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There is a little addi­tion to the Win­dows Media Cen­ter setup. It is a hid­den gem that makes life so much easier.

In our home, we have a Win­dows Home Server. Thought­fully named SERVER, it is small and sits quietly near the broad­band connection.

After Media Cen­ter record TV shows on one PC, I gen­er­ally like to store the res­ults safely for later viewing.

The *.dvr-ms files cre­ated by Win­dows Media Cen­ter, espe­cially on Digital TV trans­mis­sions, can be quite large.

So, to fix both of these issues I have installed MCE­Buddy

A tool that quietly lives in the back­ground of your PC, it watches the Recor­ded TV dir­ect­ory. When a show has com­pleted record­ing, MCE­Buddy com­presses the show into some­thing smal­ler (for instance: WMV or even MP4 for iPods!) and trans­fers auto­ma­gic­ally to our Win­dows Home Server.

I highly recom­mend this little utility.

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.

After attempt­ing to install a dual chan­nel Haup­pauge card into the Gen­eral, with the asso­ci­ated soft­ware installs/deinstalls – Win­dows Media Cen­ter could no longer see any TV Tuner Cards. This had been bug­ging me all week.

As always, I am determ­ined not to go the de-install/re-install of Win­dows solu­tion to prob­lems. I’d much prefer to logic­ally think through the prob­lem, and learn along the way.

I found that the ehRecvr ser­vice was fail­ing to start with a “file not found” error (check in the logs in

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp\) … and fur­ther check­ing showed ehRecvr was attempt­ing to read a value from the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Cen­ter

Com­par­ing this branch of the registry with a known-good ver­sion, I found that some­thing had lopped sig­ni­fic­ant sub-branches off such as “…\Start Menu\…” – in fact, only 3 branches exis­ted in my registry.

I sus­pect that one of the de-installs in the swap­ping from Haup­pauge to/from DVico caused this, and a quick export/reimport and all is well. Sub­sequently, com­pon­ents of the Win­dows Media Cen­ter soft­ware were set into a strange half-state of working.

Hope this helps someone.

Paul Jen­kins proves that you can make a 1080p Vista Media Cen­ter for under AU$670. That’s a spec­tac­u­lar achievement.

Well done, dude!

For com­plete­ness, updat­ing the con­fig­ur­a­tion of my Win­dows Vista Media Center

• Installed Vista Ulti­mate x64 (all drivers found and installed OK, just need to load SATA RAID drivers for Giga­byte mother­board at install time)
• Upgraded the case, swapped out the 500Gb PATA with a quieter Sam­sung 500Gb SATA drive (mak­ing a total of 4Tb in the house, ouch!)
• Try­ing a Leadtek PvR3200 as tuner for Digital TV
• Using MCE Buddy to transcode to .WMV to place on Win­dows Home Server
• Using Win­dow Media Cen­ter Extender tech­no­logy to con­nect to Xbox 360 on new 42inch LG HD TV
• 4Gb of RAM taken from Gen­eral Melchett’s upgrade to 8Gb. My desk now has 17Gb of RAM across 4 computers.

The recent install­a­tion of the Win­dows Media Cen­ter has been an ongo­ing major pro­ject. Apart from the phys­ical install, there has been a a few ongo­ing issues:

1. High-Definition TV “green screen of death”.
   Thanks to the Vista and XP Media Centre forum, this is a known and fixed issue. The Microsoft Hot­fix is avail­able here.
2. Elec­tronic Pro­gram Guide
   Attemp­ted to install epg­Stream. Will install ICE.TV instead (giv­ing a refer­rer to PMM!) as epg­Stream isn’t work­ing the way I expec­ted. Could be user expect­a­tion error.
3. Noise
   Once the pro­cessor gets going, fans go on. And never seem to turn off. This is prob­ably a BIOS tweak fix, or turn down the pro­cessor a little. A PATA drive vs. SATA drive may also be an issue, too.
4. IPtv
   So, where is Aus­tralian IPtv? What about Aus­tralian video down­loads? For that mat­ter, what’s the story behind epis­ode guides? This should just work.

Dur­ing tweak­ing the server on Tues­day, I de-installed Win­dows Live One­care Fam­ily Pro­tec­tion. Installing it in the first place might have been my error. From what I can dis­cern, after de-installation, the rem­nants of a fire­wall was left around. 6 hours of troubleshoot­ing later, I decided to restore a pre­vi­ous work­ing ver­sion of the Media Cen­ter setup.

Thank­fully, Win­dows Home Server had an image of an auto­matic backup from Monday. Pro­cess to fix:

1. Make a Restore CD from the sup­plied .ISO file
2. Reboot with Restore CD
3. Log into the Home Server
4. Select the image to restore
5. 18 minutes later, reboot
6. Back to Monday night’s Win­dows Media Center

Rather than stuff around for another 6 hours, restor­ing a known-good backup saved my sanity.

Update from the Week­end Pro­ject.

Some more bits from AusPC Mar­ket arrived. We now have audio cable, cor­rect short VGA cable and a new dual chan­nel Haup­pauge PCI based Digital TV receiver. Oh, and I applied the thermal grease to the top of the CPU.

A few little cables for internal wir­ing ease, and the machine is rock­ing. Even the blue blinken­lights work.

TV Cat is happy.

Yes, I know that the cor­rect eng­lish spelling of Cen­ter is Centre.

Thanks to the gen­er­os­ity of Jeffa, I scored an old Mini-ATX case with power sup­ply. Yeah, being the junior on the team — I get all the hand-me-downs.

Some hun­dreds of dol­lars later from AUS­P­CMar­ket, and I have my first ever:

1. AMD based PC (AMD Athlan64 x2 6000+)
2. Giga­byte Mother­board PC (GA-MA69GM-S2H)
3. Self-constructed PC (only a screw­driver required)
4. Media Cen­ter PC (Vista Ultimate)
5. Microsoft Wire­less Key­board 8000

Not being a hard­ware type, the mov­ing of cables, CPUs, fans, more cables and stuff made the phys­ical con­struc­tion a little longer than an expert. There are still some internal wir­ing bits to com­plete: hard disk light at the front and CD audio. Also missed that the our Acer LCD TV has VGA and PC Audio. The cables I pur­chased were not correct.

The toughest part was installing the power to the SATA DVD/CD drive, and ensur­ing the CD eject but­ton had enough clear­ance to work.

The first PATA (this was a sur­prise!) hard disk was stuffed, so off to plan B with a 500Gb PATA and we’re away. The mother­board would not boot up with this hard disk attached; so the old disk is a throw away.

Using the onboard graph­ics and USB based TV tuner is prob­ably sub-optimal. Need to fix these.

To add/change

1. Dual chan­nel PCI DVB-T card
2. DivX sup­port (com­plete at 9:40pm)
3. TV Guide so I can record TV successfully.

Oh, and the cats love the extra space. The case and CPU are quiet and rel­at­ively cool. The cave aspect of the case make it a per­fect hunt­ing spot: