XBMC+MythTV or WMC7 for Live TV recordings?

I just got a pre-eden version of xbmc from OpenElec.tv running with MythBox and MythTV 0.24

I found you'll need a NVidia video GPU with mythtv at this time; most of the VA stuff isn't totally working at this time..

Hi,

Seriously, the only solution that fits what you need is WMC. I like XBMC, but it's not ready as a DVR yet.

HTH,

Nick.

The issue is MythTV stores the video in raw, mpeg2 encoded files. The last pre-eden beta, with PVR functionality, had playback issues. Under Openelec, the VA support is still a work in progress (as I understand it).

You could try MythTV eden + PVR from here: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=110694

This supports full live TV, and recording built into XBMC - but it's not in any XBMC distro by default.

I found this: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=43115 but to make it work with MythTV 0.24, you really need a pre-Eden version of XBMC; so, instead of fighting that, I'm trying a OpenElec.tv daily build of pre-Eden, MythBox, and 0.24, and it's pretty slick in my mind; it also makes the system boot blindingly fast straight into XBMC, and the WAF is very high.

Can't speak to XMBC,

But I've been running WMC (2 Prime tuners) + Mediabrowser and I am very happy on the whole. You need the technical skill to setup codecs if you want to play things like MKVs, but other than that it's relatively straight forward and simple to use. The latest Mediabrowser also improved stability/speed for me as well.

What are your capture cards? Reason I ask is, I'm using HDHomeRuns & an HDHomeRun Prime. Also, the OpenElec daily includes the PVR portion from the thread you linked to?

Thanks!

I used WMC until I moved to NY. One of the stations caused WMC to crash everytime I tried to record something on it. So I switched to XMBC + SageTV (which isn't available commercially anymore). Given what you've outlined, I'd go with WMC. I like what I've ended up with on XBMC, but it requires tender loving care and some periodic tweaks to keep it running correctly.

Let's see it pretty much works fine

I went with Intel 2100T and use software playback (ffdshow) for h.264/MKVs (~20-30% cpu usage for 1080p material). Might try the new intel quicksync work from egur but haven't felt like it yet.

WMC works great for live/recorded TV, can use it for pictures and music as well. Although I prefer Mediabrowser's music plugin myself for that. I have 3 HTPCs (plus a desktop) with data served from an Unraid machine. All can now watch Live/RecordedTV as well as any movies/tv shows from the Unraid via Mediabrowser. Latest Mediabrowser (Apollo) seems to have sped up things and so far improved some stability issues I had (I have a relatively large collection (~800-1000 movies, dozens of TV series ~ 10TB total).

There are various "tricks/quirks" with WMC that I have learned about over the years (fixing overscanning requires a registry change and an odd setting in WMC see http://www.missingremote.com/guide/m...7-media-center, If necessary set windows to 2 channel sound and MCE to 5.1 if audio looping occurs, etc). You can play back audio files with FLAC in WMC but you need to install a plugin (various ways but I use http://bmproductions.fixnum.org/wmptagplus successfully).

Also for TV/Guide, I recommend installing My Channel Logos 2, Tuner salad (if more than 4 tuners needed), and Remote Potato (let's you view recorded shows/music from your phone/tablet/etc if your PC has enough power for the transcoding, but I mainly use it for being able to remotely record something when I forget).

If you care about playing back TrueHD or DTS-HD in MKVs then using the WMC player may not work (I haven't tried it in a long time and have had mixed results, probably depending on which version/configuration of the codecs I had at the time).

But overall its rather wife/family friendly. I have every HTPC with a harmony remote to make it basically one touch to turn on the TV etc. I have decided to just leave on all my HTPCs (they're pretty low power) instead of dealing with putting them to sleep/wake. Though I have had no major issues using S3 sleep in the past with WMC and recording TV. But it does get trickier if you are dealing with multiple HTPCs and one of them is the primary recorder. Speaking of that I do most of my recordings on one HTPC and nightly move the recordings a shared drive on my desktop that the other HTPCs can access. Various ways to do this but I have a nightly task created that runs a .bat file that using robocopy to do this.


But I digress ...let me know if you had any other particular questions.

I have a similar setup as genro. I use WMC7 with HDHomerunPrime and use it along with my Logitech Harmony remote via usb IR receiver and it is wife friendly. My whole goal was to make it as similar to a cable box interaction as possible and what I have is much better. I use MediaBrowser to view all of my movies/tv shows on my Freenas server. I then use MPC-HC to play my ripped blu-rays. With MPC-HC I have it setup to handle all of the HD audio formats with madVR and lavcuvid.

I let WMC handle everything else.

Genro, thanks for the info on My Channels logo. I'll need to try this out.

BTW, how are you able to copy over content to a shared folder? I don't think I'm able to do this since I have TWC and they copy-protect everything you record.

Fortunately I have Fios

What do you mean exactly? To play what kind of files? I can play everything I want in WMC player (I don't do blurays), but it's not easy (if possible at all) to get HD audio through WMC player if that's what you mean. But it plays regular Dolby/DTS fine.

Sure it is.

Just to throw a little extra into the mix, have you looked at Mediaportal.

I dont pretend to be terribly knoweldegable compared to the gurus on here, but I have it working very happily (with just a couple of quirks - which is kinda a requirment for a HTPC anyway).

I use it as a single front-end for:

PVR functionality
DVD/Blu ray rips (with HD audio)
Music
Actualy playing CD's & DVD's
Actualy playing Blu Ray's - this is the only bit that is a slight work around; a mediaportal menu selection opens Arcsoft TMT5 in full screen to give you full Blu ray functionality, when you finish you just drop back to Mediportal

The wife loves it and finds it easy to use and shes certainly not very technical....

I really cant comment on WMC7/Mediabrowser and XBMC, only on my own Mediaportal experience. When i was originaly looking at which option to take (about 12 months ago) I ruled out XBMC because of the lack of built in PVR support and it just came down to WMC7/Mediabrowser v's Mediportal.

To me, Mediaportal looks prettier.... having said that, the support community for WMC7/Mediabrowser (led on here by assasin) seems pretty amazing; I struggle sometimes to get answers for my Mediaportal issues; particulaly on here but also in Mediaportal's own forums.

Anyway thats just my 2 cents worth....Mediaportal doesnt get enough love on AVS as I think it should!!

I have two HDHomerun's setup for OTA. You don't need the PVR version to use MythBox; just a eden-beta of XBMC.

Mythbox let's you watch live tv, pause, rewind, etc.. The XBMC PVR doesn't let you do that - yet. It can almost everything else.

I was in the same boat as you and ended up using wmc for live tv and xbmc for movies and tv shows and with the xbmc wmc plugin it makes it easy to switch between both.

In my scenario everything runs through WMC7. I use WMC7 to view livetv and recordings. Then I go to the MediaBrowser link in WMC7 to view my tv shows and blu-ray movie rips that I have on my freenas. I have setup Mediabrowser to launch for mpc-hc for any mkv file. This then opens up mpc-hc and when I hit stop or the movie ends it takes me directly back to mediabrowser. The one reason I use mpc-hc is so I can use lavcuvid and madvr for better quality video and HD audio format. Mediasmartserver.net has a tutorial on how to setup ffdshow and other codecs to use the built-in WMC7 player to handle HD formats.

This is a pretty straightforward solution and seems very wife friendly.

The one downside to using WMC7 is that the netflix application doesn't handle DD 5.1, only HD. I use my xbox whenever possible to play netflix as the recently allowed for HD and DD 5.1.

I think this should cover

Here is what is needed to play FLAC files - http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/01/playi...ia-center.html

This is true but try it before you cross it off the list. Right now I am in a testing phase and I have wmc running with mediabrowser and xbmc plugins. Similiar to what the utee05 said.

I can't speak to it now, I know early on (sometime last year or so) I had intermittent success with it. I should clarify I mean w/o disabling Windows Media Foundation (which IIRC is needed if you have a cable card tuner) while using Gabest/Haali. Maybe I'm wrong as I haven't tried it in quite a while and maybe its easier with LAV, but I need to use Gabest/Haali for Media Control.

I put up the latest version of Mythbuntu on my ESXi box last night, configured my HDHomeRun Primes - Check
Downloaded the Eden beta, installed Mythbox - Check
Tuned into Live TV from Mythbox (XBMC) - CHECK!!!

So Eden fixed what was broken in pre-Eden. The latest MythTV (MythBuntu) is needed for HDHomeRun Prime, but that same version didn't work with the new XBMC protocol (as I remember reading it). Regardless, it all works now.

HOLY COW!!! WMC is officially GONE!!!

Mind I'm still happy using SageTV... but as those days are numbered, it's nice to know I have options!

I just got a TV tuner and was struggling with this for the past few weeks. I wanted to use one program for everything so I installed Media Browser and host of other programs. In the end I felt XBMC works a hell of a lot better for videos than WMC. I will have to settle with WMC for TV and XBMC for videos.

I found an app by the name of XBMC integration which adds a launch icon in Windows Media Center for XBMC. It will close WMC to launch XBMC. When XBMC is closed it launches XBMC. If I could only find a way to map it to my harmony remote it would be perfect.