GBPVR and MCE2005 together

[Mattmannz]

First off, thanks for a great piece of software and I almost feel a little cheeky by asking my question below!

I have been running MCE now for a number of years and before that Showshifter. My partner really likes MCE, she finds it easy to use with the remote and only a few clicks and it does it's thing and it's important that anyone can use it easily.

I have a PVR250 in the MCE box running a Sky TV decoder with the MCE remote and irblaster. Using XMLTVNZ for an EPG source.

I recently added a HVR3000 to get DVB-S Freeview now and DVB-T next year when it's released.

MCE does not work well with dual tuners with only partial overlapping channel lineups and doesn't support DVB-S!!. After a LOT of fiddling I gave up and began looking for another PVR product.

I tried GB-PVR and pretty much out of the box it worked with both tuners, used the DVB-S transmission for the EPG and away we went!

Immediate impressions are that all the features are there but things seem to take an extra click or two to get running. My partner immediately disliked the interface after having been on MCE for such a long time. Things like the EPG search and navigation and recordings are not as simple as they are with MCE.

However the dual tuners thing is a killer for me so I am currently running a GBPVR and MCE2005 combo. I am using GBPVR to record all my repeating freeview channel recordings in MS-DVR format and saving them in the MCE2005 directory.

I am then using MCE to watch sky as well as the recordings that GBPVR generates. This is a pretty good compromise at the moment with the only downside being that the freeview only channels like TVNZ6 aren't available for live tv watching.

The problem I am having is making the show visible in MCE2005. The file doesn't get written to the final location until the recording has finished. Once the file is visible MCE won't update and show the file in the recordings view until I copy it off and back on.

Also the show data is incorrect, the show length and start and stop times aren't showing correctly in MCE. Anyone have any thoughts?

I will continue to monitor GBPVR as I think you are very close to making a very awesome piece of software that people would be happy to pay money for and a product that will seriously compete with Vista MCE.

Cheers
Matt.

[#66]

Keeping the WAF high is important, but surly the advantages of using GBPVR are clear. Afterall your say DVB-S works in GBPVR and not well in MCE. If you parter can't get round to leaning GBPVR, I thing you have to look in to upgrading her to V2.0 !!

[Mattmannz]

Haha, upgrading is dangerous, stay with what I know I think :-)

So is anyone playing back GBPVR files in MCE and seeing the same MS-DVR problem I am? The length and time is reported incorrectly and the title is all lower case.

Cheers
Matt.

[stustunz]

no as you are on a forum that is about gbpvr
i had gbpvr before i had mce2005 i used mce for a day and that was enough for me to go there is to much i am going to miss out on and switched straight back
epg was to hard to get going
something to do with how many tuners you could have
no comskip i think
couldnt add things you wanted
no support
no chance of a free upgrade

[zehd]

I would casually compare MCE and GB-PVR like a Mac to a PC. Macs just work, but don't make it easy to tweak. PCs are great when they work, but you can open the hood and tweak all you want...

What you're asking is to tweak MCE so that it will import recordings and other data from GB-PVR. You want to see a GB-PVR recorded show and display its correct duration. Maybe you will even want attached show information like titles and description, rather than just filenames.

That means you have to open the hood on MCE and get it to do what you want. I doubt that many people here will be able to help or write a utility that will do that.

You need to get help with the MCE community, because they have a lot of ideas on importing external shows and data.

I would suggest TheGreenButton.com

I have no other ideas beyond that...

[Mattmannz]

Thanks for the replies guys. GBPVR is a great product for sure.

The reason I am asking for support here is because it's most likely that GBPVR isn't adhering to the file format spec rather than MCE not working with it's own file format.

I have GBPVR set to record in MS-DVR format so I should be able to read the recordings in MCE properly.

Cheers
Matt.