Getting back into bed with Vista Media Centre
After an on-again, off-again romance, Adam Turner is trying to work things out with his fickle Vista Media Centre.
Vista Media Centre is like that crazy ex-girlfriend who you know is wrong for you but you just can't get out of your mind. Every time you break up with her you vow "never again", but after a few months she starts calling you, promising she can change. Remembering the good times rather than the bad, you decide to give her one more chance - even though you secretly know she'll eventually let you down again when you need her most.
When I first built my media centre I spent a lot of time fine tuning it to the point where I trusted it. For a while things were great but ever so slowly our relationship deteriorated to the point where I pledged my love to the boring but reliable TiVo instead. TiVo has brought some stability to my lounge room, but I've secretly stayed in touch with my media centre and missed the little extra things it did for me.
I've now realised that a lot of my media centre's stability issues are due to the software the runs the iMon Soundgraph LED built into my Silverstone case. A few months ago I disabled the LCD and removed the software, which of course disabled the IR receiver so I bought a $50 MCE remote with USB IR receiver (although I control everything with a Logitech Harmony 785). Getting rid of the iMon software seems to have ironed out of lot of the quirks. To help with the media centre's stability, I've also set MCE Standby Tool to reboot the machine once every day.
Another of my media centre's key problems is that the DVD burner often disappears. Unfortunately it's the whisper quiet Asus drive, which means discs need to go in the noisy Pioneer Blu-ray drive (which is whisper quite under XP but as noisy as hell under Vista). When I checked on it last night, both drives were visible although none of the auto-play features were working.
A quick check revealed that all the auto-play features were set back to "Open with Windows Explorer" rather than "Open with Media Centre". Typical bloody Windows, I suspect the culprit is some Windows update which reverted everything back to default settings - an annoying habit of the Windows update process.
IceTV has been doing some strange things lately and large chunks of the EPG have been blank. Deleting all the channels, rescanning and remapping them to the EPG seemed to fix this. I still couldn't get the media centre and IceTV to sync recordings, which turned out to be a bug in the IceTV software which can be resolved by deleting the IceTV cache. The fact that some people experience this regularly makes me a little reluctant to trust IceTV when scheduling recordings remotely - but a fix is apparently coming.
It's also frustrating that scheduling recordings via IceTV doesn't let me tweak the padding for individual recordings via the website, although I can set global padding via the IceTV software on the media centre. It would also be great if IceTV let me specify how many episodes of a Season Pass to keep, but that has to be done by the media centre. In the end I decided that it was easier to create Season Passes on IceTV for shows on the ABC and SBS, because they're likely to start on time, but to create Season Passes for shows on commercial channels using the MCE interface so I can tweak the padding.
The Lady of the House now has IceTV set up on her iPhone, but I'm worried that my dual Season Pass plan is going to put a serious dint in my WAF. Still, she's missed the end of enough movies to know that if it's really important she should record the show after it as well. She also knows how to dip into the MCE interface to tweak the padding on a Season Pass (which is one of the things I really like about TiVo as well).
After laying down the ground rules with my Vista Media Centre, I think I'll give it yet another chance. Time will tell if my faith was misplaced.
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