Surprise! I’m still around.

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July 1, 2015 at 12:56 pm #8566
jennyfur
Participant

    Surprise! I’m still around. And I’m in the same boat as the OP here, been contemplating my options over the past couple weeks. Think I’ve finally made a decision.

    First off, since I’m bumping an old post, just wanted to update this for anyone coming in later since the post before mine is a bit misleading. As of May, it was absolutely confirmed that there’s no media center in windows 10. You can even hear it from the horse’s mouth: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/wiki/insider_wintp-insider_install/frequently-asked-questions-windows-10/5c0b9368-a9e8-4238-b1e4-45f4b7ed2fb9

    (use ctrl+F to find “media center” since it’s a long article)

    So on to my dilema. Currently, I’m using Win 7 for MCE with an xbox 360 extender. I want to upgrade this machine to Win 10, which will cause me to lose MCE. I have a few options though.

    1. I have a really old macbook pro that’s bootcamped with Win 7. It would be the perfect solution to this problem if it weren’t for the fact that it’s horribly unstable and locks up almost daily, not to mention the battery is broken so it has to stay plugged in at all times (okay the latter isn’t so much of a problem in this scenario, just an annoyance if I want to use the macbook for anything else). If it wasn’t such a POS, I would just run it as my new MCE box since I have no intention of upgrading it. Would need to save to someplace else though since it doesn’t have much hard drive space.
    2. Option 2: there’s rumors of the xbox one eventually getting a DVR solution. This rumor makes enough sense to believe as they really want the xbone to be the center of your living room, also because of the HDMI passthrough cable features, along with the death of MCE. Problem with this option is the timing… who knows when this will happen. I highly doubt it will be in time for when I plan to switch to Win 10. But I didn’t bother buying an xbone in the hopes that it would do something about the lack of MCE extender capability, so waiting isn’t really a problem (unless I’d run out of time for free Win 10 while doing so).
    3. Lastly, and looking to be the option I’m leaning most towards at the moment, is HDHomeRun DVR. Their kickstarter got plenty of funding, including meeting their stretch goals for Kodi and iPad support. I’d planned on buying a NAS for backup reasons anyway, and HDHomeRun DVR is supposed to be able to run off one. They list QNAP as a brand they plan to support, and I was leaning towards the TS-251 anyway (which happens to run Kodi and has hdmi out). I understand the $30 fee for EPG data, it sucks but it’s reasonable and still cheaper than what I’d pay the cable co. The only downside of this option is if I spend all this money on the necessary hardware and then option 2 (the xbone solution) actually comes to fruition at a later date. Would be taking that chance.