The Cure For Vista Media Center's Insomnia

At home we have a computer hooked up to our TV.  It has two TV tuners, and is set up with Windows 7 Media Center to record our favorite television shows (and automatically detect and skip commercials).  It's wonderful.  We can also watch Blu-ray movies, access Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Unbox, and any number of other streaming services right from our living room TV. 

This post is not about that computer.  This post is about my laptop.  Occasionally, when traveling, or when simply in another room of the house, I like to use Windows Media Center on my laptop.  Currently, it's running Windows Vista, so in order to be able to view shows in the .wtv format used by Windows 7's Media Center, I have installed the "TV Pack" unofficially leaked by Microsoft.

It works great.  Basically, I browse to the file I want to watch on a shared drive (I have a shortcut to the Recorded TV folder on the desktop), double-click it, and it plays on the laptop.  The commercial scan files are automatically synced. When traveling, I usually copy what I want to watch to my Laptop's hard drive, but there's also this.

So, what's the problem?  My laptop won't sleep.  Or hibernate.  At least not all night.  It wakes up at 3:30 AM to download the latest TV listings, even though I never configured it to work with a tuner, so it has no listings to download.  Needless to say, this is annoying.  It drains my battery unnecessarily, and if it's in its case, there's a danger that it will overheat.

After living with this problem, usually dealing with it by shutting the laptop down every time I stop using it--which means a cold boot every time I start using it, and it takes a while to load everything up--I finally found the solution to my problem.  Step 9 on this page points you in the right direction, but here's how you do it:

Launch the Task Scheduler.  You can do this by opening the Start Menu, typing "Task Scheduler", and pressing Enter.  You will get a UAC prompt, which you should authorize. 

In the left pane, click on the arrows left of the text to expand down to the following item: Task Scheduler (Local) -> Task Scheduler Library -> Microsoft -> Windows -> Media Center

Once you have selected Media Center, look on the top middle pane for a task named mcupdate_scheduled.  Double-click this task to load the Properties window.

In the Properties window, click the Conditions tab, and uncheck the box next to "Wake the computer to run this task".

Click OK, and close Task Scheduler.  That's it.  No more waking up from hibernate or sleep in the middle of the night!

Vista Media Center TV Pack: Pros and Cons

Not too long ago, Microsoft leaked an upgrade to Media Center which they released to OEMs. This upgrade contained some "well duh" features: features that should have been in Media Center all along. It also contained a number of "WTF" featuers: features that were not added in the interest of end users; features designed to please television stations and content producers. Features that annoy me. Nevertheless, I have installed the TV Pack upgrade (codenamed Fiji), and continue to run with it. The good:

• Tuners with different feature sets can be used (and it won't reduce them to the lowest common denominator): analog, digital, HDTV.
• Multiple tuners can be hooked up to different sources (cable, over-the-air).
• Clear QAM support: Media Center now supports HDTV over cable. Unfortunately, I can't seem to be able to get it to recognize my Hauppauge 1250 tuner as a digital tuner when connected to cable, so I can't receive the QAM channels.

The bad:

• DRM: every recording is "protected" (from me accessing it) by DRM. There is no law or FTC policy that requires this to be done.
• WTV container format (replacing the DVR-MS format). This format is currently incompatible with commercial skipping and/or removal programs such as Lifextender or DVRMSToolbox.
• DVD burning of recorded content no longer works. At all.
• If I go back to the pre-TV Pack configuration (which requires re-installing the operating system), I won't be able to access any of the content that I've recorded since the upgrade.
• There is no WTV playing support on any non-[Vista-with-TV Pack] system, or Linux. The format is a complete black box that only Media Center knows how to decipher.

It went like this: I have two tuners: an analog USB tuner (Dell branded, Angel manufactured), and a digital HDTV tuner (Hauppuage 1250). Before the TV pack, I had both tuners hooked up to the cable. The other option was to have just the digital tuner hooked up to the over-the-air antenna, which would then receive HDTV channels, but no cable. Media Center allows you to browse through the next two weeks of movies that will be on TV and pick which ones to record. Cable (aside from having shows like Battlestar Galactica) has orders of magnitude more in terms of movie selection, so without the TV Pack, I would have to choose between quality (HDTV for broadcast, but only getting broadcast channels) and quantity (all the shows and movies on cable, but no HDTV channels). The Hauppauge customer support folks claim that since Microsoft hasn't officially released the TV Pack, and since the OEMs haven't yet released PCs with the TV Pack update yet, they aren't supporting Clear QAM in media center on my hybrid card. Clearly, it's a driver issue, and they haven't released one that deals with the problem, at least not officially. So, for now, I'm waiting: waiting for OEMs to start releasing TV Pack systems, which will in turn (hopefully) lead to driver support by the manufacturers; waiting for the Media Center user community to produce software that will decrypt, de-commercialize, transcode, and otherwise access the WTV format. This is already starting to happen, but more progress needs to be made for there to be a true solution. I don't like having my recorded TV locked in a proprietary DRM-restricted format, especially one that doesn't use much compression (I would prefer to be able to transcode to H.264), but for now, it 'works.'

Elrond: Blu-ray, Windows Media Center, Etc.

So I bought another computer: Elrond. Elrond will be the living room media PC.

I believe that makes a total of 6 computers. Obviously not all of them are this nice. Some of them are scratch boxes. I'm thinking of installing Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) on one of them in the near future. When I have time (HA!)

Elrond is a Dell Inspiron 530 with Blu-ray and an HDTV tuner. It has Windows Vista Home Premium, which comes with Windows Media Center. Media Center This is the first time I've messed with Media Center, and I'm mostly impressed. It was very easy to set up. The only really annoying thing is that if you have two tuners, they can't be hooked up to two different sources: I wanted to have the HD tuner record over-the-air broadcasts (which it can do in HD) and have a second USB tuner (that I had bought with my laptop) handle the SD signal from cable. No dice. It only supports managing one guide, and assumes that all tuners have access to it that guide and nothing else. Lame. Currently, I have it set up with just the HDTV tuner hooked up to cable. It can't record any of the cable HDTV channels, unfortunately, because it doesn't have a QAM tuner (HDTV signals are in a different format on cable than over the air). I think Athena's tuner supports QAM (and it ignores the broadcast flag too), but I haven't set up MythTV yet (which is ironic, since MythTV was one of my primary reasons behind putting Athena together in the first place). The reason I decided to go with SD cable is because it has the most content by far. If I want to record some over-the-air HDTV, I can switch it over to that temporarily. If I get MythTV running on Athena, I should be able to record anything I want. [Edit: According to the manufacturer's page, my tuner can indeed receive QAM HDTV signals, but they apparently have to be clear QAM (i.e., not encrypted or "scrambled"). My TV is able to tune to the HD stations without the cable box, which means it might be simply a matter of configuration: downloading the right listings that tell my computer it can tune to HDTV channels. Whether Comcast provides listings including HD channels is another matter.] [Edit: Apparently, it's not Comcast, it's Microsoft. Windows Media Center doesn't support QAM, unless you buy a special computer designed specifically for it. This seems stupid to me, because these channels are being sent over the wire in the clear. Back to square one. Time to get MythTV up and running.] [Edit: There appear to be ways around WMC's artificial restriction (by getting tuner hardware and drivers that lie about where the video comes from). Interesting. I'm still going to explore my MythTV solution. Currently, I have MythTV up and running, but nothing shows up on a channel scan.] Blu-ray So, I've finally bought myself a Blu-ray drive. I was hoping to wait until full-featured stand-alone players went down in price to the $200 mark. It doesn't look like this is going to happen anytime soon. Blu-ray players actually went up in price after the end of the format war with HD DVD (surprise, surprise), and they don't show any signs of going down any time soon. The best "value" on a Blu-ray player was still the PS3, and I'm not that interested in the PS3 for gaming (and I already have as many Linux boxes than I need) so that wasn't looking like a good deal either. I was looking at the Dell website for a PC for the living room, and I saw that they had a special deal on a Blu-ray player, in addition to a big chunk of money off the computer, and my employee discount program percentage off, so I bit. I was hoping that I could have the option of hooking up my HD DVD drive (Xbox 360 attachment) to the PC and have it play both, but it only came with PowerDVD DX version 7, which supports Blu-ray and not HD DVD. Not a big deal, of course, since I have a stand-alone player (HD-A3). The only problem I ran into as far as Blu-ray playback is concerned is that I wanted to output Surround Sound to my receiver digitally. For this, I had to buy a sound card, and since the two digital optical input ports were already occupied (by the HD DVD player and the TV), I needed a coaxial digital S/PDIF out. I found one at Fry's (Diamond XtremeSound 7.1 for $30 with a $10 rebate), hooked it up, and told Windows to use that card's digital out. In order to get it to output Dolby Digital 5.1 during movie playback, I had to configure the settings of the PowerDVD program to output to "SPDIF"; before that, it was still sending stereo.