Building your own SOHO Windows media center, Part 1 

Installing the TV tuner card and PVR software wasn’t without drama

By Keith Shaw Network World, 02/07/05 Keith Shaw

Why would I want to buy a new PC when there are plenty of ways to upgrade my existing one?

That was my reaction to the Media Center concept - Microsoft, Intel and their hardware partners want you to think that to enjoy music, photos and video from a PC on a TV, you need to buy a new computer with a new operating system.

Hogwash.

My existing Windows XP system works just fine, so I set out to build my own media center. Here’s my tale:

Media Center PCs come with a TV tuner card and personal video recorder software that records TV shows onto the PC’s hard disk for later viewing. So first, I needed to install a TV tuner card and additional media center software, which I got from SageTV.

SageTV sent me the Happauge WinTV-PVR 150, a PCI card with a TV tuner. The card includes PVR software that lets you watch live TV and record shows, a program guide scheduler and a movie editor for burning TV shows onto DVD. The TV tuner software worked fine if you didn’t care about the user interface, the streaming feature or the music jukebox.

But SageTV promised a better experience, so we continued our adventure by installing its media center software. Working with the TV tuner, the SageTV software’s PVR interface lets you pause, rewind and fast forward live TV. It includes a free electronic programming guide (EPG) that gives a TV schedule for the next 14 days. A Favorites Manager automatically records all instances of your favorite show, and Intelligent Recording records shows based on prior viewing habits.

Unlike a standard PVR, the SageTV software also includes a Music Jukebox app that plays non-proprietary music files (not my AAC-formatted iTunes), a video file player (for playing other video clips stored on the system), and photo viewer with slide show feature.

We had one small installation hiccup - the SageTV installer lets you install its own MPEG encoders, which we mistakenly did. Everything went kaput and we had to reinstall the software. The second time, I installed only the SageTV application, and things worked fine. Why would SageTV put additional MPEG encoders on the installation disk if it wanted us to use the original WinTV tuner encoders?

The interface is designed to look more like a TV programming guide than a PC application - meaning big text, rounded highlight bars, and an interface designed for a remote control (highlight an option, click select, go to next screen, etc.) Once you train yourself, it's actually quite easy to navigate.

We had some confusion over the remote control, though. The remote included with the WinTV card worked only with the WinTV application, not the SageTV media center software. With the SageTV application, we could change channel and volume, but not work the menu items. SageTV sells a StreamZapper remote control that would probably work, but sells it as a separate product.

We think the problem stems from the initial installation. There's a check box that lets the installer know that it's supposed to work with the Happauge remote, but we didn’t check it because we weren’t ready to use the remote yet. Moral of the story is perhaps to follow the instructions very carefully?

We also discovered that we now needed to keep our PC on all the time or the system wouldn’t record our shows. (Obvious, sure, but easy to overlook.) We also had to keep the SageTV application active, although putting it in “sleep mode” moves the app into the system tray. We could also put Windows into standby, which saved some power.

With the PVR installed and recording shows, we next attempted to use the SageTV client application, which lets you stream content to any networked computer. Stay tuned for that, ahem, adventure…

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Shaw is senior editor, product testing at Network World. He also writes the weekly Cool Tools(approve sites) column, the twice weekly "Wireless Computing Devices"(approve sites) newsletter and posts to the Cool Tools: Daily Dose Weblog(approve sites). He can be reached at kshaw@nww.com.

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