newbie Q: advantages of gbpvr over win XP MCE??

[arjay]

I already have a win XP MCE 2005 box and am fairly happy with mce. Obviously I don't relish paying for it but that has already happened <g>. I have all the usual reservations about MS (I have linux on all my other boxes - but got fedup with the problems in getting mythtv to run. I had an old copy of XP lying around, so only had to shell out for mce).

However, now I have everything up and running in mce (only 10 minutes and a couple of the usual crashes later all was good). I live in Spain but get Sky via a UK setup.

My questions are:

1. I would like to give gbpvr a go. Will it coexist happily alongside mce on the same PC?

2. Can I use the MS wireless keyboard and remote (with remapping if necessary)?

3. What would people say are the advantages in terms of actual facilities/options/add-ons etc?

4. Any reasons why I shouldn't switch?

Thanks for any help. BTW I DID search this and other forums but couldn't find much in the way of a decent comparative review of the two products - mainly just anti-Microsoft stuff with which I mainly concur. (But it doesn't help understand the differences in the products)

RJ

NOTE - Edited to re-number questions!

[ricklous]

Welcome!

1) Yes. You need to disable a couple of services which start with 'eh*' to stop MCE reacting to your MCE remote 'green button' and snagging your tuners for itself. once youve done this you shouldnt have a problem with regards to mce and GBPVR getting tangled.

2) Yes.

3) the ones in GBPVR wont try and make you buy anything! But realisticly. GBPVR is very very flexible. With MCE you get what you get. With GBPVR you can generally craft the PVR you want...browse the plugin/utility/skin section of the wiki and see all the different options you have...

4) None at all. And when youve been using it for a week before realising its not crashed once you probably wont go back. You may loose your social life as rather a lot of people here get addicted to fiddling and tweaking it....

[arjay]

ricklous - thanks for the vote of confidence!. You are right, I have had a couple of crashes of the "Sorry for the inconvenience but MCE has had to close etc.." Even Win XP crashed on me once - blue screen of death no less. Also, now I have been using linux for nearly a year, I had forgotten all the scary stuff around viruses and hijacking etc. The constant updating of anti-virus files is a right PINA.

When I was trying out mythtv - I found (when I finally got it to work, sort of) that there were other facilities such as a web browser built in etc that mce doesn't appear to have. I can't see the point of having to minimize mce so that I can use other software that should be built in - e.g. Internet Exploror, proper Windows Media Player and so on.

BTW - I have found that when I copy CDs to My Music, it frequently doesn't find the album and track titles. Also, I now have several albums that are shown in MCE as unknown/not on the hard disk, but WMP shows them as there with the correct titles. I have tried to delete them in MCE but it still lists them until I try to play them when it says "missing albums". Very frustrating. I have deleted them in WMP and recopied them but the same thing happens everytime.

OK - well I think I will give GBPVR a go. Then, when mythtv or equivalent has moved from version .25 to something approaching version 1, I'll go back to linux-driven "mce".

Thanks again for the info.

Richard

[cosmocat]

I lived with XP MCE box for a year before rebuilding it as a GBPVR box, and I would REALLY urge anybody to do the same. MCE was good as an introduction to the PC PVR and was simple to set up, but it is really limited and a deeply flawed and dissapioning experience. I have been using GBPVR for 2 months and would never go back to MCE.

Problems I had with MCE.
MCE would "forget" to record programs I had set up, for no apparent reason.:mad:

MCE program guide is very flakey. The whole EPG service dissapeared for 6 weeks over Christmas 2005 meaning it was impossible to record ANYTHING over the whole period (The problem was a Microsoft server-side problem with the EPG data):mad:. Also very often when selecting a program to record a message would pop up saying " Problem with Guide Data, Reboot your PC".

File format - MCE records tele in its own MS-DVR file format, only playable on windows PCs and not supported by video editing software (except windows movie maker when you apply an unpublicesed registery hack to enable it - another example of microsoft crippling there own product for what I assume are buissness reasons, not technical ones). Trying to burn shows to DVD so they could be played in a normal DVD player was a total pain involving buying more software that I never got working.:mad:

Regular crashes and lockups.

Extender support - where to start on this one!
1) Outside of the US the only extenders were Xbox360's, and around new year these were retailling at £400.
2) No software extenders exist even though microsoft have obviously written one ( for the xbox) they have not ported it across to the PC platform and as far as I am aware never will! A software extender, called "softsled" was rumoured as part of MCE2004 but dispite many pleas from users on microsoft support sites and user groups they will not release it. (who can blame them, they want to sell you an xbox for £400!)
3) To use their extenders you must use microsofts own uPNP server " windows media connect" . This will stop my Netgear MP101 uPNP music player from working due to a long standing and unresolved incompatibility between the two where the Netgear plays one track only then locks up.
So due to all this I was faced with having to have the PC in the lounge under the telly (and the noise was getting too irritating); not being able to extend the PVR system into our bedroom; and having a useless music player.


GBPVR fixes all this.

With cheap and excellent MVP extenders its possible to have it in multi rooms meaning the PC can be shut away in the study. I can use TVersity uPNP media server software on the same PC so my Netgear MP101 works without problems.

TV guide works reliably.

I have installed 3 tuners so never run out of tuner resource which I could not do in MCE.

It does everything MCE can (except the "Online content" stuff which in the UK was totally useless anyway) and more, with more flexibility and open standards. The whole system is just more reliable and stable and an all round better user/ownership experience.

[arjay]

Cosmocat

Blimey mate - sounds like I gotta change!! Thanks for a very helpful summary of the probs.

Of course, there is the Wife Acceptance Factor while I switch over from MCE to think about - hopefully it won't be too difficult. Only had MCE up and running for a few weeks - dread the "Now you have to learn this great new program" bit.

If I managed (eventually) to get mythtv working on an old PIII as an experiment, I can probably get GBPVR to work. Unfortunately I have only just persuaded her to spring the money for a dedicated silent PC for the living room - I got a tranquil PC in the end. VERY expensive but utterly silent and an absolute dream. Only potential probs are the limited onboard sound (already dumped the onboard graphics as there is a spare slot for a video card) and the 1.7 Pentium M chip which I just have to hope will have enough grunt to encode/decode HDTV when sky finally get round to it.

Just to explain, here in Spain all houses have thick concrete walls AND FLOORS - which makes it difficult to run cables around, and wireless is a bit flabby with all the concrete and the distances involved.

BTW - do you have Sky or some other signal? The reason I ask is that I need to have GBPVR, including the EPG, working with Sky as if it were in the UK. I take it that this is OK?

Thanks again for the heads-up.

Richard

[JeffElkins]

I ran MCE for about two/three months then decided to change my hardware. I moved it to a Shuttle XPC and was less that pleased, so decided to move it back to its original box, enhanced with a 1TB RAID setup.

Boom! "We're sorry, but your system has radically changed so your install key is invalid. Please call our friendly support staff in Bombay who will have you enter a 40 character key to unlock your copy of MCE."

I did so and re-installed, fuming all the while. After a day or so I decided to junk MCE for MythTV. I got it working, but didn't care for the video plugin, so I gave GB-PVR a shot. It. Just. Works.

[zed]

I ran MCE for about two/three months ... I gave GB-PVR a shot. It. Just. Works.

That was exactly my experience...

I fought with MCE for several months. Every time you looked cross-eyed at it it would crash and/or give you some error. I finally was fed up enough with it to look at other PVR packages. I stumbled on GB-PVR, installed it in about 20 mins., and it just works. I've been running it for over a year and have had no major issues (and damned few minor ones). The MVP support is also a very big plus. The wife & kids love it. No way I'd ever go back to MCE...esp. since I nuked my system and installed vanilla XP Pro...no MCE to go back to...but then, no need, either.

The biggest problem is that I've had to add more disk (I have about 500G now, and add a couple PVR150's (total of three now), and an additional MVP (two).

[arjay]

Thanks to everyone for the confirmation - I will give it a try this weekend and report back my experiences.

RJ

[arjay]

For anyone still subscribed - just to let you know that I got gbpvr installed.

Overall I thought the install was pretty painless (especially compared to mythtv!!). However, I thought that the process to get the epg up and running was very poor. The xmltv stuff is not well documented, as far as I could find anyway. Strange given the origins of gbpvr. It is still a long-winded and quite complicated process for a newbie IMHO. I don't think in this day and age a new user should have to enter command line instructions - I expect that in my linux setups but not with windoze .

I also can't get the 150mce to work properly but I'll post seperately for that. Some of the buttons don't work at all and others (e.g. the fast forward) just crash the program and I have to shutdown and re-open gbpvr. It also won't change any channels on the sky box.

Thanks to everyone for their encouragement. I am only a few days into the experience and so far it has been pleasing enough to want to learn more. I hate to have to use Windows programs but mythtv is a long way from useable yet, so hopefully I can at least stick with gbpvr.

RJ

[sub]

Overall I thought the install was pretty painless (especially compared to mythtv!!). However, I thought that the process to get the epg up and running was very poor. The xmltv stuff is not well documented, as far as I could find anyway.

The process of setting up XMLTV varies from country to country, so I havnt documented it at all. If you're using an XMLTV EPG source, GB-PVR just expects the resulting XMLTV file to be available...the rest is up to the users and outside the scope of my project.

I dont intend this software to be used by beginners, so I'm quite happy for there to be a few "challenges" for the user. If they cant work this sort of thing out, then in my opinion this isnt the app for them.

I don't think in this day and age a new user should have to enter command line instructions

As I said, it varies from counrty to country - many have nice GUI apps that do it all for you automatically with no command line stuff required.