2007-10-28, 02:46 AM
Sometimes I'd like to chuck the whole lot in the garbage, screen and all ... and just go back to reading books like our ancestors.
1. EPG. In New Zealand, the EPG situation is killing me. I've tried XMLTVNZ, but although the author has kindly made this program freely available, he (presumably having a normal life to live) does not keep it up to date frequently enough to cope with all the changes made to the websites it scrapes off. Therefore, I'm constantly battling to have a full EPG of just 5 channels, thats all. 5. Tv1, Tv2, Tv3, C4 and Prime. I was using a precompiled XML file that was secretly avaiable from a nice website, but that has recently disappeared. That, too, though caused me untold problems until I figured out how to use XMLTV to reformat the source file into an XML file that GBPVR was happy with. Right now, I can only get Tv1 and TV2 on my EPG. sob, sob, sob. I'm REALLY frustrated!
2. Hauppage. These guys do not have good support. For some reason, I'm one of the unlucky ones who's PVR 150's dont work so well. on C4, the sound pops, or rather, goes dead for very short periods (like 1/4 second) periodically. some shows are worse than others, and some days/weeks are worse than others. No solution as yet, so my favourite shows, Southpark and Family Guy are a hit and miss affair as to whether the audio will be acceptable, with just the odd pop, or absolutely unlistenable.
3. Widescreen/letterbox etc. This isn't a major, I guess, but when you buy a 32" TV, you really want to use the whole thing. F7 in GBPVR just doesn't seem to be able to give me an option where the picture fits nicely into the screen - it either has black bars somewhere, or cuts off part of the picture. sigh.
4. quartz.dll Why I need to replace this file with an older version I do not know ... is it microsoft's fault, hauppages, Nvidias??? But since I've rebuilt my HTPC several times, I've had to go through this process a lot. Again, not a major, but it took WEEKS to find the problem the first time.
5. Power saving. To be honest, the problems above have prevented me from investigating deeply into why I can't seem to get power saving to work properly. But I just gave up, and let the PC run 100% of the time. I wonder how much that is costing me? Electricity is so darned expensive nowadays.
6. Burning. When I first sat down and planned my HTPC, one of the things on my list was to have to ability to burn shows I'd recorded to DVD, which seemed like such an obvious thing to have. Even my mother-in-law can do it with her off-the-shelf Panasonic hard drive+DVD writer thingy (of course, she doesn't have an EPG, but I'm starting to envy her actually)
I even tried Media Portal. Lets not even go there!
I was thinking of installing a DVB card to get Freeview ... should I just commit suicide instead?
1. EPG. In New Zealand, the EPG situation is killing me. I've tried XMLTVNZ, but although the author has kindly made this program freely available, he (presumably having a normal life to live) does not keep it up to date frequently enough to cope with all the changes made to the websites it scrapes off. Therefore, I'm constantly battling to have a full EPG of just 5 channels, thats all. 5. Tv1, Tv2, Tv3, C4 and Prime. I was using a precompiled XML file that was secretly avaiable from a nice website, but that has recently disappeared. That, too, though caused me untold problems until I figured out how to use XMLTV to reformat the source file into an XML file that GBPVR was happy with. Right now, I can only get Tv1 and TV2 on my EPG. sob, sob, sob. I'm REALLY frustrated!
2. Hauppage. These guys do not have good support. For some reason, I'm one of the unlucky ones who's PVR 150's dont work so well. on C4, the sound pops, or rather, goes dead for very short periods (like 1/4 second) periodically. some shows are worse than others, and some days/weeks are worse than others. No solution as yet, so my favourite shows, Southpark and Family Guy are a hit and miss affair as to whether the audio will be acceptable, with just the odd pop, or absolutely unlistenable.
3. Widescreen/letterbox etc. This isn't a major, I guess, but when you buy a 32" TV, you really want to use the whole thing. F7 in GBPVR just doesn't seem to be able to give me an option where the picture fits nicely into the screen - it either has black bars somewhere, or cuts off part of the picture. sigh.
4. quartz.dll Why I need to replace this file with an older version I do not know ... is it microsoft's fault, hauppages, Nvidias??? But since I've rebuilt my HTPC several times, I've had to go through this process a lot. Again, not a major, but it took WEEKS to find the problem the first time.
5. Power saving. To be honest, the problems above have prevented me from investigating deeply into why I can't seem to get power saving to work properly. But I just gave up, and let the PC run 100% of the time. I wonder how much that is costing me? Electricity is so darned expensive nowadays.
6. Burning. When I first sat down and planned my HTPC, one of the things on my list was to have to ability to burn shows I'd recorded to DVD, which seemed like such an obvious thing to have. Even my mother-in-law can do it with her off-the-shelf Panasonic hard drive+DVD writer thingy (of course, she doesn't have an EPG, but I'm starting to envy her actually)
I even tried Media Portal. Lets not even go there!
I was thinking of installing a DVB card to get Freeview ... should I just commit suicide instead?
