The saga of Ticcles HTPC.

Long story:
For ages I've used my modded Xbox and XBMC to watch my usual run of Movies, TV Shows, DVDs, etc in the lounge room. For TV recording I had MythTV running on my Linux box and used the Xbmcmythtv python program to watch TV recordings from Myth and if I wanted to watch live TV then I switched inputs to my STB.

After a few years of running things this way it all started to come undone over the past few months. The DVD player in the Xbox started to slowly break down so I subbed in a stand alone DVD player but with only 2 HD inputs on the TV we had to keep swapping cables around from the Xbox to the DVD player. Then my STB started playing up and I had to jiggle the aerial cable around a few times to get it to display the picture, it'd break up, etc. My patience with this started to run out but my laziness won over and I never bothered to fix it until last night when wifey finally cracked it which meant I had to swap cables and then I cracked it because I banged my head on the TV cabinet.

So I went out today and grabbed a TV tuner (Winfast DTV1000S) and rebuilt my other PC using Windows 7 64-bit with the sole purpose of using Windows media center. I'd played enough with XBMC on Linux, MythTV, etc and couldn't be arsed with the hassle. Once I got it all up and running (only took about 2 1/2hrs from sticking the Win7 DVD in to watching TV) I gotta say.. it's the fucking business! The interface is very nice, switching to live TV is quick, recording is easy and I was able to stick in all my XVID/AVI/MP4/etc into the Movie library with some third party software.

Brilliant!

Short story:
Installed Win7 MCE and it's awesome.

Would recommend to others

But seriously, windows 7 kicks ass. I've only booted into xp 2 or 3 times since i've installed it about a month ago. Seriously fucking awesome.

Good to hear, you can show me when I come down soon

What kinda TV you got?

Its easy to believe windows 7 is good ... vista is good if you are willing to spend a while modifying it and apply "hacks".

The designer of UAC should be shot.

The designer of UAC should be shot.

he needs an award.

his boss should be shot for not standing up to the marketing peeps at the weekly exec meetings and explaining why pandering to the fears of users would only lead to lost proffits

Amen to windows 7. I have it running on my new computer and it totally kicks ass. There are a few bug issues (as per usual) but I presume they will be fixed up in the next release.

yeah, ive been running mce (2005 and vista) for about 4years now. never had an issue with it. all my tv runs through it. in fact, i sold my lcd with a tv tuner, and just bought a 26monitor. cant rate it enough.

if you get the remote too, its awsome. every time we have people round for drinks they always ask "whats that?". its just vista. everyone bags vista, but when poeple see it they love it.

Windows Media Center doesn't play MKVs though, which sucks big time.

codecs Midda... codecs...

whats an MKV?

whats an MKV?

Another fucking vid containers you need to have to watch HD Linux ISOs off the intatubes. At least this one is Open Source, I just wish more players support it out of the box (yes I'm bittah cause player doesn't) :____(

Also cool, now MS needs to get from success learned on this project and apply it to their Pocket PC OS....

Nice one slinky, I'll be setting that up and giving it a go tonight. I had a few problems with the Movie library not recognising some of my movies so will be interesting if this fixes it up. I also used another program called YAMMM to rename folders, get artwork, XML file, etc and although it's added the movie to the library it doesn't display the Synopsis.

downloading oml now. will report what it's like compared to my movies 2.

What i know so far....

My movies 2 uses sql server 2005 and various other microsoft packages also.
Sql server comes up with compatibility issues with windows 7 but ignore the error and continue as it works anyway.

My movies 2 also only has titles/artwork etc for movies that have been released onto dvd and checks the movies with online data.

each movie must also be saved into it's own folder. (pain in the ass considering i had like 50 iso files all in 1 folder.

watch this thread will continue soon.:D

http://www.mediabrowser.tv/

codecs Midda... codecs...

MKV isn't a codec, it's a container format, one that Windows doesn't support.

You can install the Haali Media Splitter, which allows Windows Media Player to read the streams inside MKV (I've heard it can be tough to get it to work with Windows 7 Media Center though), but even then it doesn't support GPU decoding of H.264 video streams. Simple players like Media Player Classic will do this no worries.

Not a problem if you don't watch any HD media I guess, but that's all I watch now.