Ben Drawbaugh

The embargoed lifted this morning on a device I’ve been waiting since I discovered HD about 4 years ago — well almost. As long as I can remember, we’ve had RF modulators to make our lives simple, I remember my original Atari had one, you just plugged it inline with your coax going into your TV and you were off enjoying games. Of course NTSC RF-modulators have pretty bad picture quality and most game consoles today don’t use them, but they are still very useful for sending TV around your house on the existing coax. The problem is that if you think SD quality of RF-modulators is bad in the SD world, don’t even try to compare it to HD.

But finally the first consumer QAM RF-modulator is coming. Why is this so cool? Well lets say you want to watch your HD TiVo in every room of your house, but don’t want to buy another TiVo or pay the monthly fee. You could connect a device like this — but with component inputs — to your TiVo and then in any room of the house tune to channel 3 and now you’ll have HD with AC3 sound. You could even watch it on every TV in the house at the same time.

But lets take it to the next level, you could have a few of these and put all your gear in same room  and then use the existing coax in the house to watch whatever you want on any TV you want. Blu-ray is on channel 3, HD TiVo on 4, VMC on 5 etc. Sure you can do this now, but it requires you to run expensive cables to each TV in the house and have devices to receive the signal at each TV. Not to mention have an expensive matrix switch and remotes to control it.

The biggest problem with the Zv now is that it only accepts VGA input and works with QAM instead of ATSC.  Although many TVs have QAM tuners, the number isn’t nearly as many as those that have ATSC — it’s required by law after all. But the lack of component input and the lack of audio inputs other than USB is the real kicker. This makes the box unable to do exactly what I want it to do, but I’m sure what I’m after wont’ be far behind.

Before I get into the good stuff that backs up my opinion, let me give you some background. I’ve used Windows my entire life and although I preferred DOS to Windows 3.1, I’ve always been comfortable with Windows. When I really started getting into computers around 2000, I started to explore Linux and in the process of using Linux on my laptop (Gentoo) for years, I started to despise many things about the way Microsoft conducted its business and because of the fact that the UI didn’t seem to keep up with the times — ie, Vista has almost the same task bar as Windows 95. The irony of course is that I earn my living as an MCSE, so while I still don’t prefer Windows on my computers, I recognize that there are a few problems, like corporate email, that Microsoft simply has the best solution for. As for TiVo, my first DVR was a ReplayTV, but after I discovered HDTV 2003, I was quick to pick up a DirecTiVo HD for the low low price of $1000. So having been anti-Microsoft for a few years and a TiVo fanboy for almost five, enjoying a MS product so much more than TiVo, feels very backward to me.

Price
Believe it or not, TiVo cost me much more than my Vista Media Center PC with CableCARD. Of course this isn’t apples to apples, and I owned the more expensive version of the HD TiVo, but looking back I had $2302 invested for a two room system with 750GB of storage over 2 years. While at the same time VMC cost me $1900 — but that includes a Blu-ray drive and software. Of course if you were willing to settle for the two TiVo HDs, then you could get a two room setup for $1100. The big difference between the two in price is the service, TiVo gets $300, per box, for three years, Microsoft doesn’t charge for guide data at all, no matter how many TVs you have.

Multiroom
The multiroom capabilities of Vista Media Center are easily the biggest upgrade for me over TiVo. The up front cost to add a room is $250 for both, but again TiVo will cost you an additional $300 every three years. But price isn’t everything and the reason why VMC still out paces TiVo is because TiVo can’t stream shows between units and it can’t combine the tuners from all the TiVos in the house to automatically resolve recording conflicts. Of course with the TiVo you get another two tuners for every one you add, but I don’t think most people need as many tuners as they need ways to watch enjoy content, so the added $7 a month, plus CableCARD rental fees, just aren’t worth it.

Pictures and Music
Over the past few years I’ve had about four devices that would allow me to look at my photos and listen to my music collection on my HDTV, and while they’ve all been pretty good at music, pictures seem to be tricky. The TiVo isn’t bad at pictures, but it isn’t great — the worst part is the super small thumbnails and the TiVo Desktop that must run on your computer and who’s OS X version won’t serve up HD pictures. The VMC picture and music experience isn’t perfect, but it’s the best I’ve tried. All I had to do was copy my iPhoto Originals and iTunes Library folders over to corresponding folders on the VMC, and I was enjoying my content. The biggest bummer is that a lot of metadata doesn’t make it over, but if you really want a truely seamless experience, you can pick up MCE Tunes. But even without it, I find myself listening to music and browsing through my pictures more than ever and that includes with my Apple TV — but I will say that the music experience on the ATV is better, but without the rest of the cool stuff on one box it isn’t worth switching inputs.

Bonus
If I wanted to list all the things that VMC could do with add-ons and registry hacks that TiVo can’t — like play Blu-ray movies — I’d never have time to do anything else. Seriously, the sky is the limit and as hard as it might be for some to believe, Microsoft’s open architecture and development kit, really makes it easy for anyone to make VMC do whatever you want. Of course when you consider the amount of time it takes to set everything up — assuming you don’t buy a Nieveus or the like — all the bonus features you forfiet on the TiVo, you can almost be made up for with ease of setup.

DVR
For me at least, the main purpose of switching was to have a better DVR expereince, and while there are some die hard TiVo fans who will refuse to believe this, Vista Media Center offers the best DVR exerience availble today. But I don’t mean to say it is perfect, in fact there are few things that Microsoft can learn from TiVo, but there are more things TiVo can learn.

The Good

• The list of recorded shows is so much more enjoyable than TiVo, sure thumbnails aren’t super useful, but the vertical view is nice, and the grid of show thumbnails is just so cool. Combine this with the smooth transitions and you have a UI that makes you really notice how old and unresponsive the TiVo UI is.
• I really love the fact that you can watch a recorded program or live TV while you work in the menus or the guide, but for those times when you don’t want to watch anything, the stop button comes in handy. As if having the ability to watch TV while taking care of a few DVR housekeeping tasks isn’t cool enough, the fact that the UI is transparent in many cases, is just so cool it’s hard to explain.
• The scrub bar includes the time, so you can hit one button to see how much longer the show is and the current time.
• I really have to say, mini guide rocks. Why TiVo doesn’t have a mini guide, I’ll never understand, I guess it’s for the same reason as TiVo doesn’t show you what is set to record (or not) in the guide.
• The conflict resolution is really cool, it’s hard to explain exactly why it’s better than TiVo, but I just find it’s much easier to choose which shows I want to record — also, there are not many conflicts when you have four tuners.
• Default recording preferences, seriously, how can TiVo not have this? How did I get by configuring that I wanted to keep all recordings until I delete, on every single season pass for the past 5 years of my life? Being able to set defaults, combined with one touch recording (seriously, one press) makes the task of scheduling recordings so drop dead simple that maybe I won’t have to setup all my wife’s shows for her anymore — yeah I know, I’m dreaming.
• It’s nice to be able to preview each channel when you’re editing which channels will be in the guide, but you should be able to turn it off, ’cause it it can really slow it down. You should be able to direct dial a channel, finding channel 852 to remove, can be a lot of page downs.
• Movie info is really cool, too bad it isn’t easier to use with non-VOB movies.
• If watching a program live that will eventually be interrupted by a recording, there is an ! mark and a note, to let you know — nice touch.
• Repeats are very clearly marked in the guide, no need to dig through and find the original air date like TiVo.
• Ability to customize just about anything, like how long the scrub bar stays up for example.

The Bad

• Clear should delete the selected item anywhere in the UI, like in the “series” menu.
• There should be a deleted items instead of confirming to delete all the time.
• When you cancel a series in the “series” menu, it should return you to the closest series of the one you just deleted instead of taking you to the top again. It is annoying to delete series number 25, only to be returned back to number 1.
• There should be a preference that allows you to disable the fact that when navigating menus and you hit the bottom of a list, your selection becomes the current playing window — but you do get used to this.
• “Wish Lists” are called a custom “Keyword” recording and are very similar to TiVo, but not quite as powerful. Haven’t figured out how to only keyword search one channel and HD needs to be a category.
• Don’t seem to be able to change the size of the current playing window? Seems small on my TV.
• Should be able to create your own guide “categories” so my wife and I could have our favorite channels listed.
• I miss skip to tick on my TiVo, but the super fast forward is an okay replacement.
• If you exit VMC completely before stopping the playback of a recording, it doesn’t remember where you left off on the recording that is playing.
• VMC takes longer to launch Live TV from the main menu, this is something TiVo does almost instantly. VMC also takes longer to start playing back a recording, luckily almost all of the UI elements are more responsive than TiVo. MS should consider adding a DVR mode that would record all the tuners all the time and prioritize Live TV etc, to speed this up and to keep a buffer of all the channels.
• Can’t edit much about a single recording in a series, only ‘keep until.’
• Should be able to list Series recordings by date, instead of just either by series or date.
• No resolution pass through, so all video is converted to say 1920x1080p60.
• Grid guide should be able to take up the entire screen.
• Info should just show info instead of a menu, but it doesn’t take long to get used to hitting an arrow button instead to access the awesome mini guide.
• Can’t go back and view what you missed in the guide.
• No list view guide. Chris told me how to access the list guide.
• Should be able to control the buffer when switching tuners, unlike TiVo you sometimes — not sure why it’s not always — lose it on one tuner.
• Thumbnails should be 16×9 instead of letter boxed.

Conclusion
As fantastic as my Vista Media Center experience has been, it isn’t prefect. Other than the defective ATI tuner I received (which was replace 3 days later by Dell) I think that the setup will be overwhelming for most. Even if you don’t connect the VMC directly to your HDTV, there is still a considerable amount of setup that I wonder if less experienced computers users would be able to accomplish. That being said, if you’ve ever built your own computer, then you won’t have any problems — or if you aren’t scared to call support — for me this isn’t a problem, as I find this tinkering very enjoyable. In fact one of my biggest problems is that I can’t stop tinkering, which has led me to break my setup in a few cases. Now that I have everything setup, I plan to leave things be, create an image and enjoy.

To anyone out there dealing with a cable DVR, or find that you wish you could do more on your HDTV than TiVo allows, I wouldn’t hesitate to upgrade to Vista Media Center. The Media Center product has come a long way over the past few years, but I can honestly say it is ready for prime time and am confident it will only get better.

List of series recordings, no jokes about my wife’s favorite shows and yes they are higher priority than mine.

Scrub bar with total length, current position and time.

Shows I have recorded in the small view. The missing thumbnails are shows I transfered from my Series3. The samll window in the bottom is currently playing and in this case is playing a recording.

This mini guide can be viewed during Live TV or when watching a recorded program, and can be navigated by using the arrow keys.

Here I’m accessing the main menu while watching a recorded program.

Viewing the transparent guide while watching a previously recorded program — no it doesn’t force you to Live TV like TiVo. It is very easy to see my series recordings with the multiple red circles, if there were conflicts, there’d be an ! mark on the show.

This is the option DVD Library feature that shows my ripped DVDs and recorded movies. You can also see the show continuing to play in the small windows on the bottom left.

I sure hope Microsoft sends Ed Bott a nice Christmas card ’cause once again he’s helped out a fellow blogger on their quest to making Vista work. He left a comment in my original post, that helped me realize that configuring Vista’s Power setting to never turn off my display was a bad idea, because our favorite feature (HDCP) would break the output when it failed to handshake with a device that is off. So I set the Power settings to turn off the display after 5 minutes which makes the ATI driver stop trying to do the HDCP handshake when my Plasma is off. So now when I get up in the morning I’m staring at a black screen.

Unfortunately this isn’t my only problem. My ATI CableCARD tuner isn’t always working properly. Eventually it starts to macroblock very badly and sometimes even the entire screen turns green and freezes. I’ve found that the cure is to shut down the PC, unplug the ATI tuner for 30 seconds, plug it back in until the cable light turns green and then turn the XPS 420 back on. This buys me about one to eight hours of trouble free operation before the problem comes back. It starts out bearable, but then gets completely unwatchable, all the while the ATSC tuners continue to work perfectly.

After finding this helpful Microsoft page, I called Verizon and asked them to send my tuner an “init” and after a few minutes on the phone the helpful rep confirmed that my CableCARD tuner was communicating properly with their network and was everything was good to go as far as they were concerned. This ‘init’ made my tuner work perfectly again too, but by the time I got home the issue was back. Later that evening I was chatting with a friend who reminded me that when you buy an XPS system the support staff is in the US. So I gave them a call and although I don’t feel like they did a very thorough job of troubleshooting, they offered to send me a replacement. Unfortunately they said I had to call another department with my case number to get it, and you guessed it, that department was closed.

Although I don’t have much faith that a replacement tuner is the answer, I don’t have a better idea, so we’ll see how that goes, I just hope it doesn’t take another three weeks to receive it.

**Update** I received the replacement and it works perfect!

It started off bad because it took me a few hours before I could even get the tuner added to my setup, but after I got it working, I thought I everything was cool and wrote up a nice little post about it. At the time everything did seem cool except the occasion drop out, which I assumed I could fix by checking my coax connections etc. But since then, not only has the occasion drop out not gone away despite spending a few hours messing with my connections — the same exact connections that work perfectly with a Series3 TiVo — but every single morning since I woken up to a system that is not operational. Then even after I remotely kill the process, I still have to reboot the system and the ATI CableCARD tuner to make the signal watchable.

First some background, skip this paragraph if you want to go straight to the problem. I’ve had a Series3 Tivo since the day they were announced and have had it working with two different providers using both SA and Moto CableCARDs. I’ve had a total of 10 CableCARD tuners installed without ANY issues and the wiring in my house is brand new. Speaking of the coax, it’s all high grade RG6, with good splitters (there are only two) and I use compression fittings.

When I removed one of my Series3 TiVos to replace it with the ATI CableCARD tuner, I took the exact same coax cable and CableCARD that has been serving me well without any issues for 14 months and used them for the ATI tuner. So I’m pretty confident that I don’t have a bad CableCARD or a signal problem. But just in case I tried both CableCARDs from my TiVo and double checked all my coax connections. I even hooked up an old attenuator that I used to use on my old HR10 TiVo, which only made things worse, so I don’t think the signal is too hot.

Anyways, on to the issue. I originally posted this at The Green Button, but since no one has really responded, I’ll try again here before throwing the thing out the window. Ever since I installed my CableCARD tuner every morning when I turn the TV on after being off all night, there is a just a black screen (TV indicates it’s receiving a 1080p signal). If I hit the buttons on the remote, I can hear the sounds and the extenders continue to work fine, but if I get out the mouse and keyboard I can’t see the cursor and it doesn’t seem to respond to any keyboard presses (not even ctrl+at+delete or ctrl+shift+esc). If I telnet in and kill ehshell.exe, it returns me to my desktop, then I re-launch VMC that then works properly, except all the CableCARD channels (ATSC channels are fine) have unwatchable pixelation (yes I checked every channel I watch, about 20). If I reboot and unplug the ATI CableCARD tuner for a second, then all the channels work fine — aside from the occasional drop out.

In the System log, I see this event every 2 seconds from some time after I turned off the display, until the time I killed ehshell.exe.

Log Name: System
Source: atikmdag
Date: 4/20/2008 9:06:46 AM
Event ID: 52233
Task Category: CPLIB
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: VMC1
Description:
CPLIB :: General – Failed to authenticate output protection

My setup is pretty much a out of the box Dell XPS 420.
Intel Q6600 quad core.
3GB Ram
500GB SATA HDD
ATI Radeon HD3650 via HDMI @ 1080p60 (tried both Catalyst 8.3 and 8.4)
Pioneer PDP-6010FD
1 ATI CableCARD tuner
1 VBox PCI ATSC tuner
1 HDHomeRun dual ATSC tuner.

Since this is obviously completely unacceptable, if I can’t get it resolved, no matter how much I enjoy the VMC UI and extender architecture, I’ll just have to go back to using my TiVos.

**Update**  The issue was resolved by setting Windows Power Setting to turn off the display after 5 minutes, even though Windows isn’t capable of turning off the display this appears to tell the ATI driver to stop trying to verify the HDCP handshake.

DHL delivered my ATI CableCARD tuner about 3:30 this afternoon, so it was hard to be productive at work knowing I had a new new toy at home and to make matters worse, I had to stay late due to some issues. After I got home it took me about 45 minutes to unpack the tuner, plug it in, check the firmware version and configure VMC to use it. It wasn’t the most straight forward configuration and when I was all done, it didn’t work. The video was more blocks than video. So later I went back to it and proceeded to monkey around with it for an hour or so until I finally got it working.

Here’s the interesting part. I used one of the CableCARDs from my wife’s TiVo, which was activated on the TiVo. And what do you know, it works fine. No I didn’t re-pair, and no I don’t understand why it works. I got the idea because the last time I paid $50 to RMA my Wife’s Series3 — happened twice in 14 months — I didn’t have to re-pair the CableCARDs.

Now that it is working, it’s working great. Channel changing isn’t as fast as I would’ve wanted, but it’s about the same as the Series3. The good part is that the VMC mini-guide makes it easier to channel surf.

As for TiVo vs VMC, I have a full post coming, but rest assured VMC is better, but requires quite an investment in time to set things up.

Since it appears that no one really knows which is the best Media Center Extender, I’ll have to figure it out myself. This is a good thing, as I really like doing this type of thing.

As hard as I tried yesterday, I wasn’t able to order a D-Link DSM-750 for less than $300 yesterday, and after learning that my local Circuit City had the Linksys DMA2100 in stock for $249, I went ahead and picked one up. At the same time, I got an email from a representative of D-Link who’d saw my post yesterday and offered to send me a DSM-750 for review! So once I get it, I plan to rent an Xbox 360 and do a full head to head review for Engadget HD. But in the meantime, here’s my initial impressions of the Linksys.

Setup was easy — although it did take like 5 tries before it’d link up with VMC — but despite the unit being about 15 feet from my 802.11G AP and without any walls in the way, the network tuner indicated I didn’t have enough throughput for HD. So I found a patch cable and used the CAT5 drop I already had behind the TV. The remote isn’t nearly as bad as Chris L lead me to believe it was, but programming was really weird — love the fact the vol, mute and pwr is programmable though– and the LiveTV, RecordedTV etc, buttons on the top are a little on the small side. The UI is very responsive and down right fast, but I’m surprised how drab it looks without the animations etc. Overall I have to say Microsoft did a great job — yeah, I said it — integrating the extenders. I’m very impressed with the experience and the tuner conflict resolution, as well as the way the two TVs don’t step on each other. Nice job guys. The box is completely silent and the remote does work good; in fact my only hardware complaint is the super bright blue led, that actually woke me out of bed in the middle of the night in search of some black tape to cover it with.

To give you an idea of how well this thing worked out of the box is that I actually set it up in about 30 minutes and my wife was watching her shows on it the same night. And just like most others, my wife is my toughest user. I should have the final part today as I expect my CableCARD tuner, so my migration from TiVo to VMC is nearly completion.

With my CableCARD tuner coming tomorrow, I’m packing up one of my Series3 TiVos to sell, and I’m looking for a Media Center Extender. All three options are about the same price, but right now I’m leaning towards the D-Link DSM-750 even though it’s the most expensive at $315. But I’m tempted to save some money and pick up the Linksys DMA2100 for $250, but Chris L’s review has me thinking twice. The real problem is that no one has reviewed the D-Link. The Xbox 360 is $300 after you buy a remote, and although I understand it makes a great extender and also plays games, I’ve had one and the noise really bothered me. Plus I hear the IR receiver on it is troublesome.

Just like I’ve come to expect from Dell, it has shipped my order much faster than promised. It’s a good thing too, as 2 months was way too much to ask for. In the end it only took two weeks, which isn’t that bad. A few others at The Green Button had to wait a month, but it appears everyone there who’s been waiting, has had their order shipped. Also, I’m glad I ordered when I did, as the price is about $50 more now than it was when I ordered.

Just couldn’t wait to get home Friday night so I could continue on with my Vista Media Center project — I know right, I’m so cool. I did take two hours off to watch We Own the Night on Blu-ray with my wife, but the rest of the night I hacked away on my VMC and I made a few strides.

First I installed Acronis True Image to do full image backup to the existing Dell recovery partition. Right now I’m doing it with the 15-day trial, but might pay the $50 since it supports imaging while Windows is running and will also do incremental imaging. I also finally remembered I already had a BT mouse, and I’m happy to report my Mighty Mouse is working with VMC nicely — yes I actually like the Mighty Mouse. Still no keyboard though, but thanks to Patrick’s tip in my last post, I have a very workable solution, while I wait for the relatively expensive BT keyboard (diNevo Mini) Grant told me about, to come down in price.

The last thing I did Friday night was to discover a way to transfer all my TiVo recordings to my Media Center. First I setup TiVo Desktop 2.6 to download all my shows to D:\TiVo — including new shows from cable channels — and then installed the fully functional trial of VideoReDo, and finally I installed and configured TVAP, which automatically watches my TiVo directory for the shows that have finished automatically transfered from my TiVo, then converts them into DVR-MS files and moves them to my Recorded TV directory. The coolest part is that all the meta data is there and fwd/rwd works, but for whatever reason the thumbnails don’t.

I got up Saturday morning, made a Latte, and took a nice walk with the family. Then when I got home I continued to fight with my IR system, I discovered that if I electrical tape the flasher to the to the sensor and move it away from the other flashers, it works better; but it is still annoying to use. I spent the next few hours rewiring all my equipment. I do a lot of testing in my rack and I never clean it up as I go, plus I used to have DirecTV and I left all the wires there even though I’d removed the H20. So after that was done — what a relief — I went on to reprogram my MainLobby Home Automation controller with a new macro for watching the VMC. I had to disabled sleep with the remote so I could use the IR signal from the button to kick off the macro. I still need to figure out how to do the volume and power, might build some logic into my macro, might replace the remote — more on that later.

So now that all that was done, I spent some more time adding all my family’s series recordings — almost 30 in all — and discovered I had a few conflicts and was reminded why I needed a CableCARD tuner. Then I remembered I had an old PCI V-Box Cat’s Eye ATSC tuner from another project and slapped it in. I tried to use MCE Tuner Extender, but it wouldn’t work, so I added an old USB MCE analog tuner I had — yes I have tons of crap like this all over the place — and after a few minutes fighting with the unintuitive interface, I had all four tuners working. After this, I was having problems updating guide data and thanks to Process Explorer it appeared the files where in use by WebGuide, so I stopped the services and was able to update, so I just removed the plug-in for now.

While I was wiring everything up, I discovered my ATI DVI to component adapter didn’t work on my ATI Radeon HD3650 video card, and based on the documentation, I came to the conclusion that component wasn’t an option. For those who don’t know, the reason I prefer component is because I have a Key Digital 8×3 component matrix switcher, and an HDMI matrix switch costs way too much — not to mention I like to make my own cables. I do have one 35-foot HDMI cable ran to my 60-inch Pioneer Kuro, but I use it for Blu-ray since component can’t carry 1080p24. So this revelation motivated me to sell my BD-P1000 on Amazon and buy a Lite-On Blu-ray player from Newegg for $129. I also took advantage of ArcSoft’s April Fools day sales — ends today enter code Fool08 at checkout — and got Total MediaTheater for $45. The Lite-On drive comes with Power DVD, but it doesn’t integrate with VMC very well.

Now that everything was working, I finally took some time to watch a few shows, some recorded on the VMC, some converted from the TiVo, I’m experiencing some judder, but not sure why or how yet. Will keep an eye on it, may try switching the output to 1080i.

I also spent some time tweeking the audio settings of ffdshow so it’d pass DTS, but then I was having some choppy playback on a few 1080p mkv files with DTS — you didn’t think I went without Paramount and Universal movies in HD did you? — so I switched it back to decode and re-encode as AC3.

I still have no idea where this thing is going to live, it’s just so big. Right now it’s on the top of my rack and looks like it might fall off at any minute, I may just have to wait until I sell my TiVos to find it a permanent home.

I also saw a deal on the Harmony One which I’ve had my eye on since CES, so I ordered one. I figure the worst case I’ll just sell it. But best case it’ll fix my IR repeater problem and make it easier for me to control the volume and power of my system since the VMC remote Dell included isn’t programmable. I used to have a Harmony 880 and I hated it, but after playing with the One at CES, I quickly realized they’d fixed all my gripes, but I was still not willing to pay $250, so it appears my wait is over.

I 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 TiVos, but I’ll wait until I receive my CableCARD tuner to pass final judgment.

I ended up reinstalling Vista, because it was quicker than repartitioning and uninstall all the crapware, AV, firewalls etc. Then I installed all the updates including SP1. Next I installed both Logmein and Ultra VNC — because logmein is very slow locally — but I’m having problems getting VNC to launch at boot and I also had to disabled uac, since it was interfering with VNC. Later I plan to try an RDP hack. I then configured it to login automatically and start Media Center. I had some trouble configuring the display because although the video card properly set the HDMI output to 1080p, it also had underscan turned on by default. I’m sure this is helpful for some, but I prefer to use the “dot by dot” feature of my TV to disable overscan.

I also configured my HDHomeRun for ATSC and scheduled a bunch of recordings, everything works great, but it could change channels a little faster — hopefully the CableCARD tuner will. The biggest problem I’m having is with the remote, it doesn’t seem to work well with my Xantech IR distribution system, just like my AppleTV does. It is working, just not real well, which brings me to my biggest problem; I need a wireless keyboard/mouse. VNC is not working out, and having the keyboard in the a different room is nearly impossible. I’m going to be on the hunt for a nice Media Center Keyboard with integrated mouse, preferably Bluetooth, but IR will work too.

After I got the basics up and running I went out and installed ffdshow and haali so I could playback additional codecs like mkv. This was easy to setup thanks to Chris L, and is passing Dolby Digital and DTS nicely. The last thing I did was copy the contents of my “originals” folder from my iPhoto library and the contents of the “music” folder from my iTunes collection. Those copies finished this morning, so we’ll see how VMC deals with them, and how much work it will require to make those features usable. I may just end up continuing to use my Apple TV for music. I also want to figure out what the best way to import my shows from my TiVos. I copied over an exported show that was already converted to MPEG2, which worked, but I didn’t have as much control as I do when playing back DVR-MS files. So that is on the list of things to do, I may look at VideoRedo for converting the .tivo files to DVR-MS, but I’d rather not buy software as it’ll be a one time deal.

So enough about setup, here’s some Media Center impressions from a long time TiVo owner.

• Setup was much, much, much harder, but not impossible — TiVo you just plug it in and set your res’, Guided Setup take some time, but other than that it’s a breeze.
• The overall UI is so much better than TiVo it isn’t even funny, although some of the plugins look just as out of place as HME applications.
• The grid guide is really snappy, the overlay is really cool, and I love how it actually shows what is recording and what is not because of a conflict in the guide. So no more To Do List to fight with. But the to do list is there, and better than TiVo because it splits it out by days.
• Conflict resolution is also much better, you just pick what show you want per conflict. Of course you can set a priority — which doesn’t take 5 minutes to apply like TiVo.
• The miniguide is very useful, but the info button not so much, I quickly learned you are better off just hitting the ‘up’ button than the info button to check show details.
• I do already miss the ability to control the two tuners, but maybe that will fade as I stop using the TiVo.
• The quick access buttons on the remote are useful, but TiVo did have some shortcuts that worked well, if you knew them.
• The scrub bar is really nice, the FWD, RWD, skip etc, work very well, in this regard the TiVo and the Media Center are very comparable.
• I love being able to play ‘other’ files without converting them.
• Played a little with the pictures, it’s much better than TiVo as well, but then again I never liked the pictures feature on TiVo.
• Setting defaults for recordings is nice as well. I don’t think Tivo has this, but I like being able to set “first runs only” by default.
• The one button recording is also convenient, but I usually end up going in there to edit something anyways, this may pass as I get use,d to it.