While I’ve not got an antenna attached for FM radio, after playing around with media center apps in both Ubuntu and Win7, I have to give the edge in media center/home theater pc stuff to Windows. TV only “sorta” worked in Ubuntu. The much ballyhooed MythTV and other options–including MythBuntu, LinucMCE, etc.–for integrating TV/Radio/Video/Music into PC use are just too much like work to get ’em functional and too rough-edged to boot, even when they do work. Kudoes for great effort on the Linux side, marks down for actual accomplishment.
On the Windows side… *sigh* I could wish everything Just Worked out of the box, but “it ain’t necessarily so” as the song goes. Windows Media Center… what can I say? I don’t like its look and feel, but that’s just my idiosyncratic response. What killed it for me was that while everything BUT one thing worked pretty well, that one thing was… setting up TV. Yep. Every Single Time I got to the channel download the thing choked. Bah.
Hauppauge’s own WinTV apps almost got TV working. Got further than Windows Media Center, at least. But still, no joy.
GBPVR looked promising but stumbled getting out the gate with Win7–“wrong OS” or some such error.
Tried several other non-solutions and then hit on MediaPortal, an outgrowth of the XBMC project. Now, XBMC isn’t suited to tuning TV or FM radio, although it does all the other media center things one might want and will (when I get another Round Toit) serve well as a media director in the old XBox I have half-modded to use it, but I wanted to tune TV (and later FM radio) on this box, so I tried MediaPortal.
MediaPortal Just Works. Oh, there’re more than a few rough edges. Scanning for channels found all the channels I wanted, and they previewed just fine in the scan, but when I tried tuning them initially, some would not tune in. (“Search the forums for solutions” time… ) The manual? Just fine. IF everything goes without a hitch. No real problem solving–or acknowledgement of issues–in the manual. Managing the settings isn’t intuitive, so a better manual would be a help.
Still, I marked “TV working on PC” off my list before my “work day” started this a.m. I’ll get into the whole “time shifting” thing later.
MediaPortal: not ready for Aunt Tilly but definitely a workable solution.
OK, back at it for a bit while dinner’s in the oven…
One lil annoyance about MediaPortal that I didn’t notice right away this a.m. is that I cannot reliably start the TV service from within MediaPortal itself (yet). *sigh* Oh, if I fire up the MP TVServer Configuration app separately, it works pretty well. But not if I don’t fire that up.
Looks like I’ll be digging into the forums tonight. Funny thing: here I am planning to spend a couple of hours fixing TV on my computer and there’s absolutely nothing interesting on TV at all, at all, tonight. American Idol? Puh-lease! *feh* “Manufactured semi-music”? Not for me, thankyouverymuch. Fiction about the origins of the universe or “How the Earth Was Made”? What?!? advocacy of Intelligent Design–“Was Made”–from the “Fiction and Conspiracy Channel” (Son&Heir’s name for the so-called “History Channel”)?
And those are the HIGH points of the programming from the 61 channels MediaPortal is tuning in thus far. *sheesh!* I’d rather watch re-runs of Mr Ed.
Dinner was nice. Garlic pepper hamburger with the works (minus cheese–cheese on a hamburger? *bleh*). Bakes oven fries with horseradish mustard (for me–ketchup for others). Baked beans. An “Oktoberfest Lager” style beer (really just an ale that has a nice, dark German lager-ish flavor, not a real lager. Heck! I could brew a genuine lager in two weeks with the warmer weather days we’ve had half that time? Not). Yum.
Anywho, all that’s left to get MediaPortal working JUST like I want is to get a decent program guide download, cos it’s now loading TV w/o the config app having to be active. No, no forum answers, just foddling around until I got a clean exit from the app to register with MediaPortal.
Interesting thing: It took an uninstall and reinstall to get the configuration app to run correctly, anyway. What was the issue with that? Simple. VMWare Server is not fully Win7 compliant and had an interfering server applet running in the background–a 16-bit app! *feh* Looks like I’ll bail on VMWare Server on Win7 for a while. Oh, well, there are other VM solutions out there…
Well, back again… MP runs like a gimpy-legged dog, but unlike Windows Media Center, it runs and tunes whether the channel scan/download works or not–and does scan and find channels pretty well, so the TV actually works. Although I have a hybrid tuner–analog/digital–the channel scanner doesn’t find the digital ATSC or QAM channels like the only other digitally tuned TV in the house (cable “basic”–cos hey! it’s only TV, you know? ;-)) Still looks like I’ll have to subscribe to a service to get programming info, and cheapskate-tightwad that I am, I really, really don’t want to do that. Still, $20 a year for SchedulesDirect isn’t bad, except… that’s 2-4 eBooks! Even more used paperbacks! etc. Heck, it’s four Sonic hamburger/fries/drink combos! *heh* And I’m not really into TV all that much, anyway.
Still… since I plan to eventually find SOME way to stream TV from this server (“backend“) to an XBox client (“frontend“) in the MBR (no, not “master boot record”–“master bedroom” *heh*), I suppose scheduling info would be helpful in PVR-ing things on this computer for playback there. We’ll see.