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I tried to think back as much as I could to when I was setting Media Portal up as to why it was such a problem for me. A lot of it was my own fault. Having not dealt with much pvr or htpc software before I had to kind of learn on the fly but I was just having a discussion with someone over whey GBPVR was such an easier setup and I had to agree it was. I say this not to say GBPVR is better but maybe there are some things that can be taken from the way there set up is to improve the media portal set up. I know that I spent days trying to tweak media portal to get it to work right and had GBPVR up and running doing all the basic things that I wanted it to do in probably about 20 minutes. That's a huge difference.

One thing I would do is somehow integrate the wizard and the "media portal setup". I know when I first started I kept trying to use the wizard to reconfigure things from within media portal and it was pretty much useless to me. I made no progress. I know GBPVR has their "config" as part of the initial setup process. Another thing is the Zap2it plugin should be right up front and easy to find in the initial setup because that solved a ton of problems for me anyway. One major issue I was having was getting Media Portal to recognize the signal from my pvr-150 card. Since it was coming in from s-video I had a hard time getting it to do that and once it did then I had recording issues because I still didn't have a working epg. Zap2it takes care of both those.

While there is a lot of stuff on codecs in the forums it would be nice if there was a simpler way to figure out exactly what to use. In the example of GBPVR there was an option to just use my default system codecs and I've never had a problem with them. But definitely something that would evaluate what you have available and what the best one to use would be great.

There is always a danger in getting too simple with the setup too I suppose. For example I tried Sage and Beyond TV and became frustrated with those because even though the initial setup was very easy if something went wrong it was hard to fix it because you weren't given very many options and they definitely weren't as customizeable.

While I loved a lot of things about Media Portal as far as the way it looks, the video player funtionality, the dvd player and a ton of great plugins it is really frustrating when the main thing that you got the software for is watching and recording tv and you can't get it to properly do that. I think people are much more patient with problems in other areas then this so if you can get the tv issues ironed out that is a huge step. I know that for me right now I use media portal for just about everything but TV because live tv on GBPVR still works better but if that was ironed out I would use nothing but Media Portal. I still use it quite a bit for that too of course.

I know I'm not the most technically savvy guy here so I don't know if this is helpful or not but I hope it is. Thanks a lot for Medai Portal I really do enjoy it. Even if this sounds somewhat critical I'm really not that down on it I just thought that maybe this might help make it better.

<blockquote data-quote="ca n vt" data-source="post: 86454" data-attributes="member: 23034">I tried to think back as much as I could to when I was setting Media Portal up as to why it was such a problem for me. A lot of it was my own fault. Having not dealt with much pvr or htpc software before I had to kind of learn on the fly but I was just having a discussion with someone over whey GBPVR was such an easier setup and I had to agree it was. I say this not to say GBPVR is better but maybe there are some things that can be taken from the way there set up is to improve the media portal set up. I know that I spent days trying to tweak media portal to get it to work right and had GBPVR up and running doing all the basic things that I wanted it to do in probably about 20 minutes. That's a huge difference. One thing I would do is somehow integrate the wizard and the &quot;media portal setup&quot;. I know when I first started I kept trying to use the wizard to reconfigure things from within media portal and it was pretty much useless to me. I made no progress. I know GBPVR has their &quot;config&quot; as part of the initial setup process. Another thing is the Zap2it plugin should be right up front and easy to find in the initial setup because that solved a ton of problems for me anyway. One major issue I was having was getting Media Portal to recognize the signal from my pvr-150 card. Since it was coming in from s-video I had a hard time getting it to do that and once it did then I had recording issues because I still didn't have a working epg. Zap2it takes care of both those. While there is a lot of stuff on codecs in the forums it would be nice if there was a simpler way to figure out exactly what to use. In the example of GBPVR there was an option to just use my default system codecs and I've never had a problem with them. But definitely something that would evaluate what you have available and what the best one to use would be great.There is always a danger in getting too simple with the setup too I suppose. For example I tried Sage and Beyond TV and became frustrated with those because even though the initial setup was very easy if something went wrong it was hard to fix it because you weren't given very many options and they definitely weren't as customizeable. While I loved a lot of things about Media Portal as far as the way it looks, the video player funtionality, the dvd player and a ton of great plugins it is really frustrating when the main thing that you got the software for is watching and recording tv and you can't get it to properly do that. I think people are much more patient with problems in other areas then this so if you can get the tv issues ironed out that is a huge step. I know that for me right now I use media portal for just about everything but TV because live tv on GBPVR still works better but if that was ironed out I would use nothing but Media Portal. I still use it quite a bit for that too of course. I know I'm not the most technically savvy guy here so I don't know if this is helpful or not but I hope it is. Thanks a lot for Medai Portal I really do enjoy it. Even if this sounds somewhat critical I'm really not that down on it I just thought that maybe this might help make it better.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="ca n vt, post: 86454, member: 23034"] I tried to think back as much as I could to when I was setting Media Portal up as to why it was such a problem for me. A lot of it was my own fault. Having not dealt with much pvr or htpc software before I had to kind of learn on the fly but I was just having a discussion with someone over whey GBPVR was such an easier setup and I had to agree it was. I say this not to say GBPVR is better but maybe there are some things that can be taken from the way there set up is to improve the media portal set up. I know that I spent days trying to tweak media portal to get it to work right and had GBPVR up and running doing all the basic things that I wanted it to do in probably about 20 minutes. That's a huge difference. One thing I would do is somehow integrate the wizard and the "media portal setup". I know when I first started I kept trying to use the wizard to reconfigure things from within media portal and it was pretty much useless to me. I made no progress. I know GBPVR has their "config" as part of the initial setup process. Another thing is the Zap2it plugin should be right up front and easy to find in the initial setup because that solved a ton of problems for me anyway. One major issue I was having was getting Media Portal to recognize the signal from my pvr-150 card. Since it was coming in from s-video I had a hard time getting it to do that and once it did then I had recording issues because I still didn't have a working epg. Zap2it takes care of both those. While there is a lot of stuff on codecs in the forums it would be nice if there was a simpler way to figure out exactly what to use. In the example of GBPVR there was an option to just use my default system codecs and I've never had a problem with them. But definitely something that would evaluate what you have available and what the best one to use would be great. There is always a danger in getting too simple with the setup too I suppose. For example I tried Sage and Beyond TV and became frustrated with those because even though the initial setup was very easy if something went wrong it was hard to fix it because you weren't given very many options and they definitely weren't as customizeable. While I loved a lot of things about Media Portal as far as the way it looks, the video player funtionality, the dvd player and a ton of great plugins it is really frustrating when the main thing that you got the software for is watching and recording tv and you can't get it to properly do that. I think people are much more patient with problems in other areas then this so if you can get the tv issues ironed out that is a huge step. I know that for me right now I use media portal for just about everything but TV because live tv on GBPVR still works better but if that was ironed out I would use nothing but Media Portal. I still use it quite a bit for that too of course. I know I'm not the most technically savvy guy here so I don't know if this is helpful or not but I hope it is. Thanks a lot for Medai Portal I really do enjoy it. Even if this sounds somewhat critical I'm really not that down on it I just thought that maybe this might help make it better. [/QUOTE]