some patches/reinstalled the tv card to no avail. So I decided to give Media Portal a try. Justin uses it so I knew it worked with my TV card.

He kindly brought me in all the downloads I'd need to get it going and in our lunchbreak we set to installing it. It all went quite well and we left the electronic program guide downloading information since it would take a while. Unfortunately I couldn't tune in one of the channels I want but it did give me some I didn't want.

After work the EPG data was ready and I set to ordering the channels and aligning them with the EPG. Somewhere a long the line I lost TV3. The channel frequency it was showing up on was no longer working. Eventually after a long new scan it picked up at 91 instead of 11. I redid the channels again and now have it all working nice. The good/bad thing is the reception picture is better on the pvr than the native TV which means more power consumption.

Media Portal has been reasonably stable for a 0.2 RC4 release except for it choking a bit when it had to handle 200 channels and a skin change causing a forced reboot and having it accidently change to a skin I didn't want but have found to be good.

I even did some timeshifting for reals lastnight when I missed the start of a show. But not enough to be able to fast forward all the ads.

All in all, it looks like I'll be staying with Media Portal since it actually does what it's meant to.

ps, still now video cards or 24" monitors at work. Sigh.

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