What's available as far as TV tuner / PVR software w/ tv guide?

[Synomenon]

I used to use Beyond TV, but they stopped updating their software so I moved on to SageTV. SageTV got bought out by Google and I haven't used my TV tuner card since.

What else is available now? Just Windows Media Center?

 

[NutBucket]

Is there something about MC you don't like?

 

[Synomenon]

No. Just checking to see if the software landscape for TV tuners is as barren as it seems.

So, do you know if there's anything else besides MCE?

 

[wirednuts]

were lucky to have mce, and lucky to have it as good as it is.

the market isnt there for diy pvr's. people can barely use the cable company offerings. win8 should have had a revamped mce, but i would bet that less then 10% of windows users use mce... so i dont blame them for not doing anything. besides, it was done right in win7 so no reason to change it.

 

[postmortemIA]

you have sageTV, beyond tv, AMD's Catalyst media center; XBMC is coming with media center in next release too. You'll find that none of them are as well integrated as WMC.

 

[Mloot]

Although I have not tried it, I have read good things about MediaPortal.

 

[Shyatic]

Windows Media Center is awesome. It's 10 years old and better than anything else out there.

 

[el aye]

WMC is the best solution at this point in time IMO, but it does have a few things that I wish would get fixed but most likely, most importantly the ability to save the cached video after you start recording after you have been watching for a while.

 

[NutBucket]

I would say that's the only real annoyance I've come across.

 

[kornphlake]

MythTV is another one, it probably isn't worth messing with if you've got a windows OS though. The rumors I've read about the next release of XBMC having PVR functions suggest that it's running a MythTV backend.

 

[Aikouka]

What about the menial bug where Media Center keeps sending you to Recorded TV when you select Program Guide? That is an annoying bug. It seems that for some reason, Media Center doesn't change something "under the hood" when a left or right key press is received, but it magically starts working if you use up or down. Why? Because the magical fix for access the Program Guide is to hit up then down (or down then up) and then hit right to access the Program Guide.

EDIT:

There's also another issue where Windows Media Center tells me that my setup isn't HDCP-compliant. This seems to only occur after a reboot, and it appears to go away if you windowize your program (i.e. hit ALT+ENTER). It's still rather annoying since the nVidia Control Panel reports my setup as being HDCP-compliant the whole time.

Although, I need to look up a way to have WMC launch XBMC for me, because while I prefer WMC for its tuner capability, I still prefer XBMC for playing networked media. I tried out Media Browser, but it just doesn't seem that worthwhile for me. One of the largest issues is that it doesn't seem to have an anime scraper, which means when you browse my anime, you are presented with a bunch of question marks. Also, I prefer being able to see more at once, which means I like XBMC's File Navigation Mode over the fancy movie poster mode that Media Browser has (XBMC has a similar feature). I can also sync my libraries across my XBMC instances using MySQL, which means I can watch an hour of a movie downstairs, go upstairs, and continue watching it where I left off with no effort (other than hitting enter on the "Continue from..." menu).

 

[el aye]

Try http://xbmcwmc.teknowebworks.com/

I haven't used it personally, but I know I've read people doing this.

 

[Shadowknight]

MythTV is another one, it probably isn't worth messing with if you've got a windows OS though. The rumors I've read about the next release of XBMC having PVR functions suggest that it's running a MythTV backend.

You mean the Frodo release? You can use several TV backends with it. I'm using Myth, but changing TV channels in XBMC vs Myth Frontend is about 3.5 seconds longer than normal (5 seconds total). Still, works good for checking the EPG and change scheduling/watching recorded shows, but I would recommend against casual channel-surfing, due to the annoying 5 seconds channel-change.

 

[NutBucket]

What about the menial bug where Media Center keeps sending you to Recorded TV when you select Program Guide? That is an annoying bug.

Holy crap, I thought that was just some weird thing I experienced! Again, given how well it usually works I really don't care. But yes, annoying!

 

[master7045]

I can also sync my libraries across my XBMC instances using MySQL, which means I can watch an hour of a movie downstairs, go upstairs, and continue watching it where I left off with no effort (other than hitting enter on the "Continue from..." menu).

Off topic, but Plex will do this for you automagically and it works well across multiple devices. I've switched movies from laptop to ROKU to iPad just to test it and it works well. If you've started a move and didn't finish, it will ask if you'd like to continue from xx.xx.xx (HH.MM.SS) or start from beginning.

Anyway, to keep this post relevant to the OP, I use MC w/ a 360 as an extender. Works fine for me.