What is the Media Center recording tonight?

Image via Wikipedia

I am currently working on a few Windows 7 posts and I wanted to stop by and create a quick post in the meanwhile. I've had an idea for a daily post on what the Media Center is up to since this blog is suppose to be about the daily use and experiences of Media Center. So hear it goes.

* Lost (ABC, 9pm): I am a huge Lost fan and this is definitely number 1 on the list tonight. After last week's season premiere I am really looking forward to seeing if all the theories around Faraday's mom are correct. I love this time travel stuff.

* American Idol(FOX, 8pm): The auditions continue and I am still behind on this show. So far I have only seen the season premiere, but I did enjoy it. Not sure on the fourth judge yet, but she seems to have more recent experience than any other the other three.

* Lie to Me(FOX, 9pm): This is a new show that premiered last week. The show looks interesting but I have yet to watch.

* Life on Mars(ABC, 10pm): We have a season of this show stacked up and I don't think that is going to change. Unless my wife starts watching it I will be hitting the delete button on this show.

Windows 7 Rebuild Complete

I completed my clean install of Windows 7 yesterday morning after about 25 minutes of waiting. A marked improvement from the few hours it took to upgrade from Vista. After using it for a full 24 hours I am definitely glad that I went through with the clean install.

My hopes of my Cable Card DRM'ed content still working were crushed as I tried to play the first episode of Generation Kill (HBO mini-series). At the end of the day not a significant loss since the series was just released on DVD. All other cable card content I had I either did not care about or could get to in some other fashion (record a repeat airing, online streaming, DVD). Luckily the majority of my content was record with the HDHomerun tuners over unencrypted QAM.

I now have a clean install with nothing but my must have applications and ALL of my essential plugins working again. As far as performance, it seems to be a marked improvement but just this morning I was getting a lot of network congestion and extender disconnects. I'll have to keep an eye on that.

Rebuild of Windows 7

Image via Wikipedia

After using Windows 7 for about a week I really do not want to go back to Vista but I am definitely having issues with the Beta.  From reading other’s experience online I think it has to do with the fact that I did an upgrade and not a clean build.

Well tonight I have decided to do a clean build of Windows 7 on my main Media Center PC.  I don’t know if I have to go back to Vista first, but I can easily do that if need be.  It will just be time consuming.

I want to try the clean build to finally get all my plugins working (OML, HeatWave, VideoLibrary) and to hopefully provide more performance consistency with my Linksys DMA2100 extenders.

I am sacrificing my cable card recordings but I think it’s a hit I am willing to take right now.  I don’t know for sure that they will not be available.  We’ll soon see.

Storage: Best/Worst Thing About Media Center

One of the best things about Media Center and really any HTPC is that you have total control over the amount of storage at your disposal. Once you realize this and start increasing your storage it can also be one of the worst things you can do (but of course not bad enough to go back or really regret it).

A driving factor in moving to a Media Center solution for my household entertainment was the limited recording space that was available to me on my Time Warner Scientific Atlanta HD DVR. According to Scientific Atlanta the DVR can record up 20 hours of HD content on a 160GB hard drive. I recorded everything in HD so 20 hours sounds about right.

In my current Media Center setup I have 1.75 TB worth of hard drive space dedicated to recorded TV. I have a 1TB drive that is my main recording drive and a 750GB drive to allow me to keep shows a little bit longer but not for archiving. Any shows I want to archive go on the Windows Home Server which has 3.5TB worth of space for TV, movies, music, photos and more.

So in moving from the Time Warner supplied DVR to a Media Center solution I was able to realize an almost 11 times increase in storage capacity. As far as hours, doing the math, that's about 220 hours worth of HD content. So that means that if all I did was watch TV 24/7 I could watch for nine straight days. Nine days!

The increased storage has been a huge change in how we watch television. We can now truly watch television on our schedule. With the Time Warner DVR we constantly found ourselves racing against a clock to make sure we watched our recorded content before we ran out of space and it was automatically deleted. It felt like living through an episode of 24 where at any moment someone you cared about could be "erased".

Now that is no longer the case for us. Now we can actually let full seasons record and do viewing marathons. I'm to big of a fan to do this, but if I wanted to I could let the full current season of 24 record (in HD) and then watch all the entire season over a few days without interfering with my other shows.

Another positive is that we get to try out and experiment with new shows without endangering the recordings of our regular shows. Leverage on TNT looks really interested so I decided to give it a shot. I just set the season to record and when I get a chance I will watch it and see if I like it. Very nice option to have.

The downside of all this is that I end up with content overload. You almost become a TV pack rat. I personally like to go into my recorded TV section/list and only see shows that I have not yet seen and that I really want to watch. My wife on the other hand could care less about cleaning it up. She is definitely someone who would just as soon let the DVR manage the space.

To further illustrate my good/bad scenario, I have created tables that shows all the recorded TV we have as of January 9th. I have broken it down into a few categories:
* 1 Offs (TV Movies, Specials, single episodes of non-regular series)
* Regular Series (shows we watch regularly and then delete)
* Daily's (shows we record almost every day and keep a limited number)
* Kid's (gotta have a few shows ready to go for the little one)
* Archive (shows I may want to archive)
* Piled Up (shows that have been on my Media Center way to long)

So now with that context, here is what is on my Media Center (with about 900GB of space to spare)

1 Offs

Title	HD/SD	# Episodes	Hrs
20/20	HD	1	1
Barbara Walters Special	HD	1	1
Extreme Home Makeover	SD	2	1
Popi (movie)	HD	1	2
Rendition (movie)	HD	1	2
Blacklist Vol 1 (movie)	HD	1	2
Legend of Bagger Vance	HD	1	2
TOTAL		8	11

Regular Series

Title	HD/SD	# Episodes	Hrs
Brothers & Sisters	HD	1	1
Desperate Housewives	HD	1	1
House	HD	3	3
Leverage	HD	2	2
Prison Break	HD	1	1
Pushing Daises	HD	2	2
The Office	HD	1	.5
True Beauty	SD	1	1
Ugly Betty	HD	1	1
TOTAL		13	12.5

Daily's

Title	HD/SD	# Episodes	Hrs
Good Morning America	HD	1	2
Oprah	HD	5	5
The Daily Show	SD	5	2.5
The Colbert Report	SD	5	2.5
TOTAL		16	12

Kids

Title	HD/SD	# Episodes	Hrs
Max & Ruby	SD	5	2.5
Superman	SD	4	2
TOTAL		9	4.5

1 Offs

Title	HD/SD	# Episodes	Hrs
Batman - Brave & the Bold	SD	4	2
24:Redemption	HD	1	2
Heroes	HD	2	2
Chris Rock Special	HD	1	2
TOTAL		8	8

Piled Up

Title	HD/SD	# Episodes	Hrs
90210	HD	5	5
ANTM	SD	11	11
Don't Forget the Lyrics	HD	10	10
ER	HD	8	8
Fringe	HD	9	9
Generation Kill	HD	7	7
Hopkins	HD	6	6
Kimora Simmons	SD	4	2
Life on Mars	HD	5	5
Private Practice	HD	8	8
Privileged	HD	9	9
Life and Times of Tim	HD	6	3
TOTAL		88	83

So as you can see, just in the Piled Up table there is 83 hours worth of television to watch. That is 3 ½ days worth of TV to watch. With some of these shows there is an obvious reason that they are piled up and they will go straight to the trash.

Others shows like Fringe I just have not made or found the time for it. I'm just glad Media Center allows me to decided how to watch versus my previous alternative.

Windows 7

Windows 7 Beta was released to the general public this past weekend and I decided to take the plunge (thanks in part to easy backups with my Windows Home Server).

In this post I wanted to discuss what I had to do to get everything working.  I’m hoping this will help others have an easier path if they choose to try Windows 7.  In my next post I will give my impressions and hopefully get another video up.

First Thing First: Before you do anything make sure you backup and can easily restore your system.  I use my Home Server to create a restore point that allows me to bring my computer back to the exact state it was in before I installed Windows 7.  If you don’t have a Home Server then use a program like Acronis.

Upgrade or Clean Install:  In my case I really had no choice, but after going through both options I highly recommend doing an upgrade if at all possible.

My driving factor for doing an upgrade was to preserve my Cable Card DRM shows.  A clean install would have severed my ties to my Cable Card recorded content and I would have lost the ability to watch those shows.

It also saved me a lot of time from reinstalling software and eliminated some potential driver hell.  If you are installing on a Vista SP1 system I definitely recommend the upgrade.  As opposed to previous versions of Windows, it just works.  Of course if you have a Windows XP system you have no choice but to do a clean install.

ATI Digital Cable Card Tuners: My only reason for installing Windows 7 is to play with and test the next iteration of Media Center.  So it was definitely crucial for me to get the ATI DCT tuners working.

Thanks to those that had come before me and an easy upgrade path it was not the difficult.  After you get Windows 7 installed and BEFORE you even open Media Center for the first time I recommend doing 3 things to make the experience as smooth as possible:

1. Install the DVR-MS/MP3 Corruption/TV Tuner fix for Windows 7 Beta.  You can find the x86 version here and the x64 version here.
   
2. Install PlayReady software.  Windows Media Center would do this during setup if you don’t do it ahead of time, but it makes the experience smoother.  Download x86 version here and x64 version here.
   
3. Update ATI Video Drivers.  This may or may not apply to you.  If you have a Dell XPS 420, definitely get the latest Vista Catalyst driver from ATI and install it.  Do not use the ATI Windows 7 Preview driver.
   

HDHomerun QAM Tuner: In addition to my Cable Card tuners I have an HDHomerun QAM tuner to get all the unencrypted channels broadcast by my cable provider.  Everyone at the very least should have the local broadcast stations available to them in standard definition and high definition.

Windows 7 Media Center (7MC for short) has much better support for QAM digital tuners built right in.  To get this to work I again had to do three things.  I would do all these before running the TV tuner setup in Media Center.

1. Install latest HDHomerun software.  This will also update the firmware on the HDHomerun so you do not need to download both.
   
2. Make sure that the following registry value is correct so HDHomerun will use the new Windows 7 driver and not the Vista driver:

Run Regedit and browse to:

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

Check the Ident value... it should read "6.0". If it reads "5.0" please change it to "6.0".

1. Update NIC driver. You may or may not need to do this. Also this is only to fix any issue with playback on extenders so you can worry about this after you setup the TV tuners in Media Center.  See this thread on the Green Button.
   

The only other thing that you may need to worry about is manually adding the channels that Media Center did not find during it’s scan during the TV Tuner setup.  That’s a whole other post.

Well that’s all I have after one day with Windows 7.  More this week.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone. We just crossed midnight in the Eastern time zone.

I am excited for 2009 in general but especially for all the changes that it will bring to Media Center and the Media Center community. I can't wait!