Black Screen when running Media Portal (2 Viewers)

[Marvin Miller]

Awesome!

I understand your rationale on trying MP but the situation here is that with MCE we're dependent on Microsoft's support of the guide (now using Rovi - which sucks compared to Schedules Direct/Gracenote). So what's going on in the MCE world is that there are only a few hardcore folks like myself that still use it. Microsoft's onus to keep providing the guide is something they are getting quite bad at. It's an afterthought at MS. They want to move on. If that means sticking us with a crappy guide - this is of no concern to them.

Very recently someone created a patch/program to get MCE to use a Schedules Direct EPG feed as opposed to the ingrained Rovi. This is a great idea and several people are doing that. The real detriment with MCE right now (to me) is strictly the guide service. Being able to look after that myself with my own Schedules Direct subscription is ideal. The problem is that running the patch to get it in there appears to be a lot of work. Most of yesterday was spent messing around with it to no success, some of that due to the Colossus I think.

So MCE is something Microsoft wants to close off. In the meantime, they are pushing Windows 10 harder and harder. It's only a matter of time before they strong-arm Windows 7 from me or find another way to force the issue.

I've already been patching up MCE for several years. The other day I started installing hardware upgrades into the machine and I'm really thinking it's time to do something different with respect to my PVR. I've got 16 Terabytes of recordings from over the years and the bottom line is that I need a more modern/supported PVR. It seems like the last week has been 'address all the lingering computer issues' week

I'm sure there will be things I don't like with MP but on the other hand, I bet there will be a lot of things I do like. Same thing with Windows 10 although I have experience (some) with that. Besides, I've got several versions of Windows 7 CD's so it's not like I can't go back if it's all an epic fail but I doubt that! On the other hand, moving everything over to a new PVR/OS should put an end to a lot of issues once the mountain has been climbed. Heck, I might even get a new TV at some point

Lovely, the Windows 10 update is counting to 100% and then starting over again and then starting over again....why do I get the feeling there is more to this then meets the eye....

 

[mm1352000]

That sounds like a very reasonable and rational approach to the whole situation.
I'm based in New Zealand where it's currently 3:38 PM on Monday. I'll be available on and off for most of the rest of the day if you have any further questions. I'd also recommend our wiki as an excellent source of answers for many commonly asked questions:
http://wiki.team-mediaportal.com/

 

[Marvin Miller]

I'm up in Canada (where it's Sunday 7:45 PM)

I'm guessing I'll be on the install of MP pretty soon - if questions arise should I make a new thread for them?

Btw, appreciate your guidance in this, my guess is once I am able to install it I'll be able to tackle most things with research.

 

[mm1352000]

if questions arise should I make a new thread for them?

Yeah, it's probably better considering the thread title.
To keep things simple and coherent you could make a single thread "Marvin Miller install Q&A" or something as a catch-all for everything...

 

[CyberSimian]

With MCE all the files have the metadata in the container so if you look at one with, for example, Windows Media Player it will give you the episode name/title and the program description etc.

Yes, I understand. However this mostly only works if you stay with MS programs. Other programs won't recognise the meta-data even though it's there.

I have a vague recollection that a recent change was made to MP2 to allow it to understand the metadata in WTV files. I am less sure whether that change was also applied to MP1.

The problem with migrating from WMC to MP1 or MP2 is your existing library of recordings. I used Vista WMC for five years, and had a large library of DVR-MS files. Although MP1 would play DVR-MS and WTV files, MP did not remember the resume point for partially-viewed DVR-MS or WTV files (that bug has since been fixed), so in the end I converted all of my DVR-MS files to TS files (I already had VideoReDo that could do this). I wrote a batch script to generate the MP XML files containing the metadata from the DVR-MS files.

However, converting recordings from one format to another is best avoided if possible, so I would suggest that you try MP1 first with your WTV files to see if it will display the metadata. If it does not, you will need to investigate other possibilities, including (perhaps) converting WTV to TS and/or extracting the metadata and generating the XML files. There is a tool written by Stephen Toub for editing DVR-MS metadata which I think also works with WTV. If you can write PowerShell or VBS scripts, that tool could probably be used to automate generation of the XML files.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

 

[CyberSimian]

I have a vague recollection that a recent change was made to MP2 to allow it to understand the metadata in WTV files. I am less sure whether that change was also applied to MP1.

This is the thread that I was thinking about:

https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/threads/add-mce-recording-support-to-mp2-wtv-dvr-ms.131082/

It seems that the support for extracting the metadata from WTV files was added only to MP2, and not to MP1.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK