Q for those of you running MCE/Media portal

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itey

395 posts

Ultimate Geek

# 15196 9-Aug-2007 08:49

Hi,

I'm currently running XP MCE, with a hauppauge 150mce. I have sky plugged into it.

With the rugby world cup starting soon (and it being my dads birthday (I made the media pc for him

)), I thought I would get him a DVB-S card, so that he could watch/record the rugby on 3, and watch/record something else on sky.

So my question to those of you using MCE:
- were you able to get an analogue + DVB-S card working together ? How much of a pain was it to setup?

My question for those of you using media portal:
-How was it to setup ?
-Can media portal distinguish between the 2 cards (analogue + dvb-s), and realise that one card has 4 channels, and the other card has 60 ?

and lastly, what dvb-s card do you recommend ? I was thinking the nova-s

cheers

execute22

66 posts

Master Geek

# 81707 9-Aug-2007 11:16

From a mediaportal TVServer point if view : This is exactly what MediaPortal is designed to do I have 2 DVB-S cards and an analog card. Some people have 5+ cards! (No point in NZ not enough channels) But yes MediaPortal takes a bit work to set it up, Not sure how it compares to MCE I've never used it. If you going with MCE then I think the NOVA-S Plus is a good choice since it can be tricked into DVB-T mode (MCE, for some stupid reason doesn't support DVB-S!!). However if you're going to go with MediaPortal then I can recommend a skystar2 (Can get them off trademe) I've had nothing but success. Also if you're going to go with MediaPortal make sure you go with MediaPortal TVServer; the benifits far outweigh the small amount of extra work required.

http://mcraenz.googlepages.com/mppvr

itey

395 posts

Ultimate Geek

# 81742 9-Aug-2007 15:03

regarding media portal tv server;

I connect the media PC directly to the TV, ie it isn't stored away in some cupboard. Is there any real benefit using tv server?

If I were to use tvserver, I would have tvserver + the tv gui on the same computer (2.6gh/z p4, 1GB ram), would my fairly ancient specs handle it ok?

cheers

execute22

66 posts

Master Geek

# 81795 9-Aug-2007 18:36

Benifits as follows:

1.You can record even when the front end isn't running.
2.You can watch / record multiple channels on the same DVB-S card as longs as they are on the same transponder (frequency).
3.TVServer aka TVE3 is just the next version of the TV component of mediaportal. So the question is should i run an older version or a newer version? Soon enough Mediaportal will ship without TV builtin.

Yep that hardware will handle it fine :-) I run an AMD xp2500 (2.0Ghz I think) And I can happily record/watch 4+ channels at once

mailmarshall

246 posts

Master Geek

# 81827 9-Aug-2007 22:00

Execute22 have you used GB-PVR? How does that compare to Mediaportal Server?

allstarnz

1693 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

# 81866 10-Aug-2007 09:37

execute22: Benifits as follows:

1.You can record even when the front end isn't running.
2.You can watch / record multiple channels on the same DVB-S card as longs as they are on the same transponder (frequency).
3.TVServer aka TVE3 is just the next version of the TV component of mediaportal. So the question is should i run an older version or a newer version? Soon enough Mediaportal will ship without TV builtin.

Yep that hardware will handle it fine :-) I run an AMD xp2500 (2.0Ghz I think) And I can happily record/watch 4+ channels at once

Which program is this? Mediaportal?

Recording two programmes from the same transponder at once would be quite useful.

execute22

66 posts

Master Geek

# 81953 10-Aug-2007 19:49

allstarnz:
execute22: Benifits as follows:

1.You can record even when the front end isn't running.
2.You can watch / record multiple channels on the same DVB-S card as longs as they are on the same transponder (frequency).
3.TVServer aka TVE3 is just the next version of the TV component of mediaportal. So the question is should i run an older version or a newer version? Soon enough Mediaportal will ship without TV builtin.

Yep that hardware will handle it fine :-) I run an AMD xp2500 (2.0Ghz I think) And I can happily record/watch 4+ channels at once

Which program is this? Mediaportal?

Recording two programmes from the same transponder at once would be quite useful.

Yep :-) MediaPortal TV Server.
Not the TV functionality built into medaportal though you have to use TVServer and the TV Server Plug-in for MediaPortal.

If you have 2 DVB-S cards you can record / watch all freeview channels at once!

Haven't used GBPVR. I've heard both good and bad things. For me MediaPortal wins because it's open source and has a strong community. :-) Also it's developed in c#.Net which I like to dabble in so I can write my own plug-ins easily (in saying that though I believe GBPVR also has a good open API for plug-in development)