Windows 7 Media Center, part 1

Geek Said:

My HTPC has had many faces, most of which are Linux/MythTV as I have discussed in other posts, but seeing as how I'm never satisfied with the technology I'm using I always spend some time playing with other options.

Despite what you might believe, I do not hate Windows, at least not ALL Windows. First there is XP, I really like XP. Vista I do despise to no end, but I am still on the fence with Windows 7, it's just too young to be overly critical of it. Win7 definitely surpasses the nightmare that is Vista, but I still prefer XP. Where this leads me is to giving Windows Media Center a go....but on Windows 7 since it is built-in to Home Premium edition and not a completely different version of the OS (modified Pro as it was with XP). I do have some experience with Vista Media Center and I admit it was simple to setup, even with controlling a set-t0p-box with an IR blaster, but can you say resource hog? OMG.

I recently updated the kids computer from XP Pro to Windows 7 Home Premium. For those of you that consider yourselves Geeks, notice that I said "updated" and not "upgraded"... Anyway since I have the HDHomeRun on the network I decided it would be easy to try out WMC.

Thanks to SiliconDust and their fantastic instructions setup was a breeze. No thanks to Microsoft and their lack of information regarding ClearQAM. WMC fails to find any ClearQAM channels....or does it? Wait a minute, they are all there, just inactive. Say what? Yeah, Windows Media Center finds all the channels that he HDHR can tune in but since the listings source doesn't match up to the channels it disables them and tells you that it didn't find any. That's real intuitive...

Like I said, Thank You, SiliconDust because if it weren't for your directions I would have had no idea where to edit the channel information to enable the ClearQAM channels and assign a listing source to the channel. Once I manually enabled the channel and assigned listings I finally got to watch live TV with WMC. It didn't take long, but are you kidding me? I can see why people aren't gung-ho on building/using HTPCs. I have an internal NTSC/ATSC hybrid card that I had tried previously under Windows 7 and experienced the exact same issue, the difference being that manufacturer had no help what-so-ever to tell me how to enable the hidden channels and I never got it functioning...but that might because I didn't care to invest any time in it either.

I didn't play with it long but I did watch some golf and I have to say the WMC user interface is really intuitive and although it may require a geek-like attitude to set it up to work the use and function is definitely easy enough for everybody.

There is one primary reason I would never consider running Windows Media Center as my HTPC application. WMC embeds DRM into the recordings and limits what you can do with the resulting file. MythTV on the other hand has a bare mpeg2 file (or Nuppel video in some cases) that can be edited or transcoded and moved to any platform your heart desires.

Geek out...