Road Kill on Convergence Highway: 3 Months with MCE 2005

[Duke Weber]

Wow, I'm glad to see Matt here.  This might be the best MS tech support ever.

A few questions.

1. So do only the copies of MCE that Newegg sells have all the bells, whistles & encoders? How big does an OEM have to be before they get 'em? 

2. Is there a way to clear out all the music indexed in "My Music" and start over? I moved a copy of the music collection to a local disk when there problems with the network, but now I have two of everything, only one of which is  correct.

3. Is there a way to get Scooby Doo & pals dancing to TV & radio sound (in addition to music only)?
Is there a way to overlay him on iTunes?

4. Can I use other XP computers on the same network to view MCE recorded video?

5. Is there a way to get external video into MCE?

Thanks

Duke

PS - I'd like to thank the responders on this thread for moving away from the "I feel so sorry for the poor imbecile" zone. This was supposed to be funny, or at least mildly amusing, not a tragic tale o' woe.

[Shawn Oster]

I'm sorry to hear about your trials and tribulations, as another a hobbyist I had an almost opposite experience.  I installed MCE 2005 from my MSDN subscription and the only hitch was figuring out the correct order of discs to install when it prompted me for things I didn't think I had.

I was actually *very* suprised how smoothly the whole thing went considering I installed it in a 1.4ghz machine with 256mb of RAM, a 40gig drive, a PVR-350 card and watched via a wireless 802.11g connection to my XBox Extender.  I was pretty sure it wasn't going to work at all since most people pretty much said that type of system would be too slow, that the wireless didn't provide enough bandwidth, that it was way under the specs for memory, blah, blah.  It worked *great* for about 6 months until the whole thing overheated and just died and that was my fault for ignoring the faulty fan and weird grinding noises.  I just picked up a generic refurb'd Dell for $299 that is making an awesome MCE box.  Dropped in my old PVR-350, hooked up an external 300gig drive and still going over wireless.

A few cavets though that probably make a big difference for you:

* I'm still watching 4:3 SDTV because I don't feel like paying a service for HD content.

* I convert my dvr-ms files to mpg before I burn them to DVD so I can edit out commercials so never much cared about burning from MCE

* I have a Sonos music system so I never use the music features of MCE (though I love the pictures slideshow)

* The XBox is doing all the output heavy lifting and I've heard that the quality coming out of the XBox for content is actually better than most TV Out cards.  Just something I heard, don't know how true that is.

For the record I also tried SageTV but the lack of an extender killed it for me, which was too bad because whle I was using it I loved it, especially with the MCE "skin". It recorded natively to mpg which gave me smaller files and editing/burning was faster. 

Shawn

[rampy]

For the record I also tried SageTV but the lack of an extender killed it for me, which was too bad because whle I was using it I loved it, especially with the MCE "skin". It recorded natively to mpg which gave me smaller files and editing/burning was faster. 

Shawn

Hey Shawn,  welcome to byopvr...

We definitely like to hear about good experiences and bad experiences as we learn from both, so I appreciate you taking the time to talk about your setup/experience.

One thing to note:  There's an unofficial extender for sagetv.  The hauppauge mediamvp (which can be scooped up at discount at radioshack's while supplies last for 40 bucks!) has a community created full sagetv client.

If you wanted to revist the sagetv option and can find/spring for the mediamvp might be worth a shot,eh?

rampy

[WP]

Duke,

I build many systems and have been in the computer industry for many years, and like everyone else, learn something new everyday as I do not know it all, nor ever will, and I found your posting from Matt Goyer's blog and read with curiosity at how much trouble you had.  I then found this thread from your article, and after reading your posts, particularly the following two statements:

"Yeah, I got windows media player to work, but iTunes is excellent, runs on the mac too, and so much nicer in the UI, so why bother?"

AND

"When I shut it down I see a number of those suspicious messages from mystery programs. Googling the message shows various forms of malware. It runs antivvirus and spy-bot, which keep coming up with new things to block. Wndows security is sufficiently dicey that it is a poor choice to include in a high availability appliiance."

If I have surmised correctly, most of your experience is with Mac's, correct?  I do not wish to argue about which platform is better or if Windows is a poor choice for "high availability appliances", but will point out that it seems as if you stuck that wonderful box onto a 24/7 net connection without fully protecting it, and that may be due to your lack of familiarity with Windows or a lack of concern, I am not sure which, and nor do I think it important at this point.  However, I will point out that you undertook a very hard project for someone who thinks that getting Windows Media Player to work a big deal and further, one that does not know better than to harden his Windows system to begin with.

Yes, I make my living servicing and troubleshooting MS Products, and consistently hold MS in contempt, but I must confess, that Windows XP MCE 2005 is a damn fine product and does work- and work well.  So well, that even my wife and children use it with ease (which is mostly watching TV and recording programs).  We do not have a HD TV or gigantic flat or projection screen to view our shows on- just a simple 25"GE, but the first one I built does have a nice 32" FP TV mated to it and the specifications for it, and mine can be found to my blog, at this posting:

http://whoseparanoid.blogspot.com/2005/05/one-of-my-latest-projects-ms-mce-2005.html

Oh, since the initial build, I have added an extra 1GB of RAM and a 300GB SATA HD for music and other media.

Now, after I built it, others who had already built MCE systems seemed a bit surprised that the first box worked with an ATi AIW card, and at first I did have some minor problems, but by using the standard drivers, instead of the MCE drivers, it worked flawlessly.  I have since upgraded my clients box to a newer version of the ATi Catalyst drivers and the picture quality improved even more (patching and upgrading are important).  Those who have TIVO's who have viewed the systems and compared them to their TIVO's prefer MS Windows MCE hands down.

Does this mean that I have built more; no- most went out and they did it themselves instead of purchasing a name brand MCE system.

Yes, I did install quality Anti-Virus, Anti-Spam, and Anti-Trojan software along with other techniques to harden the system, but these tools and techniques are easily acquired from the web.  And yes, like Shawn Oster, I watch on a standard TV and convert my recordings before using NERO to burn them to DVD and this is not what it seems you prefer to do, but I do think some of the problems you experienced are related to those mystery programs.

I do wish you well with your MCE 2K5 system and hope all works out for you, and I hope that you give it another try- just protect it first.

WP

[Duke]

Nope, it's protected left, right and center. Two anti-virus programs, two anti spy-ware, and a hardware firewall in the router.  As you know, the bad guys are often one step (maybe two) ahead of the updates. This is why Gates writes memos telling MSFT that security is the prime directive.

iTunes runs really well on PCs, and while I can't claim to have tried everything, it is a wicked fine way to set up a networked music system with multiple large shared libraries. And you can't beat the price.  I do have a Mac, but use it only for video editing. I'm not a Mac weinie. My experience with PCs goes back to the very first IBM model with 64K, and before that with IBM 360s, 370s, DEC PDP-8s, 10s, 11s and many other museum pieces in my misspent youth at MIT.

Again, this has not become a door jam. It works fine as a big honker PVR on a standard TV. I wouldn't recommend it to my Aunt Claire, or anyone without the inclination to update software, and the rest.
It's still a Wintel box with all the baggage that entails.

[aint skierd]

YES!...Welcom Matt!
Thanks for the insight of the Sonic engine employed by MCE. I could have dug for days and not learned that.

[teknogeek]

Duke,

As you haven't received a response to this, thought I'd give it a bash... as a little info, I have been using MCE since it's first inception (and used to 'live' on TheGreenButton.com), 2002 was atrocious, 2004 better but still no prize, 2005 has been far, far better and the future, with Vista 'Ultimate' Edition seems much rosier... I used to use myHTPC but got fed up with all the tinkering (as did my better half!) so moved over to the M$ ship, I've had 2005 running in my house now for over a year and can count the catastrophies encountered on my two hands, not bad especially for an M$ system... being UK based I have missed out on the HDTV debacle, but have done much reading up on the TV out issues, and having built more than a few MCE systems think I may be able to help (although you may not like my answers!!!) but enough preamble, here goes...

Wow, I'm glad to see Matt here.  This might be the best MS tech support ever.

A few questions.

1. So do only the copies of MCE that Newegg sells have all the bells, whistles & encoders? How big does an OEM have to be before they get 'em? 

The Sonic Encoders + other bells and whistles are available to anyone who buys the 3-pack OEM version, alternatively you could look to not so legal avenues like torrents etc for sonicencoders.msi Another alternative would be Cyberlinks MakeDVD which is an app which integrates into MCE enabling DVD Burning and gives much more varsatility than the Sonic one including choosing the compression settings to allow more than 1 hour of TV/Video to be burned to a disc...

2. Is there a way to clear out all the music indexed in "My Music" and start over? I moved a copy of the music collection to a local disk when there problems with the network, but now I have two of everything, only one of which is  correct.

If you close the MCE interface, and open up Windows Media Player and empty it's library you will be able to start from scratch... MCE uses WMP for all it's video (not TV/DVD) and audio palyback, so in turn utilises the same cumbersome meta library, I have 20,000+ mp3 tracks on my system and until MCE Rollup 2 was released the library was dead slow, now it's bearable...

3. Is there a way to get Scooby Doo & pals dancing to TV & radio sound (in addition to music only)?
Is there a way to overlay him on iTunes?

Unfortunately, afaik, Scooby Doo et al are really only WMP visualisations of sorts and therefore only work with WMP audio...

4. Can I use other XP computers on the same network to view MCE recorded video?

I have a 5 pc network in the house, a media server, 2 MCE machines and 2 XP Pro machines, they are all able to share the same TV, Video, DVD libraries, there is a patch for XP SP1 machines to view DVR-MS format files, and SP2 included this from the off...

5. Is there a way to get external video into MCE?

Ther was one OEM (Gateway) who had an app for this (it enabled game console input) but the problem is that the ehrec/ehshell processes for MCE 'grab' the TV/Video inputs and won't let go... so it is possible (if you are an OEM with the know how) but generally I would give up on the idea, there was talk many moons ago about setting one of your tuners up for analog input to the VCR channel (I seem to recall 3 or 49?), but as MCE will only allow one analogue guide and your VCR won't be in the EPG I don't see how you would be able to select that channel, even adding it manually doesn't work, believe me I've tried... my solution was to use the TV card in another PC to recode the VHS to mpg, and then store it so I can view it in MCE (or burn it with the Sonic Encoders/MakeDVD)

As a final point I would like to state that you are not the only one to be unhappy with the ATI 550, it had a terrible start to its life and I don't know if anything has been done to improve it... from my experiences, and those of many others, the only manufacturer to be seen to be fully supporting the 'convergence' HTPC thang is nVidia... their PureVideo technology has brought the TV output to an amazing level, even at HDTV levels, using one of their 6200/6600GT cards (available with passive cooling and providing component output) and their own DVD Decoder (which also handles the TV output) gives startling results, the DVD output rivals most standalone DVD players I've seen and the functionality of the decoder is great as it also has some useful tweaks for wmv/dvr-ms output preventing much of the ghosting seen from previous decoders/cards

I hope this all helps, and if you need any further advice don't hesitate to ask... oh! And XP Media Center Edition Rollup 2 was supposed to include HDTV enhancements...

Regards,

Teknogeek

If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

[Duke]

Thanks for your thoughtful and useful response.

I did find and install the sonic encoders, which in theory would have allowed me to record DVDs. That's the theory. In practice it doesn't seem to work.

I agree with you that it's OK for a M$ product on the 3rd try. I gather that it's really intended to find a home on the Xbox. On the PC, it remains a bit quirky. Its latest oddity is to break many recordings into two pieces, of odd sizes, e.g. 14 and 46 minutes for an hour program. 

There's an interesting data point on the wife & teen children acceptance factor. They all have embraced Tivo, enthusiastically. But despite being shown how to use MCE, they don't touch it. There must be some toaster-like usability threshold, and MCE falls short.

Best

Duke

[barnolde]

have you tried Audacity? It allows you to record any sound from your sound card to your speakers.
Hence you can record streaming audio. Only issue is the interface is crappy, and you would need to split clips for songs.