Windows Media Center Sadness | The Coffeehouse

fabian

Hi all,

I am a long time user of Windows Media Center (since XP beta) and I cannot imagine watching TV without it. But I am very close to finding an alternative to MCE.

In the very heart of MCE you have the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) which is a web service that updates the program guide with program listening and allows you to browse the programs and also allows me to record TV programs.

If the information in that guide is out of date you hardly can use your TV. Programs are missing; the recorder records the wrong programs; recording ends 10 minutes before the show ends and things like that.

In Denmark it seems like the EPG has not been updated this year. I cannot find EPG information for around 30% of my channels and MCE believes that Channel A is Channel B, Channel C is Channel D. I have a standard cabel program package from the largest cabel company in Denmark ... nothing special or anything like that.

Microsoft purchases the information in the EPG from some British company. That company says that it is Microsoft problem. Microsoft says that it is that company’s problem so no one seems to care and now I have all the problems.

There are people in the forum that works for Microsoft. Isn’t there someone that would be so kind to get someone to look at this issue because the current situation has turned one of Microsoft best pieces of software in to useless “#¤#%”.

Under Windows XP it was possible to bypass Microsoft’s EPG guide and use XML TV instead (some open source EPG implementation). I Microsoft cannot handle the task of updating the EPG guide please allow us to use some other EPG source.

Kind regards

Tony

PS: Still on Vista MCE since a few of my add-ons has not been updated to win7 yet. Don't know if it has become better in Win 7 ... have my doubts.

daSmirnov

I think the issues with the guide are much improved in Windows 7.

In Windows XP and Windows Vista, I would have to manually edit about half the channels myself and tell them what they mapped to in the guide. For example the guide would have listings for BBC One, but the channel name is actually something like BBC1 West, because it changes in different regions, all that sort of stuff was sorted in 7.

In my playings with Windows 7 - I think it can use the data in the actual broadcast, all the channels were correctly mapped, although since we had the digital switchover a couple of weeks back, I've had some channels double-up upon rescanning. While sorting that out I noticed an option in the channel guide editing page called 'Use listings from broadcaster'. Next time I set it up, I'll tell it not to use the EPG at all, and see if it actually is getting data from the broadcast and not from the EPG.

LeoDavidson

In reply to daSmirnov

#Jun 22nd @ 9:10 AM

Any improvements to the UI for re-ordering channels?

I like to have my channels in a logical order, and don't care which number is which channel. e.g. I want BBC1, 2, 3, 4, ITV1, 3, 4, Channel 4, 4+1, More4, Film 4, etc. instead of a the random order that the stupid UK Freeview platform assigns.

With Media Center on XP and Vista after tuning it takes so long to re-order the channels as you're forced to use the "the foot" UI which takes multiple steps per channel and requires one click per "slot" that you need the channel to move (which can be hundreds of slots with Freeview).

It's only a one-off thing* but it's something that put me off installing the Win7 beta or RC on my HTPC as I can't be bothered doing that for each reinstall.

(*In Vista. With XP I had to do it several times due to that bug where the channel data would get messed up and have to be reset.)

Oh, I don't suppose the DVD subtitle support is improved is it? I hate having to cycle through languages instead of being able to eithertoggle just English on and off or bring up a menu of languages like PowerDVD is able to. An improvement to that would make Win7 a must-buy upgrade for my HTPC.

LeoDavidson

In reply to LeoDavidson

#Jun 22nd @ 11:08 AM

I should say that Media Center rocks, despite a few bugs and imperfections! All my TV and DVD viewing is done though it.

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

In reply to LeoDavidson

#Jun 22nd @ 11:08 AM

I personally wish you could either set the zoom levels per TV channel, or that they'd add a zoom mode that simple stretches the image as big as possible while maintaining aspect ratio. Some channels here are 4:3, some are 16:9. It's kind of annoying to constantly change the zoom levels.

LeoDavidson

In reply to Bas

#Jun 22nd @ 12:26 PM

It'd be nice if the zoom mode was indicated when you start viewing stuff. Sometimes someone has (usually accidentally) changed it but it's not immediately obvious until a few minutes in.

Personally, I only mess with the zoom level (intentionally) for letterboxed stuff, which is rare now, so it doesn't particularly bother me. I can see how it'd be annoying if you wanted different zooms for different channels, though.

I remembered another annoyance: When the screensaver or monitor power-saving kicks in, paused video playback sometimes resumes or restarts. Sad This was the bane of XP MCE, then fixed in Vista, then broken again in the 2008 mid-year roll-up and only fixed partially since then (unless it's finally been fixed again in the last few weeks?).

It's annoying how long it takes (months/years/never) for bugs like that to be fixed in Windows. A crazy-long QA process is only good if it prevents all bugs; when bugs slip through, as they always will sometimes, the response time is frustrating. Gotta compromise somewhere, given the complexity and number of users and different setups, but I think it's taken too far to the extreme.