Tip Tweaks and Tricks gathered for Vista MCE

[yotmojo]

Hi
As a newbie to the land of MCE I find this site very helpful. Can anyone out there help me with a registry tweak to allow an extension of maybe 10 minutes past the program schedule finish time when setting up MCE recording properties? Any suggestions would be extremely helpful because a certain member of the household is threatening to again buy a set top box if she misses any more "ends of programs" due to the appalling time keeping of our beloved free to air commercial stations.

thanks in advance

[syrilion]

Hi Yotmojo,

The best way to do this is to set up your recordings as a scheduled season recording (press record twice on the program in the guide - you'll get three red dots). You can then set the record before and record post times to 10 minutes in the settings for each scheduled recording. The settings are accessed from the Recorded TV menu.

As far as I know there are no registry hacks to change the finish recording time for an individual show. Your only other option is to set a manual recording by time (like you used to do with a VCR) - but why would you want to do that?!

Cheers,

Syrilion

[yotmojo]

Hi Syrilion

Apologies for delay in getting back. Thank your for the advice - it solves my problem nicely.

Cheers

yotmojo

[skypilot]

I have the record to end 10 min after the sched time but find if there is a recording on the same channel straight after the current recording, then the 10 min is not used and it cuts to the recording of the next show thereby missing the end of the previous recording.

Good luck with the WAF.

[JOKER99]

Originally Posted by Goon_Squad

A point that should be added to the sticky (x64 section)

Changing the timeshift buffer does NOT work for the x64 version in the same fashion as listed earlier. This is what you need to do:

- Create a new DWORD entry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\MediaCenter\Service\Video\Tuners
- name is "BackingFileDuration"
- Value is as mentioned in the sticky (number of minutes * 10)
- Default is 300 if the is no DWORD entry. Setting BackingFileDuration to "600" will give you 1 hour
Setting BackingFileDuration to "900" will give you 1.5 hours

Setting BackingFileDuration to "1200" will give you 2 hours

This should be added to the sticky please!

THANKYOU Goon_Squad !! I have pulled my hair out about this problem for about a year now, because, like you have pointed out, the method of changing the buffer does not seem to work for the x64 version as it does others. I tried almost everything, including that mce buffer extender app, but NOTHING would work ?!! I would always have just a 30 minute buffer, and any values i changed in the registry regarding mc would simply just reset themselves .

I can confirm however, that following your advice and creating the new DWORD entry (where there was none before) did solve my problem immediately ! As i now have a MASSIVE 2 hour buffer !! And i couldnt be happier ! (unless of course someone magically figures out how to record/save the buffer!) .. but that will never happen.

So i agree that this tip should DEFINITELY be moved to the permanent sticky, so others like me dont have to go through what i did to increase the damned buffer !!