Stopping Media Centre

[mvallevand]

I went to watch live tv on my ATSC tuner today and NextPVR said tuner not found, and sure enough config said Present No Enabled Yes. I rebooted with no change. So rooting around in services, I noticed that for some reason the Microsoft Media Centre Scheduler had become enabled (I have it set Manual), I turned it off and NPVR immediately found the tuner.

Would it be possible to have NRecord try and either stop this with

net stop ehSched

or provide a pre-recording.bat file? When it is not running this will run quickly and when it is started the wait will be worth it.

Martin

[whurlston]

It was probably due to the background scan feature. Disable it with the following:

Code:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\BackgroundScanner\PeriodicScanEnabled = 0 (DWORD)

Works a lot better than trying to monitor the scheduler service (which seems to have a mind of it's own).

Set it to 1 to enable if when you want to scan for new channels in Media Center.

I can't remember if a reboot is needed so I recommend doing one just in case.

[sub]

I've added support for a scripts\PreRecording.bat in the next release which you could add this to. If the batch file exists, the app will wait for it to run to completion.

Others might find it useful for other logic.

[mvallevand]

Thanks to both of you.

whurlston does that registry setting stop your MCE tools? I don't have that key and don't want to add it if it will break something that is working so well.

Martin

[whurlston]

Nope. Media Center will (by default) run a scan of channels on your tuners when they are not in use (by Media Center) to attempt to remap the QAM channels (or some other stream analysis reason). This of course prevents the tuners from being used by other applications. That registry setting just prevents that scan from happening. It was an issue with the HDHomeRuns when another machine would try to access the tuner only to find it was in use.

The only thing it breaks is the channel scan in the Media Center TV Signal Setup, which is why you need to enable it if you ever have to do that again.

[mvallevand]

Thanks again whurlston, it's great to see you back.

Martin

[whurlston]

Great to be back! It's been a whirlwind of a few months.

[stustunz]

Dont know if its different but i turn off media center in
control panel/
turn windows features on/off (on left)
media features
windows media center

doesnt seem to show back up yet

[whurlston]

That works too (for anyone else reading this thread). That method basically "uninstalls" Media Center. It won't work in Martin's case because he is using some of the Media Center services and he would lose that functionality.

[steveum]

Could this Windows Media Center scanner cause random "device failed to start" errors? I often seen where I have some QAM recordings fail in the middle of the night. These are typically kids shows on the local PBS kids channel, so missing some never really bothers me too much. I always thought it pretty odd that I never miss a QAM recording in prime time, but these recordings scheduled for 2:30 AM will fail quite often.