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TKEBH964

Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Jan 21, 2013 3:33 pm
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#181

Post by TKEBH964 » Mon Jan 21, 2013 3:53 pm

Thought I would introduce myself here as I have been lurking for quite a while. I cut my cable about 6 months ago and used an old Vista laptop with media center for a DVR. The laptop was free to me because it had a broken screen and I believe it was dropped at one point, but it had media center! After some strange errors with the laptop (I believe the motherboard is about to go), I built a new HTPC at Christmas time.

Processor: Intel Core i3 3225
RAM: Kingston HyperX 8GB 1600
MOBO: ASRock H77M
SSD for OS: Intel 330 60 gb
HDD: Seagate 1.5 tb Green
PS: Thermaltake TR2-500
Case: Silverstone GD06
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
Tuner: HD Homerun Dual

I have been using this forum a lot to get things set up and running smoothly. The wife even commented the other day that our setup is "pretty cool" and she really likes it. Best part is she views it as something for the house and not something for my hobbies.

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holidayboy

Posts: 2836
Joined: Sun Jun 05, 2011 1:44 pm
Location: Northants, UK

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#182

Post by holidayboy » Mon Jan 21, 2013 6:37 pm

Welcome aboard :)
Rob.

TGB.tv - the one stop shop for the more discerning Media Center user.

Washout

Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Mar 03, 2013 12:09 pm
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#183

Post by Washout » Sun Mar 03, 2013 12:17 pm

Hi All,

Been out of the Media Centre research thing for a while, as my setup has been pretty good for a couple of years, but I'm now approaching a hardware upgrade on the main media centre box and alot of my software is out of date, so a full rebuild is looming. Plus I want to find out what Win8 has done and whether its viable.....

Good to see the site back where it belongs and due to some of the old faces I recognise.

Cheers

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STC

Posts: 6808
Joined: Mon Jun 06, 2011 4:58 pm
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#184

Post by STC » Sun Mar 03, 2013 2:19 pm

You are at the right place :)

Welcome!
By the Community, for the Community. 100% Commercial Free.

Want decent guide data back? Check out EPG123

leopold

Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Feb 04, 2013 2:42 pm
Location: Manchester, UK

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#185

Post by leopold » Thu Mar 07, 2013 4:41 pm

Greetings!

I live in the UK and I've been a user of MCE for seven years, since back in the dark days of XP MCE. I started out by putting in an old Hauppauge tuner card in a Compaq Evo desktop and attaching it to the TV in order to gain the all-important WAF. Once she was in on it, I went out and bought a load of new kit - a Barton core Athlon XP 3200+, a gig of RAM, a 120GB hard drive, a pair of Black Gold tuners and a nice shiny Silverstone LC11 case to park it all in. It all worked reasonably well and I tweaked it a lot, mainly to get sleep mode working and recordings to be more reliable, as well as making it a bit quieter. I replaced it a few years ago with an Intel D6300, a pair of Pinnacle dual digital tuners, 500GB disk space, 2GB of RAM and an Antec Fusion case so I could upgrade to Vista. The Vista OS was awful, but the MCE interface was the best one I've used so far. I've since upgraded the setup to Windows 7, but the hardware remains the same.

I used to be a member of the old GB site many ages ago and it saved me many times with XP.

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holidayboy

Posts: 2836
Joined: Sun Jun 05, 2011 1:44 pm
Location: Northants, UK

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#186

Post by holidayboy » Thu Mar 07, 2013 4:47 pm

Welcome to tgb.tv :smile:
Rob.

TGB.tv - the one stop shop for the more discerning Media Center user.

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apbms1

Posts: 29
Joined: Fri Jul 12, 2013 3:01 pm
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#187

Post by apbms1 » Fri Jul 12, 2013 3:05 pm

Hello. I was a member on the old tgb. Still using wmc. Now on win7 version.

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holidayboy

Posts: 2836
Joined: Sun Jun 05, 2011 1:44 pm
Location: Northants, UK

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#188

Post by holidayboy » Fri Jul 12, 2013 8:56 pm

Welcome to tgb.tv :)

Thanks for taking the time to sign up.
Rob.

TGB.tv - the one stop shop for the more discerning Media Center user.

tletourneau

Posts: 25
Joined: Tue Sep 03, 2013 6:31 pm
Location: SE Minnesota

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#189

Post by tletourneau » Sat Sep 14, 2013 4:26 am

Hi All,

I'm new to WMC but thought I'd give it a try when Charter upped my rates and told me to get lower prices I'd have to trade in their whole house DVR for stand alone DRV's. Not only wasn't it much of a discount and I liked the whole house DVR functionality. After a bit of research I found that WMC is not really CPU heavy so I picked up a Dell Inspiron 660s from Best Buy for $229 (IB Pentium 2.9Ghz dual core, 4GB RAM 500GB HD), added 4GB of RAM, a 4TB Western Digital USB3 HD and a Ceton InfiniTV 6 ETH. It's all up and running. The WMC is Windows 7 Home Premuim running headless feeding 2 Xbox 360 extenders. The WMC and Ceton are on a gigabit backbone and the extenders are on an AV500 powerline network. So far so good, I'd love for it to all be hardwired GB but I rent. :)

Now I'm just trying to tweak things and find ways to improve the WAF rating. I need to find a good remote that works well with the xbox 360 for one of the TV's. I've got the toolbox and comskip working well thanks to the help of the fine folk here and at Andy's site.

Anyway, hello again!

Tom
Thanks,
Tom

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tipstir

Posts: 17
Joined: Tue Nov 26, 2013 6:48 pm
Location: South Florida

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#190

Post by tipstir » Sat Nov 30, 2013 11:06 pm

Hi all here on The Green Button. I am known as the tipstir! I've been around since the old PKware 1989, Prodigy 1990-91 and AOL days 1991-2001 . Yahoo in 1995 internet to present. My history with PC recording started back in the day with PCTV and WinDVR software. Have about 8x Hauppauge Media Network Players, Hauppauge PVR tuners about 8x of those along with GBPVR 2003 to 2007, then 2007 to 2010 with SAGETV I been around but never posted. I know but now I do since I have also ditch CATV for DTV. Anyway I hope I can share what I know about Windows 7, HDHomeRun (2x) and WMC here.

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holidayboy

Posts: 2836
Joined: Sun Jun 05, 2011 1:44 pm
Location: Northants, UK

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#191

Post by holidayboy » Sun Dec 01, 2013 9:22 am

Hi folks, welcome! :)
Rob.

TGB.tv - the one stop shop for the more discerning Media Center user.

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Hurracayne_dre

Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Dec 27, 2013 1:47 am
Location: RVA

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#192

Post by Hurracayne_dre » Sat Dec 28, 2013 9:45 pm

Went from a long time lurker to registered member

Wookie06

Posts: 4
Joined: Sat Feb 08, 2014 3:26 pm
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#193

Post by Wookie06 » Sat Feb 08, 2014 4:14 pm

Okay, I don't really remember anyone here and nobody would remember me. back in '08/'09 I was really going to town converting DVDs to MP4s, setting up MediaBrowser, ended up upgrading to Windows 7... Basically came to the conclusion that the amount of work required to have a less than optimal experience was less convenient than just going to the binder where my discs were. I had switched to AT&T Uverse from Cox so I didn't have traditional cable and I didn't have a digital tuner anyway. Well, I've since moved to a location where the best internet I can get is the fiber optic service my power company provides. It's cheap too and since I am no longer tied to a television provider to get adequate internet service I could finally cut the cord. Netflix, Hulu, other service available on the Roku have been what I relied on most for the past year however I knew that there was a percentage of content I desired that was passing through my house already that I just wasn't setup to receive. This PC is a unit I purchased in '07 I believe. A refurbished one from Tiger Direct. Originally outfitted with XP MCE it has since been upgraded with 7, slightly better video card, memory, and most recently a Hauppauge PCI tuner cable of ATSC (no extra PCIe slots). I did a test run a couple months ago with an RCA flat indoor tuner. I couldn't receive anything inside, I didn't have a window I could put the antenna in that faces the closest major broadcasters. When I put it outside, the magic happened. Not a great deal of channels but the major ones. Next, I reconnected the Xbox to Media Center. It worked, kind of. The unsurprising issue was that where my PC is located I don't yet have hard line ethernet ran. Still, I knew it would work. I returned the antenna planning to purchase an external one later.

So, it's the Saturday before the Superbowl and I'm irritated that I bought the Hauppauge card but I'm not doing anything with it. I procrastinated to the point that I certainly couldn't order a reputable antenna online in time. Back to Wallyworld to see what the have. There's a cute little RCA external antenna that I have an interesting idea to mount. Previous tenants in my home (I had the house rented out for about 6 years) had Direct TV installed. Those guys ran a line from one side of my house to the other passing through my garage to the room in the basement with the PC (It's a daylight basement on the back of the house with garage and a finished room). All I had to do was crimp a new connector on the cable, hook it up to the antenna, mounted the antenna to a conduit, and, voila, absolutely nothing! Okay, cable checked out okay so I try several different positions before removing it and hooking it up more directly and placing it in the same areas I tried the indoor one. Nothing. I swapped it out for the same product, still nothing. Now I don't know if something went wrong with my setup in the past couple months or not but I'm getting really annoyed. I take it back and get an indoor one. I figure at least I can find out if it works or not and then maybe just waterproof it for the game before figuring out what I'm going to do. I connect the antenna, $10 cheaper and only for indoor use, in my desired mounting location, go the computer, test the signals, and, bam, they all start popping up (RCA can stick that external one where the sun doesn't shine)! I go back outside to make sure it's okay because it is raining and that's when I really start to look at the Charter box I have it sitting on. I open the empty box, running the cable through the hole in the bottom, stuff the antenna in it, takes a little work, back inside to check the signals. Good to go. I take the lazy route and run one of my old long cables from the PC to the router in the living room and streaming to the Xbox is on. Now, I can't say any of this actually helped me enjoy the Superbowl and I say that as someone who was actually born in Seattle but it is nice to have it back up and running. I don't know if I'll ever get back into Mediabrowser and all of the finagling required to use WMC to access my content but I can picture myself building a box with multiple tuners so I can record and watch different shows at the same time (like I could when they were just SD cable programs). Who knows?

Okay, just didn't have any other outlet for this tale. Certainly not one where anybody would "get it". Glad to see the forum persists.

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holidayboy

Posts: 2836
Joined: Sun Jun 05, 2011 1:44 pm
Location: Northants, UK

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#194

Post by holidayboy » Sun Feb 09, 2014 9:52 am

Wow!

Welcome to the new tgb :)
Rob.

TGB.tv - the one stop shop for the more discerning Media Center user.

barnabas1969

Posts: 5738
Joined: Tue Jun 21, 2011 7:23 pm
Location: Titusville, Florida, USA

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#195

Post by barnabas1969 » Thu Mar 13, 2014 8:36 pm

I think Elaine posted her question in the wrong place. I don't usually look at this thread. Too bad she didn't post her question in a different thread that was more relevant. Elaine, if you see this post, come back... there are lots of people here who can help you.

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Scallica

Posts: 2797
Joined: Mon Jun 06, 2011 7:09 pm
Location: USA!

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#196

Post by Scallica » Thu Mar 13, 2014 9:01 pm

HTPC Enthusiast / Forum Moderator - TGB.tv Code of Conduct

miracleed

Posts: 32
Joined: Tue Nov 05, 2013 5:57 pm
Location: Boston Ma

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#197

Post by miracleed » Wed Apr 02, 2014 2:04 am

Hey Guys and Gals. Thanks for the great repository of information and opinion. I really like this place.

sorankurd

Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Jun 22, 2014 7:21 am
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#198

Post by sorankurd » Sun Jun 22, 2014 7:26 am

thank you

shanew76

Posts: 6
Joined: Tue Feb 17, 2015 1:29 am
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#199

Post by shanew76 » Tue Feb 17, 2015 2:42 am

Hi All,

Thought this would be a great place to start. I recently started using WMC as mainly a whole house DVR system. So far its been working great for me. Better than Cable box DVR, no more family fighting over who canceled who's recording. I really hope Microsoft opens this up to outside development, and puts it in Win 10 so it doesn't die out.

tocsin

Posts: 17
Joined: Wed Apr 22, 2015 10:17 am
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#200

Post by tocsin » Tue Apr 28, 2015 6:09 pm

Just registered... have WHS2011, HDHomeRun (UK OTA version for Freeview), WMC on Windows 7 & 8.1 and am looking forward to how the HDHR kickstarter goes (backed it!)

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