Vista Media Centre and TCL cable

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lchiu7

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#14144 18-Jun-2007 12:44

I currently use gbpvr to record off TCL cable - the usual setup with
1. xmltv to grab the epg
2. Hauppauge PVR250 capture card connected to my TCL box
3. USB UIRT to control the cable box from gbpvr
4. Hauppauge IR receiver controlled from a Harmony 880 using Girder

Works okay but lately the system has been a bit flaky and thinking about all that integration I thought maybe I should upgrade to Vista and use the Media Centre in Vista since I have a spare Vista Home Premium licence.

I suspect the epg is going to be a bit tricky but I have seen numerous posts from folks who have worked that out for MCE so it can't be much harder for Vista. The Hauppauge is supported by Vista so that should be fine. No idea if I can get Vista to work with the IR remote receiver and the USB UIRT but I also have lying around spare a Hauppauge WinTV USB2 PVR MCE kit that I have never used. It contains the USB2 capture device as well as a MCE remote and IR receivers so if worst came to worst I can could use that instead.

The main challenge is the box is a Athlon 2000+ but it does have 1G of memory and a AT Radeon 9550 256MB video card and it runs XP Pro fine

Any thoughts on this

Thanks

Larry

Staying in Wellington. Check out my AirBnB in the Wellington CBD. https://www.airbnb.co.nz/h/wellycbd PM me and mention GZ to get a 15% discount and no AirBnB charges.

Regs

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Snowflake

#75017 18-Jun-2007 14:58

you mention having the remote + IR receiver - this will work fine in controlling the XP/Vista MCE setups, but i'm not sure if its capable of doing the "IR blasting" to change the channel on your cable box. I have a hauppauge card+remote but the ir receiver I use is built into my HTPC chassis and it definately wont do the ir blasting

regards you current hardware - it will may work ok for MCE in vista, but I would anticipate that you would need to double your RAM. 1GB seems to be plenty for XPMCE but my Vista MCE struggles with ony 1GB. you could probably even get both the pvr250 and usb pvr devices working at once with a bit of fiddling too.

EPG - a small amount of fiddling to set it up will get it working on either vista or xp mce. Mostly it seems stable except for xmltvnz updates being required every now and then. a couple of the posts here link to articles which guide through installing bladerunner, iis and xmltv on vista

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lchiu7

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#75070 18-Jun-2007 19:12

Thanks. For blasing I was hoping I could use the USB UIRT (the Windows drivers work under Vista) - the question is will Vista MCE being able to control the blaster. Alternatively I think the Hauppauge WinTV USB2 MCE kit contains both IR receivers and a transmitter so I am guessing that means a blaster.

My only other issue is, I am assuming that MCE still records in a proprietary format so to burn DVD you need to transcode the content. Also does it play divx okay?

Thanks

Staying in Wellington. Check out my AirBnB in the Wellington CBD. https://www.airbnb.co.nz/h/wellycbd PM me and mention GZ to get a 15% discount and no AirBnB charges.