Howto: Mediaportal with Vista (1 Viewer)

damaster

Portal Pro
November 23, 2007
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35
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i installed MP onto Vista 32-bit a while back and had MAJOR problems installing things due to the UAC and not-being-logged-in-under-ADMIN-ACCOUNT ....it got to the point where it i couldnt install or uninstall things..i totally wiped the system after figuring out what i did wrong in the first place..heres what u do :

1. Install Vista (im using ultimate)
2. GO DIRECTLY TO SAFE MODE. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to SAFE MODE.
3. TURN ON ADMIN ACCOUNT
4. TURN OFF UAC
5. DELETE YOUR (just created by install) USER ACCOUNT
6. GO BACK TO NORMAL BOOTUP

once back in vista u have full access and ZERO issues as far as the crappy popups about allow/deny
u can install/uninstall normally


from that point on u install just as u would normally on XP..getting vista drivers of course
I'll post up my guide soon, been very busy lately.

Using vLite, you can remove UAC along with lots of other useless Vista components even before you install Vista. My guide will explain what to remove on the Vista image before using it to install.
 

fluxtras

New Member
October 15, 2007
4
1
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Cool... I'm looking forward to all of this... I personally had a lot of problems with volume-control in Vista with my remote.... I want it to control the Master Volume...

I'll check back later... when I have my new PC
 

damaster

Portal Pro
November 23, 2007
412
35
Home Country
Canada Canada
Sorry, I've been very very busy lately doing some renovations. I haven't had a chance to touch the HTPC in a couple of weeks! I'll clean up my guide, put it into a PDF file and post it in a week or so. I hope you can wait.
 

Justchill

Portal Pro
February 25, 2008
247
1
Brugge
Home Country
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Sorry, I've been very very busy lately doing some renovations. I haven't had a chance to touch the HTPC in a couple of weeks! I'll clean up my guide, put it into a PDF file and post it in a week or so. I hope you can wait.

that would be great damaster!
How is your VISTA - machine running?
 

ghanz

Portal Pro
September 18, 2007
109
2
Ouderkerk
Home Country
Netherlands Netherlands
Man you delivered me some extra work on this one. I had some minor issues with waking up from standby (it was fine but picked up a minor bug along the way somewhere), I installed MST and all went to hell. Now if go to standby by remote and try to wake up, my system ends up in a loop of starting up and closing down. Deinstalling MST and cleaning my registry did not fix this so I'm forced to reinstall vista. I will wait for SP1 to do this and will leave my system just on. I'm downloading anyway but I advise people not to use this MST, it is designed for XP anyway and it shows some bugs to say the least!
Well it's all in the game so to speak.

I do agree on Vista being absolutely the best OS for MP. I picked up minor bugs only after screwing with codecs in the registry and after multiple reinstallations of MP. Seems a nice time to do a clean install anyways :(

master volume settings are very easily solved by installing eventghost and creating a macro for volume bdw
 

Furetto

Moderator - Dutch Forums
April 11, 2005
664
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Brussels
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Introduction

Several months ago, I upgraded my whole MP machine. Having access to corporate licenses for most Microsoft products, I tried installing XP SP2 on it. This failed. My disc was somewhat damaged and the DVD drive was somewhat old. I still had an XP install disk without SP slipstreamed, but it did not support the SATA raid controller so I was supposed to load drivers through a floppy (which was not installed in this machine) or slipstream the driver into an XP boot-CD.

Vista - first try

As we were still having administrative issues for our Vista licenses at that time, I resorted to install a Vista RTM image I still had lying around in trial mode. This was at the very beginning when EVR support was available. My machine worked like a charm. Still waiting for my Vista key, I decided not to invest too much time in finalising the install (no antivirus for instance, this machine does go on the net and is also used for gaming).

One day I got infected by a virus... don't recall which one. But it does modify all running executables. Which led MediaPortal to try a repair every time I rebooted... MP as virus-detection tool... who would have thought that... Trying to clean this up, I screwed up big time and ended up nuking my windows-install.

Vista - fully functional

In the end, we managed to get a few Vista keys for individual install so that we could support Vista (by the way, I am a network engineer at a university which includes giving support for any possible OS). I decided to keep one of them for MePo. And to finalise the installation this time. I have McAfee antivirus running but only monitoring the system, not any of the MP directories, ...

The few suprises I had were easy to fix...

  • Disabling UAC, in general not recommended on all possible blogs and forums, but the first thing I do on my personal machines. Mea Culpa :p
  • Volume issue - solved in this post. And if I understood correctly, solved in recent SVNs.
  • Part of MP goes to c:\ProgramData instead of C:\Program Files. This is mostly a surprise but gives problems if you use XMLTV. Copy the files over from ProgramData to Program Files (or vice verse, don't remember right now)
  • EVR still having some minor quirks. Like FFWD and RWD not always working optimal. I don't mind too much. And I read in today's SVN report that some tries are being made to fix this.

Vista SP1
SP1 was released to Windows Update yesterday. There is a post about experiences with SP1. Due to lack of time, I have only installed it on one machine, at the office. I had absolutely no issues. At all. I had a very old MP installed on it, I installed the latest SVN over it. Still no issues. Now, I admit, this is not a full MP install. It is mainly to try things out when I am at the office.

SP1 will get installed on my "production" MP machine after the weekend, as I leaving the country for a long weekend in Paris :D

Conclusion

Vista is definitely a good choice for MP if your machine is powerful (check out my system to see what I mean). As always, a clean install of both OS and MP is to be recommended. But as my machine at the office proves, it does not need to be.

Sorry to get a bit off-topic and to make such a long post. Just wanted to share my experience...
 

stoked

MP Donator
  • Premium Supporter
  • December 14, 2007
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    Sorry, I've been very very busy lately doing some renovations. I haven't had a chance to touch the HTPC in a couple of weeks! I'll clean up my guide, put it into a PDF file and post it in a week or so. I hope you can wait.

    Hey damaster,

    Did you get around to publishing your guide? If not, could you at least list what was safe to remove?

    Thanks!
     

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