Total Mediaportal newbie - initial experience

[PhilMcCavity]

I've been running a dual-tuner HTPC setup with 2xNebula tuners (1xPCI master, 1xUSB master) for a few years. The PC is getting a bit long in the tooth and the Nebula software is flaky at best, so I'm running Mediaportal on a trial basis. My impressions so far :

The Good:

• A great-looking and consistent user interface
• My Videos and My Photos work great. I haven't tried a DVD yet.
• Very easy to set up and get started
• Works well when driven using the keyboard and mouse

The Bad:

• I don't have an EPG set up, and the inability to specify a name for my recorded files means I end up with an unintelligible jumble of meaningless filenames
• It doesn't seem to be possible to schedule a TV recording unless you're currently tuned to the station in question, and it's a bit ungainly to schedule recordings in increments of 30 minutes - I'd like to be able to nominate whatever length I'd like.
• It would be good to be able to nominate how long to record for when selecting "record now"
• When I first start Mediaportal after a reboot, navigate to "my TV" and select "turn on TV", the program locks up for about 20 seconds until the TV actually starts. The first channel change also takes about 40 seconds. After that it's fine.
• I've yet to master the playlist feature in "my music", but it's not a quick and easy process to stack up a few albums to play. Single albums are easy enough, but it's far easier to browse my music folder and use right-click/enque in Winamp to play more than one album
• I haven't found a way to stream internet radio in V1 yet - I did see a plugin but it doesn't indicate that it's V1 compatible.

The Ugly:

• I have a Windows MCE remote (non-genuine) and only a few of the buttons work as expected. I've not found a button that duplicates the ESC key ("back" isn't it), the aspect ratio button (which I need for a few of my videos) does nothing, nothing I've tried yet will fire up Mediaportal from the system tray and a few of the keys actually lock up Mediaportal to the point where I have to kill the app from task manager. I have both "Use microsoft MCE remote or keyboard" and "use general HID device" checked on the first 2 tabs in the remote configuration settings.

So, in summary :

1 - I still use Winamp to play music, stream internet radio and stream music from my Slimserver installation. This I can live with.
2 - If this is to pass the girlfriend test, I've got to get the remote to work seamlessly. This I can't live with (the remote, not the girlfriend) and if I can't sort it I'll be receiving instructions to put the Nebula software back on. If anyone can point me at some info about this remote it might get me out of the woods here. If there are any utilities which will tell me what command is being sent by each button it'd be a great help (MP's logging doesn't seem to do it)

So in summary, other than the remote control and a few smaller issues, it looks pretty good. Thanks to the MP team!

[Marcusb]

Hi there,

why don't you have EPG set up? Do you not have net access at home? There are a number of built in EPG downloaders for australia and it seems a lot of your main issues are that MP is more suited to people who have the EPG set up correctly. It will always be a little clunky using MP without a reliable EPG.

For the playlists, I think there are settings in Music config for this. The main way is to just highlight a song and hit "play" on the remote. In config you can configure whether that song is played next or at the end of the current playlist. I don't use this often so could be corrected here

For radio, again, I don't stream radio at all, but I understand the radio section of MP should easily be able to do this. If you are using the TV Server setup (IE able to record shows when MP is closed, via a service) then it's in the TVServer configuration application.

For the remote control, Windows MCE support is built in as standard. As long as you have the "Use MCE Remote" option ticked in configuration then it should all be good. Some third party ebay remotes are not pure MS clones and as such, can be set up to work, but may need some feedback from you. Mostly the hardware ID of the remote so MP knows what to look for. To get help with this, enable extended logging in the MS remote section of MP Config, send some remote commands and then post the resulting log file back here.
I can't help you with this bit, but there are a couple of MCE experts floating around ;-)

With regards to the time to turn on and change channels. This is unusual. if you look in the log files do you see any steps that do take a long time to complete?
I think I never get any delays longer than about five seconds, but this does seem long when sitting there. It's also largely dependant on your signal strength too.

Hope this helps you pass the GF test and thanks for the feedback.

[PhilMcCavity]

I have a few issues to sort through here. I'll start separate threads for each one as I get totally stuck. Thanks for your help.