I still like our Vista Media Center PC. We use it as a home theater PC (HTPC). Unfortunately, we only have one tuner in the PC and all the shows we want to watch come one at exactly the same time on the same day. So I've been recording some shows on the Panasonic DVR, the HTPC and, in some cases, a Panasonic DVD Recorder. That makes finding my recorded shows difficult. I broke down and bought a HD Homerun network tuner. Basically, it is a dual tuner for Clear QAM ATSC, or digital cable tv that connects to the PC through the network. Now it's great, I can record up to two digital/HD tv shows and one analog. Those HD shows are HUGE! One HD show is about 7GB. I'm glad I upgraded the hard drive.
I did have one issue with the tuner. When it sets up it offers suggestions for the channel names. For instance WTHR digital was named WTHR-HD for the HD capable channel. I noticed there weren't any listings for programming on that channel so I went into media center and manually added the WTHRDT channel listings. Of course, stupid media center would blow these away every time it downloaded the guide since WTHR-HD didn't match WTHRDT. I even tried renaming the channel in media center but that got blown away too. I found that media center uses the published channel name during updates. Although this should never get overwritten when it had been changed manually in media center, I had to go into the HD Homerun setup and change the names to match what media center expected. Like, duh. I guess all's well that ends well. It works and now I can record many of my shows in 1080i High Def. That sounds like win for me.
For the last week or so, the PC has been bugging me to install Vista Home Premium Service Pack 2. You never know what Microsoft has in store for you when you install these packs so I've been hesitant to let it run. I finally gave in yesterday and all went well except for one issue. You see, I may have hacked my PC to enable remote desktop. It was almost a necessary when we had a standard def tv because I couldn't read jack in 480i mode. It's not that big a deal now that we have a HD tv but I'm so used to the capability to connect remotely that I was pretty bummed that MS decided to purposely kill the hack. I tried several things to get it working but none worked. MS made "changes" to the dll so the feature no longer worked in SP2. Fortunately, there are others who paid attention in school and understood enough about the dll to hack the feature back to life. I followed a guide at the Forward Thinking blog and got everything running again. By the way, make sure you follow the guide closely. I was obviously retarded and skipped the UAC step (btw, here's how to turn it off). The UAC is a pain the booty and prevents overwriting the dll. Once I realized my problem, I was able to quickly finish the install. Kudos to those who did the hack and the blogger for the post. If you decide to apply the hack, it's at your own risk. Who knows, the PC may now have a security hole that's used to turn all the robots evil in the future... and we just can't have enough evil robots.
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