RIP Windows Media Center

Forums › Home Theatre (including HTPC and EPG Collector) › RIP Windows Media Center

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1985 posts

Uber Geek

#1298378 5-May-2015 13:49

I am further embedded with WMC as I have a card reader plugged into it and all the necessary software to decode Sky (legally in terms of I can only see subscribed channels). I'm sure this can probably be done with other media software solutions but I wouldn't want to go through the hassle again of setting everything up from scratch and all the nightmares which accompany such a task.

I would like to eventually get rid of Sky but my girlfriend is a developer for an overseas sports betting company so she needs Sky for work.

geekiegeek

2513 posts

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#1298439 5-May-2015 14:42

sm250: What I am not clear about, is exactly what I can replace it with. Reading this forum and others there doesn't seem to be any obvious replacement.

All that I would need is a tool to do the recording. I can use other tools to create myself an EPG so I would just need some way of telling some sort of service to record what is on one of my tuners. I could then build myself a WPF or WinRt front-end that displayed what I had recorded, and displays the EPG to give me the flexibility to do what I need. Is there any such thing?

Stefan

Might be possible with Mediaportal if you just install the TV Server, then you can build your own frontend but not sure why you wouldn't just use the one it comes with and switch off all the features apart from TV. Pretty sure you can have it launch straight into TV as well.

sm250

88 posts

Master Geek

#1298441 5-May-2015 14:47

geekiegeek:
sm250: What I am not clear about, is exactly what I can replace it with. Reading this forum and others there doesn't seem to be any obvious replacement.

All that I would need is a tool to do the recording. I can use other tools to create myself an EPG so I would just need some way of telling some sort of service to record what is on one of my tuners. I could then build myself a WPF or WinRt front-end that displayed what I had recorded, and displays the EPG to give me the flexibility to do what I need. Is there any such thing?

Stefan

Might be possible with Mediaportal if you just install the TV Server, then you can build your own frontend but not sure why you wouldn't just use the one it comes with and switch off all the features apart from TV. Pretty sure you can have it launch straight into TV as well.

Depends how customisable it is. What I've done with Windows Media Centre is created a plug-in that handles all keypresses which then allows me to use the teletext buttons on the remote to skip by four minutes, three minutes, two minutes and 10 minutes respectively to avoid the ads :-) anything that I go to now will have to have that same functionality. I know how I could quite quickly code that myself if I wrote a WPF application assuming that media portal wrote the file into a fairly common video format.

I am might have to use something for live TV because my wife for some reason is quite happy to watch live TV whereas I will only ever watch it recorded.

Like others in this thread, it's something I'm trying to avoid for as long as possible, but if lightbox for example produces a decent Windows 10 and then there might be enough for me to justify thinking of going to Windows 10.

Stefan

reven

3743 posts

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#1298443 5-May-2015 14:49

sm250:
geekiegeek:
sm250: What I am not clear about, is exactly what I can replace it with. Reading this forum and others there doesn't seem to be any obvious replacement.

All that I would need is a tool to do the recording. I can use other tools to create myself an EPG so I would just need some way of telling some sort of service to record what is on one of my tuners. I could then build myself a WPF or WinRt front-end that displayed what I had recorded, and displays the EPG to give me the flexibility to do what I need. Is there any such thing?

Stefan

Might be possible with Mediaportal if you just install the TV Server, then you can build your own frontend but not sure why you wouldn't just use the one it comes with and switch off all the features apart from TV. Pretty sure you can have it launch straight into TV as well.

Depends how customisable it is. What I've done with Windows Media Centre is created a plug-in that handles all keypresses which then allows me to use the teletext buttons on the remote to skip by four minutes, three minutes, two minutes and 10 minutes respectively to avoid the ads :-) anything that I go to now will have to have that same functionality. I know how I could quite quickly code that myself if I wrote a WPF application assuming that media portal wrote the file into a fairly common video format.

I am might have to use something for live TV because my wife for some reason is quite happy to watch live TV whereas I will only ever watch it recorded.

Like others in this thread, it's something I'm trying to avoid for as long as possible, but if lightbox for example produces a decent Windows 10 and then there might be enough for me to justify thinking of going to Windows 10.

Stefan

mediaportal you could do this, better yet is skip steps, press once say +15seconds, twice = +30seconds, 3 times = +1min, 4 = 2mins etc. these are all configurable and keep going up/down

sm250

88 posts

Master Geek

#1298480 5-May-2015 15:56

reven: mediaportal you could do this, better yet is skip steps, press once say +15seconds, twice = +30seconds, 3 times = +1min, 4 = 2mins etc. these are all configurable and keep going up/down

Thanks. Looks like it might be worth having a look at that at some stage. I saw a quick video on YouTube and the recorded TV screen didn't look quite as good, just seemed to be a long list where WMC groups things into series. It would be great if there was a way to play around with each of these different products to see if they worked without having to spend ages configuring them :-) at the moment I'm of the attitude that what I have works so don't want to stuff that up, but there could well be things that are better out there just the time it takes to set it all up, where WMC is a very fast set up.

Stefan

Regs

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Snowflake

#1298583 5-May-2015 19:39

WMC shipped with Windows 8 so will be 'supported' for some time yet. I'm still running Win7+MCE - that said, I find myself using it less and less (think Netflix and other VoD solutions). I only really use it to watch TV News an hour or two after recording... which could easily be done via an OnDemand solution now.

It was/is a great solution, can imagine what it would be like now with continued investment - but sadly, nothing changed since Win7.

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freitasm

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#1298588 5-May-2015 19:48

As above, we use it more for live TV, and only a couple of hours a week now, thanks to Amazon Fire TV box in the house and streaming. However it is still great for photos slideshow while playing music. with a very small form-factor PC (BRIX or NUC) it'll be around our house for a while.

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sm250

88 posts

Master Geek

#1298589 5-May-2015 19:49

Regs: WMC shipped with Windows 8 so will be 'supported' for some time yet. I'm still running Win7+MCE - that said, I find myself using it less and less (think Netflix and other VoD solutions). I only really use it to watch TV News an hour or two after recording... which could easily be done via an OnDemand solution now.

It was/is a great solution, can imagine what it would be like now with continued investment - but sadly, nothing changed since Win7.

"Supported" is an interesting term - I'm still having to run on Windows 8 because I can't activate with the key that I got when they gave them away for free. My hard drive died in April after Windows 8 came out, so I rebuilt it. Wouldn't activate with that key, so rang Microsoft and eventually (after about six hours on the phone and multiple calls having been sent to the wrong place) got through someone who said they would email me a new key. The key never arrived and I spent a further few hours on the phone to Microsoft getting sent from person to person and making no progress and I can't even find anywhere to buy the key. One guy said they would charge me $200+ dollars to sort this issue out, which is ridiculous.

My wife gets rather frustrated because it constantly comes up with a blue screen that says click here to activate. Thankfully I can alt+tab out of the settings page and back to Windows Media Centre :-)

My issue with on demand solutions, at least on the Windows platform currently is that a web browser is a terrible place to try and watch television from a television, because there is no remote support, most of them don't remember where you were and don't restore properly if the machine goes to sleep.

I'm hoping that the universal app functionality on Windows 10 will ensure that companies think it's worth developing Windows specific apps which then might hopefully work for use with the TV/remote, but then I'm stuck with issues of how I record broadcast TV which is what I do 90% of the time. Not a great solution, but I do understand not many people use it anymore. It's just a shame that Microsoft can't find a way to release some of those pieces of backend technology for us developers to reuse.

Stefan

Regs

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Snowflake

#1298616 5-May-2015 20:12

freitasm: As above, we use it more for live TV, and only a couple of hours a week now, thanks to Amazon Fire TV box in the house and streaming. However it is still great for photos slideshow while playing music. with a very small form-factor PC (BRIX or NUC) it'll be around our house for a while.

oh yeah, photos/slideshows. That's always running. I'd miss that!

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Regs

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Snowflake

#1298619 5-May-2015 20:15

sm250:

"Supported" is an interesting term - I'm still having to run on Windows 8 because I can't activate with the key that I got when they gave them away for free. My hard drive died in April after Windows 8 came out, so I rebuilt it. Wouldn't activate with that key, so rang Microsoft and eventually (after about six hours on the phone and multiple calls having been sent to the wrong place) got through someone who said they would email me a new key. The key never arrived and I spent a further few hours on the phone to Microsoft getting sent from person to person and making no progress and I can't even find anywhere to buy the key. One guy said they would charge me $200+ dollars to sort this issue out, which is ridiculous.

hmm, that sucks. PM me your email address and I will get in touch and look into it. Might take a while though as i'm a bit snowed right now with all the big announcements and our Ignite NZ conference launch...

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mcraenz

1140 posts

Uber Geek

#1298667 5-May-2015 21:42

WMC doesn't have the ability to record multiple channels on a single mux if I recall. That was always a big show stopper for me. Especially important for Sky subscribers. With MediaPortal I'm able to record upto 16 Sky channels simultaneously with a quad tuner.

The TV recoding side of MediaPortal really is a superb and mature piece of software. Actually all of MediaPortal is.

That said, I'm sure the Sky situation will change soon, my guess 12 -18 months. And no HTPC solution (that I've seen) offers good integration of multiple streaming services into a single interface. If MediaPortal or Kodi threw all their focus at that they would emerge as the HTPC leader of the future . Even if it were through well maintained kludges, workarounds, browser automations etc.

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Athlonite

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#1298842 6-May-2015 09:43

Would it not stand to reason that WMC for windows 8/8.1 would also work fine in windows 10 could you not just install it and use it

sm250

88 posts

Master Geek

#1298845 6-May-2015 09:47

Athlonite: Would it not stand to reason that WMC for windows 8/8.1 would also work fine in windows 10 could you not just install it and use it

I think the problem would be pulling out all of the required pieces and making them work. I'm not sure how deep the integration goes in Windows itself, there must be a codec for the recorded tv files I presume, and then there's the recorder and various other things, presumably including registry settings. I would imagine that it would be possible to pull them out if you had a lot of patience! But because Microsoft isn't willing to open source that no one can actually distribute those files so you would have to give clear instructions for others to repeat and it might be quite a complicated process.

Stefan

Athlonite

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#1298861 6-May-2015 10:03

sm250:
Athlonite: Would it not stand to reason that WMC for windows 8/8.1 would also work fine in windows 10 could you not just install it and use it

I think the problem would be pulling out all of the required pieces and making them work. I'm not sure how deep the integration goes in Windows itself, there must be a codec for the recorded tv files I presume, and then there's the recorder and various other things, presumably including registry settings. I would imagine that it would be possible to pull them out if you had a lot of patience! But because Microsoft isn't willing to open source that no one can actually distribute those files so you would have to give clear instructions for others to repeat and it might be quite a complicated process.

Stefan

I thought that WMC was an separate download from MS so wouldn't it just require installing it as you would have done under win 8/8.1

mm1352000

1149 posts

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#1298889 6-May-2015 10:38

sm250: I think the problem would be pulling out all of the required pieces and making them work.

I haven't heard anything about MS changing or pulling out their DX9, BDA, DirectShow or MediaFoundation frameworks. If the news is true (I'm still highly sceptical), then I suspect the reasons for pulling the plug are political and/or monetary rather than technical. For example:

.NET 3.5 - which I've been told is the framework that the WMC business logic uses - is going EOL/EOS, and they can't support it over the lifetime of W10
They want to [finally] pull DirectShow at some point, and this requires cutting all the components that have any dependency on it.

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