I decided that my first ever blog entry would cover my experience installing windows media center edition.
I recently installed MCE on one of my pcs at home to test. The installation process is very easy and I got the system up-and-running in no time. The first problem that I encountered was that my graphics card wasn’t WHQL certified and not compatible with MCE. After hours of searching the net, I found an application that allowed me to turn of the DirectX check. This allowed MCE to run without complaining about the graphics card. I then needed to find compatible TV tuner cards. This is an almost impossible job in South Africa. I finally found a card from ProVideo in tawain. Installing this wasn’t easy. The standard drivers didn’t work. I downloaded the newest blackbird driver and tried installing it. After hours of debugging I finally managed to get my TV tuner to work. This TV tuner came with a remote control which works very nicely. Finally I wanted to download the Electronic Program Guide to my pc. South Africa has no support for the standard EPG yet. I found a site that publishes the XMLTV guide for South Africa and an application to import this XMLTV listing into the MCE EPG.
Finally my MCE was up and running. I have to say that I am very impressed with MCE. I previously used ShowShifter but since using MCE, I have never looked back. I will for a future blog write an article about my experience using MCE and also compare it to MythTV & ShowShifter.