Snakin' All Over

My new pet snake is installed, working, and really flies. Deathly silent, yet it instantly responds to every command. It's like somebody speeded up the world. Or at least speeded up my television. And, yes, this is a follow-on from last week's rambling post about our new "Mamba" Media Center box from QuietPC.com. In fact, even the title continues the not-quite-a-song theme.

The long and sometimes tortuous setup and installation is over. It's nestled neatly in the TV cabinet, and after a few days use it really does seem to be a superb machine - and a significant upgrade from the old I-US Media Center box. OK so most of the setup hassle was my fault (more later) because I wanted it to be on my local domain and integrated with the network. It needs to have remote Event Log access turned on, my "failed recording" monitor service installed, a custom screensaver, auto logon, and a few other tweaks.

What surprised me, though, was the benefits from the new TV cards. The old box had only one PCI slot, whereas most modern tuner cards are PCI-E only these days so I had to choose between terrestrial (DVB-T) and satellite (DVB-S). And none supported HD. The new Mamba has a dual DVB-T2 (HD) and a dual DVB-S2 (HD) card. And, amazingly, Media Center accepted both, and tuned both of them, so that we now get all of the terrestrial and the satellite channels. You can still record from only two tuner instances concurrently (either on the same tuner card or one from each tuner card) and watch a previously recorded program at the same time. But it's wonderful to get back some old favorite channels that aren't on satellite, and to finally be able to get all the HD channels.

Of course, the actual tuning process is still a pain, and really does need to come closer to the capabilities offered by ordinary TVs that can detect broadcast update signals and automatically retune channels that move around. Media Center has the facility to add new channels, but it never seems to fully work. In the past, when they moved channels around, I had to do a complete re-setup of all the channels - which means getting back the 500+ I don't want and had removed from the guide, and having to go through the laborious process of finding listings for channels where the channel name and the listing name are slightly different. Though maybe in the Windows 8 version of Media Center it will work better. No doubt I'll find out in time.

The final setup process was made more infuriatingly slow by a couple of unexpected hitches. For some reason, Media Center no longer has an option to start automatically when the system restarts from cold or when a user logs on. I have no idea why this option was removed, and it seems from a web search that lots of people are annoyed about it and have found an equally large number of kludges to fix it, including creating a profile and using a batch file in the \ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup folder. However, another solution seems to be obvious. Create a scheduled task that runs at logon and executes the file %windir%\ehome\ehshell.exe, and set the taskbar to auto-hide.

But the most annoying quirk was that my custom screensaver that displays details of photos never appeared. All I got was a nausea-inducing scrolling, panning, and zooming screenfull of black and white photos with odd ones occasionally appearing in colour - despite the Lock screen slideshow being turned off and my screensaver properly configured in Windows Personalization settings. I played with this for ages before finally searching the web for solutions. Most of which are totally confusing because the say to turn on the slideshow and then turn off the option to "show the lock screen instead of turning off the screen".

I even followed the advice on one site to use gpedit to disable the Lock screen altogether, but it made absolutely no difference. After I finally gave up and went back to configuring Media Center I found the screensaver option within the Media Center interface. Which is helpfully turned on by default. The Lock screen slideshow I was trying to get rid of wasn't actually the Lock screen at all. No wonder I had problems! After turning the Media Center screensaver off my own screensaver works fine. Doh!

I'm still not sure I'd recommend Media Center as a replacement for a normal TV to my non-technical friends, but it really is a superb system if you know something about computers, are prepared to fiddle with it, and accept the few shortcomings such as the usual need for updates and other maintenance tasks. Even the smart TVs I've seen can't compete with the full range of capabilities and flexibility of a powerful computer driving a big wall screen.

But I have to run. Now that I've got the "Dave" channel back again, there's ten episodes of "The Professionals" from 1978 I need to watch...

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2014
  Thanks for sharing your experience Alex! You're right in saying that Media Center isn't super-smooth at detecting changed channel frequencies. My own Media Center seems to randomly find new channels which I almost always have to then edit out of the Guide (because they're pay-only or just plain uninteresting).Occasionally I do need to add new channels manually and for the satellite channels I use the following page which is a godsend in telling you what frequency etc. to type in. This saves doing a full scan which, as you rightly say, often brings back many hundreds of channels that you previously edited out.en.kingofsat.net/tv-28.2E.php
• Anonymous
  June 24, 2014
  Thanks Glen! This will be extremely useful.