Comments on: Vista Media Center arrives today, what to do first?

By: Ben Drawbaugh

Ben Drawbaugh — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:47:38 +0000

Yeah Logmein is crazy easy to setup and works great, but it is a little slow across the LAN. VLC is faster, but I haven’t figured out how to make it auto load in vista.

By: Brad Linder

Brad Linder — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:34:30 +0000

Yeah, for the most part the plugins are SD… I was just trying to think of some off the top of my head that I actually use.

I’m not sure how LogMeIn compares to RDP/VNC because honestly, it’s just worked so well for me that I haven’t really bothered with much else. I did set up a VNC server for a few days a while back, but it took longer to log in using UltraVNC than it did using LogMeIn, so I scrapped it.

By: » Day one with Vista Media Center » Ben Drawbaugh

» Day one with Vista Media Center » Ben Drawbaugh — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:15:08 +0000

[...] successfully completed everything I set out to do yesterday, and more, and am feeling more confident that this solution will be able to replace my [...]

By: Ben Drawbaugh

Ben Drawbaugh — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:18:14 +0000

I don’t have ultimate, and I didn’t want to spend any extra just for that one feature — remember this is a DVR to me, not a computer.

I don’t need the firewall, it is already behind my home firewall and I use WPA to secure my wifi, so I only have to worry about people who plug-in, which is not very likely. But mostly because they are known to cause hard to troubleshoot issues.

Thanks for the tip!

By: Richard

Richard — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:44:37 +0000

Vista Ultimate does support RDP, I use remote desktop and the Mac RDP client from my wife’s MacBook all the time.
Why disable the firewall?
There’s an option in the Media Center UI to auto start login etc. see http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/9b7a9095-fc10-4ff3-9cb0-0f7394105db91033.mspx

By: Ben Drawbaugh

Ben Drawbaugh — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:54:33 +0000

Thanks for the tips, is logmein faster than VNC? It seems VNC is slower than RDP.

I’ll check out those plug-ins too, but honestly I don’t listen to the radio, sometimes talk radio, but the stuff I listen to isn’t usually available online. As for Yougle and NetflixMC, aren’t those SD only? You know the tagline of my life/blog. DVRMS toolbox I’ve played with before, maybe it’ll help me import my recordings from TiVoToGo.

By: Brad Linder

Brad Linder — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:43:26 +0000

You might want to look into http://www.logmein.com as an alternative to VNC. I’ve been using it on my VMC machine for a while now, and it does the trick. Plus you can login from any computer with a web browser.

You’ll also want to look into media center plugins once you’ve got the system up and running. The one I use the most is RadioTime, because I listen to a lot of online radio streams, but you might also want to check out Yougle, NetflixMC, and some others, as well as DVRMS toolbox.