WMC TV Shows 2022

[Jazzycian]

Hi all,

I recently built a htpc. Aorus b550i board, AMD Ryzen 4600g, 16gb ram, Windows 10 pro. Pretty capable. Movies, TV shows on a NAS source. PCIE DVB-S2 dual tuner.

I installed WMC (really great work by the way by the dev Gary on here). It is amazing but I am hitting a wall with the 'wife acceptance factor'. It almost ticks the boxes.

I set up live TV with a pcie TBS brand DVB-S2 dual tuner card. UK satellite but I'm in Ireland. EPG123 and schedules direct set up. Most stations are not correct on the guide but pretty sure I must have left the auto match ticked so not concerned there, I can start again and try map them manually.

I can get some program to sort meta data and covers for movies etc but I am stuck for TV show functionality.

I added them to the 'Video' source and can navigate to them. It uses the embedded name and not my plex naming but I can fix that. My big issue is that there seems to be no way to auto play the next episode of a TV show.

You may think it is easy to just play the next with the remote but....one of the main uses for us is playing cartoons for the 3 year old, these are always short in duration so really not feasible for the missus to be going back in every 5 minutes to navigate to the next episode and play manually.

I came from using plex so spoiled for TV show functionality. Plex just annoys the hell out of me on my NAS so built this HTPC.

I tried mediaportal 2.0 before this but the lack of auto play of tv shows and probably needing to make playlists for each show made me come back to my original WMC dream machine. I don't think mediaportal and xbmc variants are very intuitive or wife friendly.

I may be required to go and install plex on this machine but I really want to stay with MWC, it is so very nearly perfect. I have a really nice XP WMC philips remote control I picked up with USB receiver and it is amazing to have all the buttons work in WMC

What do people do for TV Shows in WMC? Am I missing something obvious?

Thanks in advance

[jachin99]

If you search the forums there should be a way to at least make a video playlist that wmc can use

[Jazzycian]

If you search the forums there should be a way to at least make a video playlist that WMC can use

Thank you for the reply. I had a look and all I can find is a reference to W7 Playlist Creator and mention of wvx files. I looked up wvx files and the information seems to be exclusively for windows media player. I'm going to download this and see if it will allow me to make playlists for each TV show.

Are there any other tools I should be aware of to tweak the experience or customise things?

Ideally I want to make it easy to use and navigate, the missus is already used to skipping intros and all that good stuff from Plex so if I can't make it a shade more friendly I'll have to look at something else unfortunately.

[Jazzycian]

An update for anyone reading this looking to do the same thing. W7 Playlist Creator works well, just super manual until I figure a way to automate it possibly.

I can make a playlist in each series folder and start the name with an underscore so it is always first in the list in the videos library folders.

Seems WMC has no function to skip to the next episode unless again I am missing something but this may work ok for cartoons at least for the kid. Any further input from anyone is welcome.

Edit: just realised this is a bit pointless as you can hit 'play all' at the top of the folder anyway...

[Jazzycian]

I realise I am blowing on the last embers of the WMC community but want to update with my fixes here for the next person who may be looking and finding no information on this.

I realise a lot of the community are on cable cards but I am on a Dual DVB-S2 pci express card (TBS-6902 is the model) and trying to replace my Humax freesat box that went a bit dodgy on me not recording.

I fixed the messed up channels on the guide using EPG123. I did a fresh start with the function Gary built in. Then I added 2 sources from schedules direct for UK satellite in the EPG123 application. The freesat option and the Astra one near the top of the lineups. The Astra one gives you the additional channels like 'Dave ja Vu'.

Then I made sure to unselect the auto match option. When I selected all the stations I wanted. I used Wikipedia to weed out the stuff that I didn't want.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of ... d_Kingdom)

Channels on Wikipedia marked as requiring manual tuning you will get by scanning the Astra source as well as the Freesat source option when selecting lineups and country as UK (postcode I used WN3).

Click save and execute.

Opened the EPG123 Client application (refresh button if you add more channels by doing save and execute in EPG123) and had the 2 programs side by side. Then you match by call sign and rename all of the call signs in the lineup to match.

Click create. One thing that I wasn't expecting is that I can't seem to force a pull of info. So I think I need to wait until the scheduled time as it is greyed out now.

I used the Backup button in the EPG123 client to make sure I have a good starting point if I mess anything up in future.

The quality of channels is not as good as the Humax box though so I need to figure that out next. If this is limitation of WMC or the card or what.

I am determined to use WMC in 2022/2023. Even if I have to figure it all out myself.

[technodevotee]

I am a huge fan of Windows Media Center and hope that it can be kept going.

I find it interesting that you don't think the picture is as good using your TBS 6902 card as your Humax.

A friend of mine has a couple of Humax boxes (terrestrial and satellite) and I have to say, the picture always seems very good.

My first HTPC came with Windows MCE and a pair of PCI Hauppauge DVB-T tuners and I was very happy with them. I upgraded to a different HTPC with a pair of Hauppauge PCI DVB-S2 cards, which were very high maintenance but had a great picture.

Next upgrade meant no PCI slots so I started using a pair of TBS 6982 cards but had intermittent issues with them so I switched to TBS 6902s but they were even worse. I don't think they are as sensitive as the Hauppauge cards and they seem to take a long time to 'lock onto' the signal.

I struggled on with them for six months and sent them back in the end.

I replaced them with four Hauppauge Starburst 2 cards and all my problems went away. Apart from the fact that they are only single tuners, I am very happy with them.

I also have a Hauppauge Win TV Quad HD (DVB-T2) in another PC and that is great too. Just a shame you can't get surround sound on it due to the lack of codec.

[Jazzycian]

I am a huge fan of Windows Media Center and hope that it can be kept going.

I find it interesting that you don't think the picture is as good using your TBS 6902 card as your Humax.

A friend of mine has a couple of Humax boxes (terrestrial and satellite) and I have to say, the picture always seems very good.

My first HTPC came with Windows MCE and a pair of PCI Hauppauge DVB-T tuners and I was very happy with them. I upgraded to a different HTPC with a pair of Hauppauge PCI DVB-S2 cards, which were very high maintenance but had a great picture.

Next upgrade meant no PCI slots so I started using a pair of TBS 6982 cards but had intermittent issues with them so I switched to TBS 6902s but they were even worse. I don't think they are as sensitive as the Hauppauge cards and they seem to take a long time to 'lock onto' the signal.

I struggled on with them for six months and sent them back in the end.

I replaced them with four Hauppauge Starburst 2 cards and all my problems went away. Apart from the fact that they are only single tuners, I am very happy with them.

I also have a Hauppauge Win TV Quad HD (DVB-T2) in another PC and that is great too. Just a shame you can't get surround sound on it due to the lack of codec.

Thank you for the reply.

Yeah I just feel it is a little jumpy and not smooth. Still looking for a way to improve it. Perhaps it is the card, or the codec for me but unsure of how to troubleshoot it to be honest

[technodevotee]

Jumpy or unsmooth video seems to happen on systems that have just been built or have undergone a lot of changes.

Windows can be pretty busy in those circumstances and it usually settles down.

Windows 10/11 don't 'know' that WMC processes require real time disk access and do their own thing to the detriment of running programs.

Some graphics cards allow you to set certain applications to performance mode but I've never investigated that feature.

[Jazzycian]

Cheers, I will look into that and see if I can set WMC to utilize the performance. Now everything else plays well, I am using the k-lite codec pack so I think that has me covered for movies.

I keep persisting to use WMC, I have one final thing thats kinda annoying me and making me think about just giving up and using mediaportal. The TV shows etc. I know people used media browser in the past and I tried to install this, the last beta for wmc which is on the emby site and I couldn't get it to work at all. I needed to install emby server and then just couldn't figure it out.

I used media center master and got a tvdb subscription and have scraped all my meta data including the wmc dvdid file but the movies section is laggy loading and I have no place to watch TV shows except mapping to the videos source and watching in the folders.

So I tried My Movie Collection software which looks nice and scans in my media but has no metadata, it just sees my existing covers and tells me the dvdid files were made by another software and won't show them up or import them. This also doesn't seem to scan metadata for me. Which is disappointing as it does install a movies section and a tv shows section but without its own metadata doesn't show anything.

Is there a plugin for media browsing that works these days and could use the existing metadata created by media center master or is there some option in media center master to install a media browser plugin in wmc?

Clutching at straws and everytime a door opens a windows closes for me on this. If I could just have a media browser plugin to nicely navigate TV shows and movies I would be set. I think mediaportal wi

ll use my metadata so half thinking to try it again but really want to just get wmc sorted.

Any ideas at all?

[Jazzycian]

Also my setup is a htpc and all the media I have is on a NAS on the same network. I have plex server installed on that NAS and basically am trying to move to using the htpc instead of plex clients on the tv or htpc.

[technodevotee]

Any ideas at all?

I'm afraid not.

I use WMC purely for recording and watching TV and nothing else because I use different software for different things like watching movies and videos and listening to music.

I have EPG123 and Recording Broker installed but nothing else.

I store all my Recorded TV, DVDs, Blu-Rays, Videos and Music on my NAS so that I can get at everything from other PCs but don't use any kind of media server.

[Jazzycian]

Cheers, thank you for the replies. I am really looking for an all in one solution to make it easy to use for others in the house. Really is a pity there is no TV series support or plugins that seem to work anymore. The inability to just auto play the next episode without hitting 'play all' is a bit of a deal breaker for me. Even not being able to skip episodes with the remote and having to skip forward a few seconds at a time without reg editing again is annoying.

The live TV is the only thing that works well in my opinion and only for the work Gary has done. Quite commendable what has been done but without being able to figure out installing working plugins for TV shows I think it is no longer worth my time. Too hard to find information and there are very few people apparently still using WMC. Ah well, I did give it a good shot over the last 2 weeks but long term, it won't be sustainable.

Probably will just uninstall and install media portal again, even though that won't auto play it does have a menu for TV shows and everything accessible in one place.