Alternatives to Windows Media Center for DVRing Live TV?

[Crow550]

For those that run Windows. Anyone ever look at alternatives?

Or maybe you missed out on WMC for Windows 8 and don't want to pay $9?

I got WMC for W8 during the free promo. I looked Months ago at alternatives but seem to come up short on viable alternatives?

Anyone know of any? It does seem XBMC does have this finally built in. I will be trying it soon. Last time I tried I had to use some back end program and it became more trouble than it was worth and a general pain in the ass.

I believe Media Portal is another option?

Figure it's time to see the other options for recording live TV in Windows.

Hope this helps others as well as myself.

Plex is pretty cool. It would be awesome if Plex Media Center had this built in. Then you could share your TV recordings on devices all over the House and such. With TV recordings in WMC you have to use MCEBuddy to convert it and it just takes so much time to convert it for Plex to then be able to share it.

 

[NutBucket]

Huh? IIRC you can share recorded programs over WMC without any conversion, etc. You just add additional clients or viewers or whatever term MS uses. Fairly straightforward. The only limitation is you can't view live TV from remote systems.

I believe this works with any media center extender.

 

[Tegeril]

If you want to watch anything that is encryped by your telco, you have to use Media Center. It's the only option.

 

[Crow550]

So if you have Cable then WMC. What about alternatives for OTA?

As for sharing with WMC it's limited to Windows devices right? If I owned an Xbox that would be great and all.

 

[NutBucket]

Oops, indeed you are correct. I didn't realize that there's only one extender still being sold aside from XBOX. That's annoying.

 

[Tegeril]

Win 7 supports all the old extenders (save the OLDEST) and Win 8 supports only the XBox. Even the Ceton Echo isn't supported.

 

[slippysoup]

Mediaportal can record OTA and I think XBMC will be able to do it soon too.

 

[pkscout]

XBMC still requires you to have a separate back end, so if you were unhappy with that before, then nothing has changed. That said, I use ArgusTV as my backend and XBMC for the front end and have been very happy with it. But you will spend more than $9 in your time getting it running to your satisfaction.

I've heard good things about MediaPortal (but have never used it).

 

[Crow550]

Win 7 supports all the old extenders (save the OLDEST) and Win 8 supports only the XBox. Even the Ceton Echo isn't supported.

Well the main thing I am looking for is any good alternatives to WMC. However something like Plex support would be a nice added bonus too. As that supports PS3, Roku and some other devices too.

I personally wouldn't want a media extender considering I own 3 Rokus, PS3, Wii, two PCs....

So the lack of media extender support in Windows 8 isn't a real deal breaker. Maybe now that they are charging $9 for WMC they will start updating it? Or maybe not. Well see. I do know there is some decent 3rd party support for WMC to add features.

Guess well see what Microsoft does with WMC.

I'm going to take another look at Media Portal and wait till XBMC gets some type of native support built in or go take another look at the list of backends. I believe I tried XBMC and used Media Portal and a backend Months ago too.... I recall it was a bit messy.

I will also take a look at what www.alternativeto.net offers too.

XBMC still requires you to have a separate back end, so if you were unhappy with that before, then nothing has changed. That said, I use ArgusTV as my backend and XBMC for the front end and have been very happy with it. But you will spend more than $9 in your time getting it running to your satisfaction.

I've heard good things about MediaPortal (but have never used it).

I might look at XBMC with ArgusTV. Ah it took you forever to get it setup? Kinda like when I tried it with Media Portal.

I will see if the new version of Media Portal is decent.

In the end I might keep using WMC if it's such a pain in ass. With WMC you can get plugins for Kylo (TV made browser), Hulu Desktop and XBMC too: http://www.teknowebworks.com/ and http://kylo.tv/

However the main topic is recording OTA and maybe sharing it across the network without having to spend hours converting it.... If possible....

 

[Tegeril]

Out of curiosity, what are you not getting out of Windows Media Center that you want? I couldn't imagine switching to another platform (and I've tried for non-CableCard content) at this point because it just works so well for me.

 

[snoturtle]

Am currently in the process of changing over from WMC on windows 8 with xbox 360's as extends to windows 8 HTPC's running XBMC with nextpvr back end on our 3 main tv's.
Currently have 1 HD homerun prime that I am thinking of replacing with a pair of the new HD homerun's when they come out as they have 4 tuners each and encode in H.264 instead of MPEG2

Have it up and running on a laptop right now to see how everything would go

The main reason for the change was to move down to one box at each tv because as of right now each tv has an xbox 360 used for live tv and dvr duty and a ps3 connected to ps3 media server for movies and tv shows I have ripped to the server

So far I love the way it handles movies and shows that I already have but the live tv aspect of it has been a pain the the butt

Finally got everything setup earlier today and video is good but gets pixelated a little more often than I would like
Going to try and see if a different codec will help with it though

 

[SaurusX]

Am currently in the process of changing over from WMC on windows 8 with xbox 360's as extends to windows 8 HTPC's running XBMC with nextpvr back end on our 3 main tv's.

Are you putting thin client PC's at each TV to access the nextpvr backend? What are the specs you're using? What are you using for an EPG? I've been looking into the possibility of changing to nextpvr once my current Media Center HTPC is retired. Relying on xbox extenders doesn't seem viable in the long run and I need options.

 

[snoturtle]

Hi

The plan is to get 3 of these and put one at each tv
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16883103785
Was going to go with the Intel NUC based celerons but these are cheaper and faster for not much larger in size

Yes they will all access a backend nextpvr server

As far as EPG goes I have it setup where nextpvr pulls EPG from http://www.schedulesdirect.org/ and than passes that along to XBMC

Currently have it all setup on a xps 13 laptop that I had around to make sure I could get everything working before I started ordering new hardware.
So far so good, still trying to tweak live tv
It works ok but pixelates more than I would like
Not sure if it is because it running wirelessly or not though and the laptop doesn't have an ethernet jack to try

I do wish that Microsoft would continue with MCE and extenders though
its clean and works well and once I change my server machine over to an ssd there is very little delay in changing channels now.
just doesn't have all the features I need

Are you putting thin client PC's at each TV to access the nextpvr backend? What are the specs you're using? What are you using for an EPG? I've been looking into the possibility of changing to nextpvr once my current Media Center HTPC is retired. Relying on xbox extenders doesn't seem viable in the long run and I need options.

 

[SparksIT]

I'm using MythTV as both my front and backend, I do believe that XBMC does integrate well with MythTV, though I haven't tried it myself. It does work great with OTA broadcast, which is all I use it for. I don't have cable so I couldn't tell you how well it works with that, though it supposed to work well with QAM channels. There may be some options for those with encrypted channels, but, like I said, all I use it for is OTA broadcast.

Setup can be an issue, especially if you are unfamiliar with Linux, but it took me at least 6 hours to get it set up to do all the general needs of a DVR. That said, at least 2-3 hours of that was getting the tuner to work, but that was my fault, as I picked a TV tuner that was not built into their systems. There are some features that I haven't had a chance to implement, such as auto start\shutdown, and web access, but it has worked very well over the past 7 months. I used Mythbuntu, and while I am not an expert in Linux, I do know enough to be dangerous. So if you are unfamiliar with Linux, it may take longer.

Best of all, its free, and their support is quite helpfully, only requirement is that you use IRC

 

[Aikouka]

According to the XBMC wiki, NextPVR supposedly supports CableCard-based tuning, but I could never get its OTA tuning to work. I think the most that I would get is audio. So, I was going to use XBMC, but with the difficulty in getting NextPVR to work, I just went with WMC. Although, we all know that WMC has fun bugs in it such as the back-to-back show recording problem where it won't do the +3 minute buffer on the first show as it stops that show to record the next one.

One thing that I'm curious about... I've tried viewing my recorded TV through library sharing in a Windows Home Group. Now, I used Windows Media Player as my player, but the video quality is awful. Would the quality be better if I used Windows Media Center on the other PC, or is there a way to increase the quality? I'm running over a wired, gigabit network, so there shouldn't be an issue in transmission speed.