Continuing to whip Vista into shape

After finally having all TV channels available (I failed to mention I downloaded Mediaportal to do a channel search - I couldn't find TV4 when searching Malmö, but it showed up when I tried Hörby) it is now time to get the rest of the system in shape. I put some TV shows in a directory watched by Media Center and enter it. Boom. Media Center crashes.

Search the net and find something about Nero being a problem and bad codecs. Then I couldn't find my media since Nero had kidnapped the registry settings for that. To make a long story short (and it was way too long) I uninstalled the piece of utter crap that is Nero and hope to never look back.

Next to get thumbnails working. More searching and I found a fix. Using only the value for .avi I now have working thumbnails again. Unfortunately the thumbnail is based on the first frame of the video which makes it kinda useless (often black). Will take a look at that later.

Then I told the kids we could go out and play and come back and watch Bolibompa (Swedish children's show) once we were done. I paused live-TV and went away. Big mistake. It seems only ~40 minutes were stored so we couldn't start watching from the beginning. So we started at the earliest possible point, which was fine for a while but then we jumped forward in the program with no way of going back. My guess is that the buffer for pausing live TV is a fixed amount of HDD space and not an amount in minutes. Which means the buffer can grow and shrink depending on the compression of the stored material. I'll look over at thegreenbutton and see if they have anything to say about it.


Am I pleased with having an HTPC? I think I will be. Earlier today I was ready to return the unit, but now I feel and can get it to work. Albeit with quite a lot of time and work on my part. It is definitely not a plug'n'play solution and I wouldn't recommend it to many people without a lot of warnings.

Insane-man finally decides!

Well, it seems I managed to get out of indecisive land after all. All it took was a push from my wife who explained that we need to be able to record TV and that I probably won't be happy unless I can get everything to work exactly as I want. So an HTPC it is. But I took the easy way out and got the Scaleo EVI since I didn't want to have any hassle setting it up.

Boy was I wrong.

It took me 4-5 hours to get TV4 and TV6 up and running. I was very close to returning the entire system, but kept looking for new services within Vista MCE and finally TV4 showed up. I don't think I did anything (and I have an excellent signal with rooftop antenna), but I did try to enter a different area code to see if I could get MCE to find the additional channels (who were on the same mux btw).

Now on to configuring the rest of the software. Vista MCE crashes when entering a folder with Xvid files, some reports that this is a Nero problem (which came pre-installed). I'll update and see if it helps.