MediaPortal Install Guide - Page 11

Uh.

Ok, so is anyone else having this problem EVERY single time mediaportal is shut down?

Never had an issue with MediaPortal or any other program. Checking the obvious, in Mediaportal Configuration under General you have "Minimize to tray on GUI exit" UNCHECKED correct?

I have been using MP for a few weeks now and it has been working great.Today however it stoped playing audio in both movies and music files. Thought it was a codec issue so reloaded recomended coecs from the first post but still no luck. I have uninstalled MP and all codecs and reloaded with the same results. Audio files will play in Total Media Theater launched from MP or with windows media player. The only thing that seems to be different is that I configured windows Media player earlier to try to figure out a problem I was having with streaming music. I am running Vista. I hope someone has a sugestion or I might be reinstalling Vista this weekend...

How are you outputting audio? HDMI, SPDIF, analog to a receiver or right to computer speakers? What audio codecs are you using?

You may want to grab GraphStudio (http://blog.monogram.sk/janos/tools/...m-graphstudio/) and open up one of your movie files with it. That will show you what codec the system is configured to use for video and audio and may point to the problem as well.

Have you tried hitting 'm' to unmute media portal? - and = are volume down and up, respectively.

Just checking

Again this is ONLY if the streamed MP skin is selected...

Ahh gotcha - sorry missed that first time around. That's a strange one, I don't know enough about what the skin is doing differently. One thing I'd suggest would be to make a note of which plugins are active, then to troubleshoot, disable them all, then see if it still hangs on exit. If not, then its probably one of the plugins that's causing the issue - start enabling them again to see if you can figure out which one.

Thanks the volume was turned all the way down in MP. Dont know how that happened but it was driving me nuts... Thanks agian...

Well it's interesting to know I'm the only one having this issue thus far! Maybe an uninstall-reinstall is in merit. The only plugins I'm using (for streamed mp) are the RSS feed and moving pictures.

You may want to try running process explorer to see if you can find any attached threads that are causing it to hang with the process. I don't know if you are at all familiar with Process Explorer, but it is tool developed by Sysinternals a while back, and between it and the other tools they made (that rule!), Windows essentially bought them out and now host them. Here is a link....

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896653.aspx

You may want to check out some of the setup guides to get it working in a manner condusive to your goal. There is a good newbie forum post on their main forum that would be a good place to start...

http://forum.sysinternals.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=10998

Bear in mind this app will throw a lot of technical data back at you, but it may just help give some clues as to the culprit. If you are in desperation mode, it is worth a shot. I've used it in the past in my old position at work when I dealt more with 32bit apps, and the results were hit and miss for the kind of issues I had, but perhaps you will have better luck.

Has anyone figured out a workaround in the Windows 7 beta that will allow mounting of Blu-ray rips and startup in PowerDVD from within MediaPortal utilizing Virtual Clone drive rather than Daemon Tools? I can't get either Daemon Tools or VCD to work in Win 7 so far....TIA

I think I may have found my mediaportal holy grail and gotten the EPG to work. I used this post.
http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/el...acement-28637/

It's not the most simple process in the world and I'm still fighting to get the proper time settings, but I've actually got a guide.

I figure you've got about a 50/50 chance of success which is a whole lot better than what I was getting before. Now I've got some new issues but these might have been caused by the new tuner card I added. If I can get this to work then I can save $100 I'd have to spend for beyond tv. Hopefully someone can get it working properly.

duff99,
why not just pay for schedulesdirect and get the SD plugin? it took me all of 5 minutes to set up...

I did. It never worked for me. Did you have to map channels? I installed the plugin and it said that it had download the guide, but nothing ever showed up. What did you have to do? Any help would be appreciated.

duff99,
Here is the plugin I downloaded for schedules:
http://www.team-mediaportal.de/datei...orMEEPGPlugin/

I followed the "best way" instructions on that page and was up and running in about 5 minutes.

Hope that helps.

:edit: you set up your channel lineup on the schedules direct website right?

Thanks 10K, I'll give it a try again. Mediaportal has decided that it can't use any of my hdtv tuners now. So maybe I'll kill two birds with one stone and try to set up everything again.

duff,
I accidently deleted my capture cards in the tv server config app and had to completely reinstall to fix it.

I documented my entire hardware/software setup process in a thread over at arstechnica.

You can check it out here:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/...1#138008956931

Cheers,
10k

I sure wish somebody with more tech knowledge than myself would write a guide like this for the TV Server. The documentation and videos for setting up SQL Server and TV Server appear to be a version or two out of date. Screens and choices appear in the process that aren't mentioned in the documentation or videos. I've tried getting through them with trial and error, but since nothing works I guess it's been all error so far.

Specifically, when I start up TV Server Configuration, the SQL Server User ID and Password I had set up earlier don't work... "Connection failed! Login failed for user 'sa'"... and I can't go anywhere from there............

Are you using the right password for the sql server? user sa password is 'MediaPortal'. it is case sensitive.

:edit:
Also, make sure you edited the connection properties for SQL as outlined in this guide:
http://www.team-mediaportal.com/manu...ion/SQL-Server
and that you have opened your firewall ports
http://www.team-mediaportal.com/manu...ation/Firewall

I think the problem has to do with my capture cards. I got an HDHomerun first. It was working fine just no guide. I was under the false impression that I'd be able to get my basic cable channels through qam. I only got my local channels, albeit in HD, but no cable channels. So I got an avermedia m780. It has an ntsc and a atsc/qam tuner.

I'd already set up the HDHomerun so I didn't bother scanning for qam channels on the m780 but I did on the ntsc input. It worked and it was about that time that I managed to get that alternate epg working. It was then that I discovered that I couldn't use the qam tuners anymore.

I tried rescanning, but it just raced through without detecting any channels. I tried redoing the setup and now none of the tuners would detect any channels. I'd done some messing around with drivers and such so I tried going back and doing everything again. I set up the HDHomerun again and it worked, then when I installed the m780 drivers everything stopped working again. I'm thinking that there's some sort of conflict between the two tuners. I'm going to try again setting it up in a different order and see if that helps.

I've been playing around with different programs trying to find something that will work. Beyond tv works great but costs $100. I haven't had any luck with gb-pvr yet, but if I can't get Mediaportal working I might have to try again. My ultimate goal is to figure out a system I can build for my mom that she can actually use. I built a playback system for my dad using Mediaportal, but that only has to play back ripped content no recording. I really like Mediaportal and appreciate it's flexibility. I just have to figure this tv thing out to make it perfect.

I'm going to keep trying and I'll keep you updated if I have any luck.

I do not quite agree with daMaster on the above two points. My apologies to daMaster in advance.

MCE Remote: This statement is only a half truth. It works out-of-the-box but not 100%. It is only good for navigating the UI but it does not work out-of-the-box if you want to control the STB with the MCE Blaster. There are some blaster plugins but it is very flaky at best. I have been desperately trying to replace VMC with Media Portal but this Blater thing has been killing me. The support in the support forums is virtually non-existent. Just see the number of posts that do not even attract a reply in MP forums.

Wonderful Media Portal Documentation: This is again something I strongly disagree. May be it was wonderful at one time but not anymore. It seems to be very dated. In fact most of the screenshots do not match with what you see during installation.

I have had my fair share of problems with VMC too. But, there are forums like thegreenbutton and our very own AVS where it only takes a few hours to get a response and most of the times it only takes a couple of posts in a thread to arrive at a solution. Such is the wealth of knowledge at these forums. That is sorely missing at MP.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Please do not let my observations dissuade you from trying out MP. It is a wonderful piece of software without any doubt but only if you do not expect support from the forums as you have got accustomed to here at AVS.

Concerning the MCE remote, I have a Harmony 720 emulating the MCE remote and the only modification I had to make was for ESC (back). I use EventGhost and programmed the MCE Red, Blue, Yellow, and Green buttons to be right mouse click, ESC, Alt-F4 (exit) and Launch MediaPortal respectively.

The only time I have to grab the keyboard is when I start doing something outside of MediaPortal.

MCE Remote: This statement is only a half truth. It works out-of-the-box but not 100%.

+1
I can truly feel your pain.

With iMon that comes with antec or silverstone boxes, Mce Remote works "out of the box" under VMC and its internal video player but it certainly do not work "out of the box" with the MediaPortal internal video player.

To go one step further, I just found a .imo file for iMON that represented the MCE remote config, then I just added a couple of extra functions; after that, MP worked great using my H1, and the fact that I can use TMT inside of MP using the remote is great also...

dreamer

I am not at all familiar with what it is you are setting up in terms of this TV server as I myself have not touched it, but I do work with SQL a lot for my rl job. From what I have seen so far, it sounds as though you setup the sa account in your TV Server setup. My guess is the service is trying to use this configured account to authenticate with SQL. So, the question back to you is, how is your sa account configured on your SQL server? When you installed SQL, it at some point prompts you to enter a password for the sa account. If you didn't do this, then the pw is either empty or defaulted to 'sa' (most likely defaulted to sa)

You can test this by opening SQL Management Studio and try to login using SQL Authentication and the sa account credentials you configured in your TV Server. If it fails then you need to either reconfigure your TV server with the blank p/w (or sa), or, login with a different known SQL account and change the sa password under the Security > Logins section using the pw you configured in the TV Server. (Try windows authentication if you don't know of any other SQL logins)

In all actuality, using the sa account to run a service/application is not a good idea. I would suggest you setup a separate account with only the necessary read/write permissions on the database that this service requires and use that. sa is a whole-system super super admin account that leaves your system vulnerable if there are any points in the application that are susceptible to intrusion. People who write applications that use sa are, in my opinion, just too lazy to take the time to set things up properly since sa pretty much lets you do anything out of the box. Sure, it makes it easy to configure, but at what cost? Some might say its not that big of a deal since the data being used is non-critical, but SQL is more powerful than just giving the ability to read and write data, and in the wrong hands, can wreak havoc on a much larger scale than most people realize.

But I digress...give the a-fore mentioned hints above a try and let us know how it goes.

I can get TV server working OK, using MYSQL. Everything works OK until I do a reboot. Then TV server will not start, have to uninstall, then install to get it working again. I set it up as standalone server and client on same machine Vista. I been to the MediaPortal forum and tried to find solution. My computer is not on a network if that makes any difference. If I go to TV-Server config after reboot it crashes because TV Server won't start. Can anybody but in simple terms how to get TV Server to start after reboot, no network experience.

Everything else is working fine, my movies, weather ect.
What a great HTCP interface.

There might be a requirement for TVServer to have network connectivity. But I'm not sure. I know if network flaps tv streaming sometimes dies. Did you check the logs?