After having spent weeks pulling my hair out over Mediaportal Ive decided to give W7MC a bash.

Ive just downloaded the 90 trial of enterprise and if its all good, Ill probably end up getting the family pack and update all my machines at home.

Anyway, a few questions whilst I work my way through the many forums. This is a fresh install on a separate drive. W7 installed with no fuss and I ran the windows update until there was nothing left. All Ive done since is load the latest Haupaugge drivers for my HVR-4000 as the W7 ones were a couple of years old.

1. Is it necessary for me to load one of ffdshow/ccc or shark codec parks to run mkv's ? For some reason I thought W7 now had the necessary codecs to handle it out of the box. Or am I thinking about freeviewHD ?

2. My music sits on a server and teh music library in W7MC is very slow to navigate. Is it because its on a network ? The drive sits in the same server as my movies drive and there is no lag with that library. Both machines and routers are gigabit enabled.

3. The tv channels keeps appearing and disappearing in the guide. I ran the initial scan and only got the four mediaworks channels. I had a 'fiddle' with the aerial and now get the TVNZ channels but initially had a very poor reception. The settings told me it was down to 18% on most of them. I pulled the aerial out and put it back in again and now all channels are at 96% and above, but the TVNZ channels are horribly pixelated, but the mediaworks channels are fine.

I thought W7MC was ok for freeviewHD out of the box. now.

4. Is there an equivalent to Mediaportals tv series ? I see there is media browser but assumed that was for movies only.

5. Is it possible to manually enter the tv details so I can scan for SBS ? Havent looked into this yet, but I assume its possible.

Thats about it for now, Im off to scan the forums to see what I can find out. I want to keep the install as 'lite' as possible so dont really want to be installing codec packs etc if I dont need to.

My priority on this is to just get something which works. After five years of playing with Mediaportal Ive just had enough. I dont have the time anymore to sit in front of it for hours on end teaking every little bit and want to just sit back and watch some tv instead now !

Thanks for any information or pointers to guides which would help me out.

Cheers