Trials and Errors

Now, I consider myself to be a pretty tech savvy person… I’ve learned everything I need to know about computers and all that shit by myself, usually through trial and error, be it designing a web page or building a computer and most things in between. But today I questioned my sanity, all thanks to Windows XP Media Center.

Yes, this is a follow on from my post last week about a DVR in the desktop PC, a few people recommended Media Center (henceforth known as MCE) so I bit the bullet and obtained a copy, first thing that alerted my spidey sense was the inability to upgrade, it was fresh or nothing, dang. Good thing we have a pretty much empty secondary hard drive, it would make a fantastic guinea pig. So I installed MCE, a few important drivers (audio and video), installed the TV Tuner card and pressed the green button on the remote…

Good start, the copy I used wasn’t a bust… After all the settings were set up, for lack of a better term, I was ready to play with it.

Before I jumped in at the deep end, I figured I’d look around at the supplementary options like photos and music and what not.

OK, photos from my recent trip to the Westin hotel all came through alright.

As did the music, though it was taking it’s sweet time in adding albums, so I went with a quick choice.

It had already found things like the album art, year of release and such likes, it could have dragged these from the ID3 tags, but apparently it was pulling this info from somewhere online as some albums didn’t have these.

While 10,000 Maniacs played away, I gave the MSN Messenger feature a try out, and it works pretty nice, though, I wouldn’t use the remote to enter text.

Now it was time to try the TV part, I installed WinTV which came with my tuner card also, and checked that first to make sure that was recieving a signal, which it was. So at 1pm there wasn’t much choice, Trya won by default before anyone thinks I’m a Tyra Banks Show fan.

A little bit of info on the program before we begin.

And this is where is all goes pear shaped, I’ve tried everything to get it working, every decoder option under the sun and then some but no, the damn thing wont budge.

So if I can’t get this to fly then it really limits my options for the PC DVR project, currently BeyondTV 4 is in the lead…