Posts Tagged media center
Windows 7, x64, and FrontView…oh my!
Posted by clifgriffin in Technology on September 7th, 2009
I spent sometime resurrecting my beloved media center from the neglect it suffered this summer. True to my eclectic way of going through hobbies like a womanizer goes through women, I had nearly talked myself out of doing anything further with the machine. I even contemplated completely abandoning it.
Fortunately, shorter days and cooler (albeit slight) weather has returned me to my senses. All of those televisions shows I bid adieu to in May are drawing nigh. I can see the silhouette of season premieres appearing on the horizon, galloping like wild horses.
With this new sense of urgency I decided the best approach would be to simply backup everything and start fresh. I used the Windows Easy File and Settings Transfer utility for the first time. It smoothly backed up everything to one gigantic, 175 GB file on my external hard drive. As my media center has been mostly non-functional for months I decided it would also be a good idea to skip backing up all of those shows I recorded last Winter/Spring and will never watch again.
Faced with the decision of whether or not to install the 32 bit or 64 bit version of Windows 7 I made the decision to give 64 bit a chance. I have never done this before due to my fear that plugin and driver support for x64 will be weaker. The thirst for a new experience helped me over this hurdle however.
All of this being said, the installation and setup were completely without hitch. I did not find any plugins or drivers lacking x64 support. Except, that is, FrontView.
FrontView is notoriously out of date, the last update being released 11/20/2006. In fact, before I even installed Windows I did some preliminary research as to whether or not it would work. I found no report concerning Windows 7, but I did find one report that it did not work with Vista 64 bit. As alternatives exist I decided to proceed.
To my surprise, FrontView did install and connecting to my LCD required no effort on my part. It simply does not track media center’s session data. It simply displays the default text/time. A few hours of troubleshooting proved fruitless. As it stands I have posted on TheGreenButton in hopes that someone else has already tried this and succeeded.
Sadly, not only have FrontView’s developers refused to release updates they also ignore support requests. Something I figured out a few e-mails ago. It would not be an issue if I hadn’t already paid for the pro version of their software.
I do not understand why some invest hundreds of hours into developing a product only to abandon it once a user base forms.
I can appreciate the time and effort required by even small projects, but developers have some responsibility to their projects, especially if they continue to sell them and advertise their support of them.
Correctly Mapping ClearQAM Channels in Media Center in Windows 7
Posted by clifgriffin in Technology on March 24th, 2009
A year and a half ago I bought a giant aerial antenna for the sole purpose of receiving clear OTA reception of local stations in media center. In this pursuit, I had very little troubles. The setup has worked like a charm and I haven’t had to touch it for months on end.
That was until a few weeks ago when I started having difficulty receiving a few stations. It seemed that I could only get strong reception on one channel if I agreed to not get good reception on other channels. This is obviously unacceptable.
Yesterday I rushed home from work to try to play with the antenna positioning one last time before Chuck. Fully 30 minutes later I resigned myself to failure.
Now you have to understand–my whole setup is predicated on the success of this antenan. If the antenna falls down, I don’t watch TV…period. I pay Comcast as an ISP and that’s it. Being unable to resolve reception issues I decided to try something new: ClearQAM.
I have not used ClearQAM in the past because:
- I wasn’t sure I received any stations as I’m not paying for any TV package.
- I didn’t want to accept the degeredation in quality that Comcast imposes. (Cable companies rather selfishly compress HD content)
- For most of my HTPC’s life, ClearQAM was not a native option in media center.
So last night I optimistically hooked up the cable connection to my tuners and went through the TV setup wizard again. The first problem I had was in the proper detection of my tuner. Windows 7 didn’t recognize my Hauppauge HVR-1600 as a ClearQAM tuner. Fortunately I found these instruction which helped me modify the registry to get around this.
Having succesfully completed the wizard, I found that I had a few stations, whose channel numbers and guide data were completely wrong, and didn’t have a few other stations. After playing around with it for a good while, I found the this guide that got me 90% there.
In short, Windows Media Center in Windows 7 may miss some channels in its scan. And it will most likely not know what those channels are if it does find them. You can use SiliconDust’s webpage to figure out what channels you should be getting. Using the “Add Missing Channels” page in setup, you can add the missing ClearQAM channels with the correct QAM modulation. (Left most column on SiliconDust’s page). You should also note that SiliconDust’s page displays channel data for both OTA and digital cable. You’ll want to scroll down to get to the digital cable listings.
It will also be very helpful to know what channels you want to be getting. For instance, I knew I wanted WSLS (Channel 10.1 NBC in my area), so I searched that page for WSLS and added the channels that seemed to match. (In my case there were some duplicate entries that I was only able to weed out after figuring out which ones worked and which ones had the content I wanted.)
Once you have added all the missing channels (or you think you have) go to “Edit Guide” and find the channels you have added. You’ll want to do two things once you’re here. You’ll want to change the channel number to right one. (For instance, NBC on my setup was ClearQAM channel 64-4 but I wanted it to be 10.1 as this was the official channel number). To do this, select the channel name (to the right of the channel number and checkbox) and press Enter. This displays the settings for this channel. Change the channel number as desired and press save, then go to “Edit Listing” and type in the call letters for the station you want. Be sure to be as specific as possible. If your channel is WSLS-DT, select that and not WSLS on the off chance the analog station has different programming than the digital station.
You should also be sure to differentiate between WSLS-DT and WSLS-DT2 and the like. If you can’t find the proper call sign for a station, look it up online. In my case, I receive a station called “The CW”. Looking online I determined that the correct call sign was WWCW.
It’s a process of trial and error, but once you have it setup you won’t have to worry about it anymore.
I apologize for the lack of screen shots in this post. I’m not near a media center, but wanted to get this written while it was still fresh.
Two Videos of Media Center in Windows 7
Posted by clifgriffin in Technology on November 2nd, 2008
I have basically decided to switch back to Vista Ultimate on my Media Center due to aforementioned problems. But before I do, here are a couple of screen capture videos to supplement Charlie Owen’s wonderful walkthrough.
The music wall displays all of your album art. It repeats as necessary and only uses albums for which you have art. It’s a very nice effect. The album details also flip periodically keeping the whole thing feeling dynamic.
The picture wall is also a huge improvement. Slideshows can become very monontonous, especially if you have seen the pictures many times. The picture wall randomizes things. Not only does it show random pictures, but it plays around with the colors. I watched it for about 30 minutes last night…
So, there you have it. A sign of things to come. I only wish it were fully developed so I didn’t have to switch back!
My Windows 7 Experience, thus far…
Posted by clifgriffin in General on November 1st, 2008
Some might call it fool hardy to install an alpha version of an operating system on your Media Center, but after seeing Charlie Owen’s beautiful screenshots, I had no choice.
True, the upgrades might be considered minor, if mostly cosmetic, but the interface, look, and feel of the software continues to improve and mature and that is its biggest selling point to me, right after its feature set.
I spent many hours setting everything up, and everything isn’t perfect yet. At this point, I’m debating whether I should continue wrestling with the things that aren’t working, or admit that this is not finished software and go back to Vista. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
For an alpha operating system, Windows 7 is remarkably quick and stable. It has only rebooted spontaneously once, and that was at some unknown point between the first reboot and when I logged in for the first time. I haven’t actually witnessed it happen.
By contrast, Vista alpha was so unusable I barely made it past the login screen and explorer endlessly died and restarted itself!
Instead of describing what other people have described and posting screenshots you can find anywhere else, I’m just going to list the things I like and the things I don’t like (or are broken at this point).
Things that work…
- While the interface is still lacking coming enhancements like the “superbar”, the improvements this release contains are still…improvements.
- The cosmetic changes are good…I like them. They seem to be steering towards minor changes that make the whole experience “feel” better. Which, like it or not, is a big part of how people perceive an operating system.
- Usability wise, things are continuing to improve. They have reduced the number of steps to some common tasks, and, more importantly they have made finding some screens easier. (But not all)
- The color scheme of Windows 7 seems to be centered around blue…which is good. I like blue.
- Media center looks gorgeous (if I hadn’t mentioned it). The tweaked main menu is great. The music wall is a nice touch. The new “Play Pictures” slide show is mesmerizing.
- Gadgets have been moved off of the sidebar and onto the desktop. Good call.
Things that don’t..
- The interface is still too complicated. Grouping things by task in the control panel is good…but it shouldn’t take me 10 minutes to find the “Network Connections” screen. Each release of Windows seems to bury this one further and further under a maze of “helpful” task oriented lists that make me want to kill a small animal. Make easy things easy to find, and put the not-so-easy tasks in a list for people who have more technical skills than John McCain!
- Adding items to the menu strips in Media Center doesn’t seem to work right now. I tried many ways of doing this and it just doesn’t seem to work like it used to.
- Windows Media Player 12 doesn’t work with Netflix Watch Now.
- nVidia nForce drivers (and all other drivers I found) for my onboard network card (ASUS M2NPV-VM) fail. The adapter resets endlessly. I had to pull out my USB wireless dongle to get consistent Internet acesss.
- Internet Explorer, Windows Media Center, etc hang occasionally.
- Gadgets are still mostly distracting and almost completely useless.
I had to run a couple of other things in compatibility mode to get them working properly, but other than that…no major issues.
All of these things are minor…except for the first item (and the last?), I’m confident all of them will be fixed by release. (Christmas 2009???)
The question for me is: shall I continue to give Microsoft feedback and suffer through the lack of Netflix and slightly reduced stability? Shall I try to hack it to make it do what I want? (at the risk of catastrophically breaking it) Or shall I go back to Vista and wait expectantly for more stable releases in the future?
I have no idea at the moment.
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