Once again we return as ready as ever to answer your questions and mull the intricacies of Media Center. We had a lot of fun on this week’s show and got some good information out to you, our listeners.
First up this week is Boxee and Windows Media Center Integration 1.0. A new tool, this app will place a tile in Media Center linked to Boxee and through magic in the background will close Media Center and open Boxee when selected. It does the process in reverse once you’re ready to head back. I’ve been using Boxee for awhile now and this is something I’ll be installing very soon myself. If the transition is as smooth as other solutions, you should be good to go as far as not having to touch a mouse or keyboard.
For those of you still using the Windows 7 Release Candidate, don’t forget: Your HTPC will start rebooting itself every two hours starting March 1st. After that, you have until June 1st when your copy of Win 7 will not receive updates or fixes as it’ll no longer be counted as a true, genuine copy. Head out and get that retail copy! If you don’t want to have to deal with that pesky reinstall, apparently there’s a way to go from the RC to retail but neither of us have tried it so use at your own risk.
One other thing we covered was a question sent in from one of our listeners regarding guide data. You can find Guide Tool through the link. I haven’t had to play with this yet but if you have any questions, be sure to send them on to Josh!
Thanks to everyone for sending in your questions and comments. Our contact page is no longer sending your messages to the spam folder so contact away!
Click Here to download Episode 65!
As always, we thank Dragon Global for their support of Entertainment 2.0. While you can’t skip the Olympic events you don’t want to watch, you certainly won’t be plagued by commercials.
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For the gentleman looking for build options there is a great thread over at AVS in the home theater sections listing current builds (HTPC and Servers) by renethx. He has been around for a long time and actually helped me plan my first HTPC 3 years ago before this thread existed. Last week when that motherboard died I just pulled up the thread picked what fit what I needed and threw the pieces back together. For me this is a must read for anyone who asks me how I built my systems.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=940972
The January 2010 builds start on 401 or there is a link in the first post. If these don’t meet what you need you can post on the thread for help or if you want something very specific you can post directly for him. For a couple paypal bucks you are guaranteed the answers but he has replied many times for me without this as well.
The Win7 wtv->dvr-ms converter (and todvrms) only do container swaps. David needs to transcode the video stream to MPEG2 prior to attempting to stuff it in a DVR-MS.
If you are looking for a good guide on building a HD HTPC or Media server there are a couple threads on AVS forums. The first is http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=940972 which is a 421 page thread dedicated to the topic. This is the most recent Guide from Jan 2010 http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=17984809#post17984809. The OP does his best to keep the guide updated and also answer specific questions in the thread.
The Media Server thread is only 187 pages and can be found
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1071162
hi Guys Terrific shows as always… A question for you. I have seen this advertised on one web-site in the UK and wondered if you were familiar with the product or the retailer:
http://www.tvstick.co.uk/products/productinfo.asp?catid=1&prodid=32
It does seem a very good product for the price and would be the answer to using a nettop for my M/C rather than the PC I am using at the moment (Full height PCI sat card required)
Also in terms of media center and recording content. ALL recordings are done in mpeg2. NTSC tuners have hardware encoders on them that record the SD tv stream straight to mpeg2. QAM and ATSC are both Transport Streams that are saved directly to mpeg2.
the HD PVR records content in mpeg4(1080i h.264 to be exact), which is why it wasn't natively supported in media center and which is also why third party plugins like DVBlink is needed.
Also I've done the RC to RTM upgrade method of editing the text file and installing RTM on top of RC, didn't do it on my HTPC, but did do it both on my netbook and office pc and both worked out well, so far been running that way since October with zero issues.
– Josh
In 7MC the wtv format can contain mpeg2 or h.264, depending on the source. HD DVB-S recordings in the UK are all h.264, and Media Centre supports other countries that use h.264 for DVB-S and -T.
This is also how Adam has managed to convert his mkv files to wtv.
In 7MC the wtv format can contain mpeg2 or h.264, depending on the source. HD DVB-S recordings in the UK are all h.264, and Media Centre supports other countries that use h.264 for DVB-S and -T.
This is also how Adam has managed to convert his mkv files to wtv.