As I've mentioned before, I get a ton of usage out of my Portable Media Center. During the week, my Media Center PC churns away recording all of my favorite television shows while I'm on the road for business. When I come home on the weekends, I plug the PMC into the computer and it copies all of the week's television onto the device. Back to the airport the next week, and I can catch up on all of the goings-on of my favorite shows. It's a great way for me as a traveling consultant to stay in touch.
I had high hopes for Vista, especially now that it supports my fancy new 64-bit processor. In theory, going 64-bit should really speed up the transcoding process that occurs to get all of the TV shows compressed for the small screen and onto the portable hard drive. With the upcoming Zune player from Microsoft, it looks also like the portable media concept is very much alive and moving forward. this is gonna be great! But I ran into problems.
One of the other things that I've decided to leverage in Media Center for Vista is high-definition television, which is a whole different topic in and of itself (yes, it is awesome). It's the combination of HDTV, Vista, and PMC that seems to have caused my problems. When I fired up my first sync, almost all of the recordings failed to copy over to the portable media center. All of the standard-definition shows copied over well, and a few of the high-definition recordings came over too, but the far majority of the content just sat there with an error message. Being the good geek, I dug in and tried a bunch of different things to get the sync working (including different codecs, different transcoding engines, hopping on one foot while singing the national anthem, everything I could thing of) but was in the end unsuccessful. Collaborating with some beta testing colleagues and with the Microsoft development team, we came to the conclusion that 1080i content was by its very nature unable to be transcoded. Bummer.
Several weeks passed, and I'm now getting ready for another business trip today with a pretty hefty layover at Chicago OHare. I'd sure like to be able to take some television with me, so I dug in once again. And what do you know, I've found a combination that works! It's a workaround, but at least I can take my shows with me now and I have enough evidence to get the bug reopened on the Microsoft side and hopefully addressed in a future hotfix (it's too late to get a fix in for RTM). Here's how I did it, and how you can do it too (unfortunately you'll need a second Windows XP maching lying around):
- On the Vista PC, share the Recorded TV folder. This may bring up additional popups prompting you to turn on file sharing, which is normal.
- From a Windows XP machine, navigate through the network to the share you've just created. In my case the name of the Vista PC is "vista64?, so in order to get to the share I click on Start, then Run, and type in \\vista64\Recorded TV\
- Type in the user name and password for the vista machine when prompted, then you should be able to see the list of recordings on the vista machine. If you're using Windows XP Pro, check off the "Remember my username and password" box so that you won't have to type them in ever again. If you're using Windows XP Home or MCE, unfortunately you'll have to type in the username and password every time you reboot your PC.
- Launch Windows Media Player 11, and click on the little arrow below Library and select the Add to Library option.
- Under Monitored Folders click on the Add button.
- In the Folder box, type the full path to your recorded TV share (in my case this is \\vista64\Recorded TV) and click OK
- Click OK again to close the add to library window. Your Windows XP machine should now list all of the recorded tv programs from your Vista PC as part of the media library. To see the list, click on the music notes icon in the top-left of WMP11 to change the view from music to Recorded TV.
- Note that in order to play back and sync recorded TV on you Windows XP machine you'll need to have a supported MPEG-2 codec on your machine. If you have a DVD player in the XP machine and can watch DVDs, you should be all set. You can use this utility supplied by Microsoft to check your machine for compatibility.
- Plug your portable media center into the Windows XP machine and set up the sync as you would normally.
- An additional tip: make sure that your virus scanners on both the Windows XP and Windows Vista machines are set to ignore dvr-ms files or you'll see some terrible performance hits during the entire process.