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Nick Hodge is a Professional Geek for Microsoft Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

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Intro to Windows Media Center

By Nick Hodge | June 23, 2008

In the early days of radio, the receiver set was expens­ive and sat in the lounge. Today, radios are in cars, mobile phones and the shower.

The same occurred with tele­vi­sion: expens­ive sets star­ted in the lounge, and then migrated out to the kit­chen, car and on small devices.

Now if your PC  Win­dows Vista Home Premium or Vista Ulti­mate, you can make a PC watch TV. And bet­ter yet, record it for later view­ing. Sort of like those VCR things that we once all owned. All using Win­dows Media Center

Here is my setup, feel free to copy/paste:

1. Hard­ware

Inside my Vista PC, I have a Haup­page TV card installed. You can also pur­chase a USB sticks that will also work.

Just ensure that the card/USB device sup­ports Win­dows Media Center

These cards/USB TV devices con­nect to a stand­ard TV antenna. A good antenna is a must; and with the appro­pri­ate adaptors and extenders: you can use the same antenna the TV uses.

2. Soft­ware

Along with the TV cards/USB sticks there is driver soft­ware to install to con­nect between Vista’s Media Cen­ter and the card. I always check with the card’s web site to ensure the ver­sion is the abso­lute latest.

3. Ser­vices

In Aus­tralia, I have sub­scribed to free*epg from EPGStream.net. This ser­vice integ­rates with Win­dows Media Cen­ter to peri­od­ic­ally col­lect Elec­tronic Pro­gram Guides (EPG). Installing the soft­ware sets up all the appro­pri­ate “bits” in Vista to be wired ready for Australia.

4. Setup

Once all the above is installed, launch Vista Media Center.

Yes, the inter­face is dif­fer­ent to nor­mal PC applic­a­tions. This is because Media Cen­ter is designed to work with a remote con­trol. Don’t fear! You can use a mouse an key­board to nav­ig­ate the menus. Also notice as you move near the top-left of the Media Cen­ter win­dow, you can expand/shrink the Media Cen­ter applic­a­tion to a smal­ler win­dow. I use this often when work­ing: a TV in a win­dow on screen is some­times an excel­lent pro­ductiv­ity booster.

The first time you launch, there is an easy step-through pro­cess to con­nect all the bits together.

With Digital TV, there are more smarts: auto­matic assign­ment of TV sta­tions to the cor­rect epis­ode listing.

5. Record­ing

Click­ing on the Green But­ton returns the main Media Cen­ter menu to the screen.

Click­ing on “Guide” returns the screen as above.

Right-clicking on a sched­uled show allows you to Record it, or Record the Series. Record­ing a series will res­ult in pro­grams with that name on that sta­tion being auto­mat­ic­ally recor­ded. You don’t even need Win­dows Media Cen­ter run­ning (yes, you need to ensure the PC is run­ning, and the antenna is attached)

The shows that are recor­ded are saved as files on your PC in a dir­ect­ory: “C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV” for safe­keep­ing. Or watch­ing inside Win­dows Media Centre (TV and Movies, Recor­ded TV)

With a simple addi­tion of a hard­ware card, you can turn your PC run­ning Vista into a Digital TV that records for later view­ing. I highly recom­mend this setup. Now TV is with you whilst you email.

Topics: technology, windowsmediacenter | 5 Comments »