Questions from MCE newbie but TiVo old timer!

[TiVoAussie]

Hi Folks

I'm considering replacing my 3 beloved TiVos (which have served me well for 6 years) with a single Media Centre Box. The principal motivation for this is to be able to receive and record HD TV, but to be useful to me the system *must* also be able to record Foxtel Digital PayTV, received via satellite and control the Foxtel box with an IR blaster. Guide data for all FTA channels and PayTV is also essential.

I have only one Foxtel STB, so at its busiest the system should be able to record 1 Foxtel Program and 2 FTA programs, or alternatively 3 FTA programs.

Before embarking on this undertaking I've got a few questions to which I haven't been able to easily find answers and I'm hoping this group may be able to help me out.

1) I assume that to "emulate" the three TiVos I will need three HDTV Tuner cards (or two cards with two tuners on each?). But here's the first thing that confuses me… In the useful Sticky how-to at the top of the PayTV forum on this site it says "You CANNOT use MCE for Foxtel AND Digital TV at the same time. (we hope it may support this in the future.) As I mentioned earlier, you can use one tuner in MCE and another in Windows if you want. If you want to use Foxtel with MCE, you MUST use an analogue TV Tuner card. You CANNOT use the AV inputs of any Digital TV cards, they are all currently useless within MCE."

I don't quite understand this (actually I'm hoping it has been "fixed" in Vista because it seems a stupid restriction, it's exactly what most users would want, surely?) but as it's pretty fundamental to me I'd like to get the answer clear. If this restriction still applies does it mean I have *no way* of doing what I need, or do I just need to put in a additional Analogue Tuner and use the Analogue input on that to connect the Foxtel STB. This is a potential showstopper, so I'm really hoping that somebody here will be able to clarify the situation on this.

2) Padding: As we all know, FTA (especially) hardly ever runs to schedule. On the TiVo it is very easy to add padding before and after scheduled start/end times. Is this easy to do on MCE? Actually, on the TiVo we have a hack called "endpad" which will automatically add padding if that won't conflict with another recording, I suppose that's too much to hope for?

3) Live Buffering. With 3 TiVo's I can, for example, set one to channel 2, one to channel 9 and the other to channel 10, then swap between the TiVos and be able to "rewind live TV" on each of them. This is something my wife holds very dear! I understand that MCE also provides a "live TV buffer" even when not specifically recording anything but how does this work? Assuming I have the 3 tuners and Foxtel on an analogue input I know I could *record* all 4 feeds simultaneously, and thus presumably rewind within any of the recordings, but if the feeds are not being specifically recorded are they still being maintained in separate buffers? I assume so, but would like this confirmed. Also, on the TiVo the live buffer is cleared when the channel is changed, does this also happen on MCE?

4) I understand that the default live buffer on MCE is 30 mins, as it is on the TiVo, but on the TiVo this can be extended with a simple hack. I read that there is a similar hack for MCE that allows you to increase the MCE live buffer to two hours. Can anybody confirm that this is true and that it works well? A 2 hour buffer is a "must have" for my wife.

5) Recording a show that has already started. On the TiVo, if you are (say) 10 mins into a show and decide that it's worth recording you can hit "record" and the recording will be saved not just from the point at which you hit record, but also the section of the show that has passed, which it picks up from the buffer (or as much as it can, if it's already overflowed the buffer). Can MCE do this? It's a very handy feature!

6) How easy is it to burn recordings to DVD? I know Microsoft is very "sensitive" to issues arising from the DMCA, so are there restrictions which might affect the ability to burn recordings? (It's quite difficult (read slow and fussy) to do "fully digital" recordings from the TiVo to DVD, so I have been recording them to a standalone DVD recorder direct from the analogue S-Video outputs of the TiVo which has worked pretty well. I have all three TiVos connected to the DVD recorder via a remote controlled AV switch box and it has worked very well) I'm hoping that on MCE it will be as simple as clicking a button marked "Save show to DVD" or something similar.

7) TiVo will speculatively record anything it sees which matches your viewing patterns/habits as a "TiVo Suggestion" if it has free disk space and nothing else better to do at the time. I don't imagine MCE has a similar capacity? By no means a showstopper, most of my TiVo's suggestions are immediately deleted, but on rare occasions it has found a few gems!

Doubtless more questions will come to me as I continue to explore the options, but I'd welcome any answers to the above questions and any other comments anybody might have regarding my plans. Furthermore, if anybody reading this is in the business of building MCE boxes I'd be happy to discuss having one built which will meet the above goals as right now my time is more precious than my dollars!

Thanks in anticipation for all or any comments

Cheers
Ron

[impact]

Ron - so many questions for a first time poster...

Your just lucky that I converted from Tivo over 3 years ago and can understand your concerns and possible pains. By the way - I never looked back. I converted for a similar reason - DVB-T and thought it a stupid idea to convert a digital signal to an analogue signal for the Tivo to (re)-encode it into another mpeg file for viewing. I just wanted to record the data stream as it came down the wire thankyou. And the picture quality absolutely s&**# anything the Tivo could produce !

Before answering your questions (in brief), let me clarify a couple of things first. For your initial thoughts / discussions - MCE2005 and Vista are same beast - there is nothing new in Vista that really gives you more functionality regarding to tuners and the like. Sure Vista is more stable, has a different front end GUI, and is built on a newer framework that over time will enrich its functionality - but today, all the weaknesses of MCE2005 in regard to setup and tuners remain identical in Vista.

(Id still recommend Vista - it lets you play with the newer stuff just coming along - plugins like squirrel stash and the like are not available for MCE2005, and this will become even more common as we move forward)

So onto your questions;

1. You will never emulate 3 Tivo's with a MCE machine - as you currently have 3 MCE equivalents, if you understand what I mean - you have 3 individual machines, probably connected to Video 1 / 2 / 3 and your wife knows how to operate this... With your MCE setup - its likely to be one machine, say connected to Video 1 and you choose what you want to playback / record / watch. The obvious problem here of course - its 1 output vs 3 outputs - maybe you have had the other Tivos connected to other TV's throughout the house, and been able to playback multiple shows at once. You can do that with MCE, but only with an extender, and the only one available in Australia is the xbox360. With the xbox360 you will see the MCE interface and basically do everything you can remotely.
But Digital / Analogue... and MCE only supports 2 tuners... one tuning space - all sounds difficult, but as much as I hate to say it - MS really did not think this all through and concentrated on a solution for the US market. Things are slowly changing, and hopefully some good changes will come later this year.
- Today though, MCE will only see 2 tuners, that may be 2 tuner cards with a single tuner or one card with a double tuner. Luckily a hack was found ages ago, so that you can easily add additional tuners (I have 6 dvb-t tuners in my machine, have tried 8, but thought that was too greedy!)
- It is true that digital and analgoue do not mix well, normally MCE will only see all the digital tuners or all the analogue tuners - and neither the twain shall mix. Which is a real bummer if you want dvb-t and FM, because FM would be treated as analogue - duh!!! Luckil, again, some bright sparks have hacked this, so you can mix and match. I have not done it, nor really intend to, but know of people here who have done it. I personally believe that you may find some problems with the EPG as it could be quite easy for MCE to get confused as to what stations belong to what tuners... ie it might try to record 2 analgoue channels, when you only have 1 stb setup. (This is what I meant by MCE only knowing 1 tunerspace). Check the threads and ask explicit questions on this - but I am sure a hybrid dvb-t card with analogue inputs/tuner can be used.... Things in this department will change...
- You might like to consider building a dvb-t MCE box and a seperate self contained foxtel analogue box ? If you were to go for Selectv or austar, you could of course throw away the STB and just use a DVB-S card directly in your PC (However you still have to hack DVB-S to make it think like a DVB-T - but thats another story)

Put you off yet? Confused? Annoyed? Sounds like too much trouble? Its no big deal really, start small, introduce it to the partner, and grow gradually until your reliance on Tivo diminishes to zilch - thats what I did..... And I find all the other features make up for what I have lost from Tivo.

2. Padding is not as good as Tivo, but its not bad. You have soft padding and hard padding. You dont get the features of endpad, but it works... However, this is the main reason why I have so many tuners - so I can do the hardpad stuff... Softpad can you believe it is limited to 4 minutes extra - REDICULOUS... There are hacks to change it to larger numbers, but they dont really work that well. If you use ICetv for your EPG, their extra program PIMP might give you some extra help on soft padding. Hard padding is similar to Tivo - Extra 5 mins / 10 / 15 /30 /60 /120 etc.. The softpad is across the board for all recordings similar to endpad.
There were some rumours floating around that padding, ability to record multiple dvb-t streams from 1 card, all good stuff that may come to us MCE'ers soon (Saw these over in the Ask Jessica thread at thegreenbutton.com)

3. Live buffering - you still use that... Nah !!! Its simple, you change the channel, you loose the buffer, it starts again. The Live TV buffer is just for the channel you are sitting on watching - whether that is minimised while you look at menus or full screen. It uses a tuner card to do it... So if you have 3 tuners, and 2 are recording, you can of course watch any part of the 2 that recording (time shift), but if you want to watch Live TV - that would be your 3rd tuner, and prevent you from using that on another channel. Its almost identical to a single tivo, you have just had the luxury of being able to do this 3 times...
Change channel live buffer is cleared.

4. Yep you can hack it out to 2 hrs - Works as it should.

5. You only get the recording from when you press record - again silly thing here... Your watching LiveTV, 20 minutes into a 1 hour show you decide I should record the rest - you press the red button and it only records from that point onwards.

6. Burn to DVD - hmmm... In MCE2005 it dont work well, In Vista - it works better and can be done with the remote and the Vista interface. However, most people prefer to use the old Nero or similar way - an external program that gives you more features. Dont be fooled about DVR-MS files which is what the recordings are kept in... They are just mpeg files with a wrapper around them containg DRM / Metatags about the recording. And can be stripped off with tools in seconds, thus resulting in a file that you can move about the PC network and do what you want with.

7. No such built in feature, but search for MCE and Genie - and you will find similar functionality through a plugin...


What esle can I say about moving from Tivo to MCE....
- You can display your pics / slideshows / mp3's - cant do that with a series 1
- The networking... I used to see a trickle of data come out the ethernet port on the Tivo, now I can move gb's of files around easily
- Play all those other video formats - avi / divx / xvid
- Large storage, communicate to shared drives / SAN / across your LAN - having TB's of files available for viewing pleasure
- DVD's - put them online and play with out loosing / scratching disks
- Plugins available for cool things, like checking weather, seeing the BOM radar and the likes.


Yep - thats enough for present... Play, try, and enjoy. Your Tivo will start gathering dust soon...

[galimatias]

impact, one thing that got me curious in your reply:

Dont be fooled about DVR-MS files which is what the recordings are kept in... They are just mpeg files with a wrapper around them containg DRM / Metatags about the recording. And can be stripped off with tools in seconds, thus resulting in a file that you can move about the PC network and do what you want with.

Which tools convert dvr-ms files to mpeg in seconds, please?
Thanks.

[GlenR]

Which tools convert dvr-ms files to mpeg in seconds, please?
Thanks.

VideoReDo will convert a 1 hour dvr-ms to mpeg in seconds - around 600 seconds or so I think.

[impact]

Or use the FREE tool - dvrmstoolbox. Amongst many options, it can do the conversion. Its what Cruchie does - Crunchie uses dvrmstoolbox to convert to a mpeg file, and then does the mpeg to divx conversion.....

[galimatias]

VideoReDo will convert a 1 hour dvr-ms to mpeg in seconds - around 600 seconds or so I think.

Yeah... I use VideoRedo, but I would not say it does the trick in seconds. (that implies a sub-minute processing time).
I only wrote my query, because I was worried I used the wrong and inefficient tool.
Thanks for your response, GlenR.