preferred OS for GB-PVR?

[zehd]

What is there in Vista Home Premium or Business that makes them more desirable for GB-PVR than Vista Basic? If you're running GB-PVR who cares about the Media Center stuff? Or Aero eye-candy? Does EVR work in Basic? Is there any advantage to Vista over XP for a server machine? I ask because I have access to a Basic license but don't want to spend the $ on anything else.

Premium anything will include the Media Center components... The XMLTV grabber mce2xml (not to be confused with mc2xml) requires the Media center...

Other than that, I do not know. Whatever I've heard, Basic would be just fine, if you only intend to use GB-PVR...

[johnsonx42]

What is there in Vista Home Premium or Business that makes them more desirable for GB-PVR than Vista Basic? If you're running GB-PVR who cares about the Media Center stuff? Or Aero eye-candy? Does EVR work in Basic? Is there any advantage to Vista over XP for a server machine? I ask because I have access to a Basic license but don't want to spend the $ on anything else.

The only reason I mentioned and am now using Business is that I have licenses for it. I also have licenses for XP Pro. What I don't have is any spare XP Home licenses, and have never had any license for Vista Home.

As far as I know the only disadvantage to Business is that it doesn't include the microsoft mpeg-2 decoder. But I have no idea whether that decoder is desirable to use, and there are certainly no shortage of alternatives. The k-lite codec pack even includes Cyberlink's decoder, though I'm not sure how they get away with doing that.

I don't know if Home Basic includes the mpeg-2 decoder... I think it does, but I wouldn't count on it; I've never so much as touched a copy of Home Basic. Certainly Basic is no worse off than Business in that regard.

[johnsonx42]

For anyone reading this far, I give one warning about using Vista for GB-PVR:

DISABLE UAC.

Trust me. GB-PVR keeps it's config file in with the Program Files. This is bad in Vista, and has VERY bizarre consequences if UAC is on. I'm too tired to explain, but if you have any problems with config.xml changes not sticking (particularly if they are changes you made by hand), then disable UAC. This is not unique to GB-PVR, I've run into this with other apps.

[SLR_65]

Ah Ha! I was running Vista Ultimate for a bit and this exact thing happened! I could make changes in the config and save it but when I loaded it back up the changes weren't there and it had defaulted back to what it was!

Originally I could make the changes, it was a couple weeks after the load that the problems started. I had other reasons to migrate to XP Pro so I didn't really investigate further - THANKS for solving the mystery for me!!!

[johnsonx42]

One last bit of Vista advice: If you don't use EVR (I had to give it up because I needed an AspectRatioMode with a negative number, and EVR won't allow that), then you'll want to disable Aero else VMR9 Custom will stutter. VMR9 FSE is fine, but there are usually other reasons not to use FSE.

[Dava]

The problem for me with Vista is that it will not allow you to deny standby requests. With my XP build, if someone presses the power button and it is recording, I catch this and prevent it. I also want to display some info on a display before standby, I can't do that on Vista either.

[b00sfuk]

The problem for me with Vista is that it will not allow you to deny standby requests. With my XP build, if someone presses the power button and it is recording, I catch this and prevent it. I also want to display some info on a display before standby, I can't do that on Vista either.

Agree, this is the on annoyance I have left with my HTPC setup on Vista. Tried to fix it with SlimmGBPVR utility but no luck. There is a Microsoft policy setting that is supposed to allow this but we could not get it to work (there is a thread in the SlimmGBPVR forum if anybody is interested http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=35079&page=4).

Other than that I much prefer Vista to XP. It is very reliable and the EVR picture quality is great.

[johnsonx42]

The problem for me with Vista is that it will not allow you to deny standby requests. With my XP build, if someone presses the power button and it is recording, I catch this and prevent it. I also want to display some info on a display before standby, I can't do that on Vista either.

That seems like a rather major gotcha. I've been working on getting sleeping to work: so far I've got it waking up nice as can be, and it will sleep on command from the remote or from the System menu, but it won't sleep on it's own (it will sleep immediately after the 2:00am epg update, but other than that once it wakes up it stays awake).

But if the remote will be able to put it to sleep even during a recording, I may have to give up on sleep altogether. Fortunately my system uses only about 40 watts while idle, but zero would be much better.

I wonder if that's something sub could fix? ....you know, as long as he has nothiing else to do

[stustunz]

im sick of people saying XP isnt reliable
or vista is more reliable my latest Xp machine has never crashed it is capible of running vista but i see no need to change
XP is reliable if you have the right hardware and the right idiot sitting in front of it
get the wrong idiot that buys cheap hardware (or anything asus) uses flaky software and hello it will crash
ahh i feel better now

[gEd]

Did anyone say xp was unreliable?

I have found both xp and vista to be extremely stable. I can't recall the last time either crashed on me, either at work or at home.

XP was a great platform for my old gbpvr system, worked well for several years and is still a totally suitable OS to use.

Hopefull vista and windows 7 will be just as good.