I upgraded from a 2Ghz Athlon machine running XP MCE 2005 to a dual-core 3Ghz 64bit Vista Home Premium machine just over a year ago, largely because my hard-drive was failing, but recently I decided to resurrect my old machine as a media centre. All it took was a new HD, PSU, and a TV tuner (I got a Hauppauge Nova-T 500 dual digital tuner card).

I've shared my recorded TV folder on my home network, and I can watch recorded programs under Media Player. I find this useful for when there are conflicts of interest as to what to watch, as surely the whole point of a PVR is that everyone has their own tastes. No?

I'm interested in taking things a bit further in this direction and, although I am a computing graduate, I'm not exactly sure where to begin with this particular task. There are two or three things I'm interested in setting-up:

1. Have the videos recorded on the XP machine show-up in the 'Recorded TV' section under Vista's Media Center
2. Set it up so that I can watch live TV on both machines, obviously taking a feed from each tuner on the Nova-T card
3. Use my Vista machine to browse the guide, and use it to define recordings for the XP machine to use.
   

Number 2 and 3 are obviously some of my more ambitious goals, I hadn't really considered them as a possibility at-first. In my readings, however, I stumbled across Media Centre's equivalent under Linux (Myth TV) which apparently can do this with relative ease (once the media server is set-up). I've even installed Mythbuntu on another partition and got MythTV working, but I got intermittent video glitches due to a driver problem so I switched back to XP.

I might be willing to put Vista on my media center machine too, if that'd help, but it's unlikely unless there are serious advantages to be had, as I could get another tuner for less than half the price of a new copy of windows. That wouldn't really resolve #1 either, however.

Anyone know if my 3 goals above are possible under windows with my current hardware/software? If so: How?

If this is the wrong place to be asking: Where should I start?

1) I believe this can be done just by making the XP Recorded TV directory a network share then adding the path to the Watched folders list on the Vista PC.

2) If you mean using the Vista machine to watch a live channel from the tuner in the XP machine, or vice versa, then there's no way to do that.

3) It's not native functionality, and the closest I can think of is babgvant's Recording Broker. Details here (http://thegreenbutton.com/blogs/chris_blog/archive/2007/04/08/180885.aspx) and download here (http://babgvant.com/files/folders/recbrocker/default.aspx).

 

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MCE2005 (Reluctantly decided not to upgrade to TV Pack - will see if 7MC fixes the issues) | AMD64X2 3600+ | 1Gb Ram | 3x500Gb SATA | Hauppauge PVR150 | nVidia 7300LE silent GPU | Pig ugly big black case | Virgin Media cable | Xbox 360 wired extender

Okay. I seem to be having some trouble adding a watched folder. I assume that it's in the Library Setup section of Settings? Whenever I select this, I get an error saying that a necessary component of windows media center is not available, and that I should restart... Probably something to do with me not having a tuner in the machine. Could that cause problems?

Hmm. I'll try my google-fu. Wish me luck!

Oh, you don't have a tuner in the Vista machine at all?

You'll need to enable the TV section then. I think it's just a registry key away. Not had to do it though.

It sounds like what you want is really an extender connected to the XP machine. Yes, we all know MS should enable PC based extenders, but they won't so lets not go there.

 

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MCE2005 (Reluctantly decided not to upgrade to TV Pack - will see if 7MC fixes the issues) | AMD64X2 3600+ | 1Gb Ram | 3x500Gb SATA | Hauppauge PVR150 | nVidia 7300LE silent GPU | Pig ugly big black case | Virgin Media cable | Xbox 360 wired extender

Yes, I suppose you could say that I want my PC to be an extender.

Think I might have this problem, actually:
http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/2/204012/ShowThread.aspx
Tried the solutions, didn't work. I suppose I could try swapping the machine the card's in and seeing if that lets me set it up. Or I suppose I could share my media folder on my main computer, set it up as a network drive, and tell the XP machine to record to there... Lol.

OK. Progress:
The "A necessary component of Windows Media Center is currently not available." message goes away if I have WMP open in the background. Not sure why it'd do that, I'd expect WMP to occupy a service rather than free one up.

I now have a new problem, however: I can't seem to be able to find the files in Windows Media Center, although they do show-up in windows media player's library. Any ideas?