Temporarily disable WMC from recording scheduled shows

[fyiman]

How can I temporarily disable WMC from recording scheduled shows.

I have Windows Media Center installed on my Windows 7 Home Premium x64 computer.

I want to try out XBMC and/or MediaPortal as an alternative to WMC.

In the end, I may decide to continue using WMC instead of changing to one of the others, so I want to keep my current settings for WMC intact, including schedule of shows to record, etc.

Also, in the meantime, while testing XBMC and MediaPortal, I have lots of shows/movies already recorded that I will want to have the ability to watch.

[mdavej]

That's a tough one. Something you could try is changing the disc space for recordings to something very small, or point recorded tv to a non-existent drive, Z:\Recorded TV, for example.

[mdavej]

The suggestion I posted in your other identical thread didn't work? All you'd have to do is set the space to what you've currently filled, then every subsequent recording would fail.

Unless they're copy protected, you can view .wtv files with almost anything. I stream them to my BD players via DLNA. I don't need XBMC or Media Portal.

mcBackup worked fine for me the last time I tried it. You just have to limit it to recordings and not channels. Otherwise you'll create a big mess.

[DanH]

Open the Services list and disable the Media Center services.

[mike_ekim]

How long? You could go into scheduled recordings and delete everything being recorded for the next few days. That's probably the safest bet, and there would be no long-term problems.

Or maybe you could 'break' the tuner setup. It can't record anything if it can't find tuners. Personally, I wouldn't go that route.

[barnabas1969]

Simple answer #1: Turn off the PC.

Simple answer #2: Disable all Media Center services and scheduled tasks.

Simple answer #3: Make a system image backup of the PC, re-install Windows, try XBMC/whatever. If it doesn't work as hoped... restore your backup.

[CyberSimian]

How can I temporarily disable WMC from recording scheduled shows.

I think that the cleanest solution is to turn off automatic EPG updates (the control for this will be found somewhere in "Settings" -> "TV" -> "Guide"). I use Vista, but I use manual guide updates (once per week in my case).

The only disadvantage is that you would need to wait two weeks before the EPG became empty. Also, if you have any manually-scheduled items (items specified to record at a particular time on a particular channel), they would still try to record (since they are not dependent on the EPG).

Finally, if you are lucky enough to live in a part of the world that has a broadcast EPG (an EPG broadcast as part of the TV signal), you would need to turn that off, too.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

[holidayboy]

There is a way yo backup / restore the scheduled recordings list - you could backup the schedule, then use the 'clear recording schedule' option in MC.

Then restore the schedule when you want recordings to start up?

You should find a thread here somewhere detailing how to backup the history of recorded items in order to prevent duplicate recordings as well....

[holidayboy]

Personally, Id probably just disable the eh* services - ehrecvr and ehsched I think.

[fyiman]

The suggestion I posted in your other identical thread [using "Z:\Recorded TV"] didn't work? All you'd have to do is set the space to what you've currently filled, then every subsequent recording would fail.

(I'm not sure how this thread got posted twice... sorry about that =)

I'll try your great suggestion to set the recording location to something non-existant like "Z:\Recorded TV". The only thing that may be a problem would be watching live (buffered) TV. Hopefully, WMC will buffer this in temporary disk space. The other (similar) way would be to move all my existing recordings out of the current "Recorded TV" folder, and then set WMC to only have a few GB of recording space.

Unless they're copy protected, you can view .wtv files with almost anything. I stream them to my BD players via DLNA. I don't need XBMC or Media Portal.

I have a mix of copy protected and non-CP recordings.

This is actually related to why I am looking for an alternative to WMC. Around November 2013, I started to have problems with copy protection. Something changed with either Comcast, or a WMC update, and now many shows on many channels are shown as copy protected, and some recordings have "expiration dates" which are usually around 2-days after the recording.

Before, the occasional copy protected recording would play fine. But now, playback of these new CP recordings tend to have "stuttering" problems (brief pauses), and at times (sometimes frequent) a "Copy protected" message is shown during playback. Sometimes, this CP message is shown for just a brief "flash", or a second or two, but sometimes it is shown for up to 15 seconds or so. And sometimes the message is shown a few or many times in a row. The part of the recorded show that would be shown during the time the message is displayed is just gone. This is a "horrible" viewing experience.

I don't mind that these recordings are copy protected. I only have 1 computer that has the TV Tuner card and WMC on it, and I am only watching the recordings from that computer. I'm hoping that XBMC and/or MediaPortal will handle this better.

mcBackup worked fine for me the last time I tried it. You just have to limit it to recordings and not channels. Otherwise you'll create a big mess.

On mcBackup, I see backup options for "Scheduled Recordings", "Channel Lineup", "Recorded TV", and "Extra Folder". Do you mean I should limit to backing up "Scheduled Recordings"?

I don't see anything related to backing up "Recording History". Will backing up "Scheduled Recordings" also backup "History" as well?

Perhaps I'm wrong, but my understanding is "Channel Lineup" is about backing up settings related to the Tuner and Guide, which among other things, determines "which" guide(s) to download; and "Recorded TV" is about backing up the actual ".wtv" files.

[fyiman]

Open the Services list and disable the Media Center services.

Thanks for the suggestion.

I had actually thought about that. And also to set them as "Manual start", or even "Disabled". I just wasn't sure if some other part of WMC would re-start these services.