Microsoft: We're SO SORRY for Media Center TV guide titsup
Microsoft has apologised for deleting TV guides on Windows Media Center. The data wipe left customers in the UK and Ireland "distraught" and struggling to record their favourite shows. After The Register raised the issue yesterday, Microsoft has now restored the programme guides in the UK and said it will tackle Ireland next. …
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It works well...
I use it to drive my main TV. It records FTA HDTV, works out where the adverts are and works well. Took a lot of time to perfect but well worth the effort. I'm in NZ and live TV is pretty much unwatchable due to the adverts.
£20 PVR for Win7 that few ever heard of
A £20 USB freeview stick off ebay and WMC on my Windows 7 HTPC gives me a wayyyy better product for recording telly than mates who have dedicated devices. Glad MS did the right thing.
If you use windows media center
Buy the amulet voice remote for flawless speech control over tv, film and music. My blind parents have been using it for over 2 years and its the best speech implementation I've seen... Ever, check out my demo on YouTube search for "DIY speech enabled TV" you'll never go back to mashing buttons again or searching through lists for your films and tv series
EPG
The other article mentions how the old WMC can't read the broadcast EPG and so has to get it via the Internet/MS. What isn't mentioned is why on earth it can't be patched to just read the EPG data from the broadcast stream like every other device under the sun? It's baffled me for years when I previously used it.
Tried WMC, really didn't like the startup time or UI
I did try WMC a while back (yes, on WIndows 7) and thought it took a long time to start up and seemed to have a UI that favoured looking pretty whilst taking an actual age to navigate around.
As I said in the previous WMC article about their EPG cockup, WMC is by no means the best media centre platform, even on WIndows itself.
The best combo for ease of setup and flexibility is Linux+tvheadend+XBMC. I'm using TBS PCIe cards for my sat and terrestrial digital viewing and their Linux support is very good. tvheadend is such a good and easy to use Web-based backend that I don't know people put up with anything else :-) And as for XBMC, well it just is super-configurable too (a dozen or more skins if you don't like the very pretty default Confluence skin) and has virtually every feature you'll need under the sun.
Re: With MythTV or VDR you
Why cold boot the box, hibernate works fine, wakes its self to do a recording and then hibernates again (not suspend), with WMC box connected to a eon power down the TV and AMP also get fully power downed when the box hibernates. On a cold boot, WMC has a nice feature to lunch on login, double click wmc haha.
As for Myth TV after using WMC the interface just plain sucks and made my eyes burn, not to mention the hours trying to get working drivers for the tuners and trying to get the WMC remote to work properly, maybe things have changed since i last tried it (was a couple of years back).
WMC was in some ways better on vista as you could patch it past 4 tuners, although that said the EPG ate its self after a while, so no brownie points there.
Sadly microsoft made something called softsled and then shelved it which would have made WMC a fantastic hub, but then realised using an xbox as an extender would likely make more money and canned the project.
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