Moved from MCE to Sage

For many years I’ve run Windows Media Center, from MCE, to MCE 2005, MCE 2005 RU2, to Vista Media Center, to Vista Media Center + TV Pack.

And for a long time it’s worked really well.  I had a HTPC box connected to tuners and XBOX 360 Extenders.

But it did have little things going on that made it hard to use, the IR blaster solution was really never 100% (I would say it was 99%, but that’s not high enough when you’re married), the tuners would sometimes be “unavailable” for whatever reason and require a restart of the computer (the computer was only used as a HTPC box with no other applications running on it), but it was all very minor really.

Until that is, TV Pack came along.  I installed on a fresh SP1 per the instructions (I was a tester, so I did this a bunch) and wiped my machine for the RTM and reinstalled again.  TV Pack goes along perfectly for a week or so and then the machine reliability goes to all heck (it falls from 9.8 to 2.X in the Vista reliability monitor).  I’ve seen note of this being the result of a file getting corrupted and how to fix it, but I don’t really know.  My wife was not happy.

And then the DirecTV box never came out.  So our HD DirecTV was not HD, it was still SD through an S-Video connection.  And LifeExtender broke, and then WTV files became so DRM’d whenever I did anything that they became unwatchable rebuild to rebuild (“this video can only be watched on the computer it was recorded on”).

So I switched to SageTV these last two weeks.  I have a smaller box (a HP Mediasmart running Windows Home Server), two HD PVR tuners that can capture HD from my DirecTV receivers, my HD Homerun devices and one of those SageTV HD Extenders.

Thinking I had been watching HD all along on my MCE box I went and watched a network show on my Sage extender.  WOW.  My wife said “so that’s what HD is meant to look like!”

Now, my MCE setup was correct, recorded HD from the HD Homerun, 8 gig file, through to my 360 which was connected 1080P to my Sony Bravia 1080P TV set.  But obviously along the way there is something going on in MCE on the 360 extender to produce /a/ HD picture, just not the /original/ HD picture.  Some sort of scaling would be my guess.

Scaling aside, we now have a setup my wife loves (the time is on every menu screen, you can set a show to record even after it’s started, DirecTV is in HD, it looks great with SageMC, and works reliably with serial control over the DirecTV boxes).

I could have moved back to good old Vista Media Center without TV Pack.  That would have probably been fine (and cheaper), but I can honestly say that this is one of the better digital home projects I have done from the wife approval factor.

And that is worth a lot.

Graeme.