KYSBSUG #94 – Digital Home

KYSBSUG logoKYSBSUG December 2011 – Meeting #94
Topic: Digital Home
Presenter: Tim Barrett
Date: Wednesday December 28, 2011
Time: 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM Eastern
Venue: Money Concepts
Address: 323 Townepark Circle, Louisville, KY 40243

Cost: FREE

Description:
The topic this month is “Digital Home”, demoing integration between Xbox 360, Windows 7, Windows Home Server, Windows Phone 7 & iPad. We’ll discuss the video and audio formats & apps used, network configurations, and show how to access your digital media inside or outside the home or office.

Sneak peek at the presentation:One of the slides in the Digital Home presentation - KYSBSUG #94

We’ll go through this virtual Digital Home and explain it one room at a time, explain which equipment is needed, best practices for setting it up, and leave plenty of time for Q&A.

Registration:
Registration is NOT required for this event.

VN:F [1.9.20_1166]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)

Windows 7 Media Center Missing TV Signal Menu

Windows Media CenterI was customizing a new Windows 7 Media Center PC for a friend and I ran across an interesting problem that was driving me nuts. This brand new PC has an internal tuner card and is connected to a 10/100/1000 network with an HDHomeRun dual-tuner on the LAN as well. So with the one internal and two external tuners it should be able to record 3 shows at the same time. Pretty cool!

After the initial Windows 7 setup with a mouse & keyboard plugged in, I decided to use my fancy multi-monitor setup and Remote Desktop to finish configuring & patching the PC before taking it on-site. I remotely installed the AV software, updated all of the drivers, etc. However, when it came time to configure Windows Media Center I was in for a bit of a surprise.

When I opened Windows Media Center | Tasks | Settings | TV, the menu was missing some options.

The TV Setup menu looks like this…
RDP Windows 7 Media Center
Fig. 1 Windows 7 Media Center via RDP

When it should really look like this…
Hyper-V Windows 7 Media Center
Fig. 2 Windows 7 Media Center via Hyper-V

Or even this…
Console Windows 7 Media Center
Fig. 3 Windows 7 Media Center via Console

As you can see in Fig. 1, the TV missing the Set Up TV Signal option. I searched all over the Internet and couldn’t find an answer to this problem. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the Windows Media Center feature:
Uninstall Windows Media Center featue in Windows 7

That didn’t fix it.

I even tried Media Center Recovery

Open a Command Prompt

Type CD \windows\ehome [Enter]

Type mcupdate.exe –MediaCenterRecoveryTask [Enter]

How to reset Media Center to factory defaults

That did reset Media Center, but it didn’t fix the ‘no tuner option’.

So I checked one of my Windows 7 virtual machines running on my Hyper-V test box, and it showed the Set Up TV Signal option as shown in Fig. 2. I decided to try one more thing and RDP into that exact same virtual Windows 7 box and bingo, the Set Up TV Signal option disappeared right before my eyes!

So, I physically logged in locally on the new Win7 PC with a mouse and keyboard, which can play games like daftar roulette online, restarted Media Center and the menu choice was there! And the choice for “Configure Your TV or Monitor” was there too. Apparently, the Windows 7 Media Center is aware of how you’re logging into the PC.

Once you’ve properly configured your tuner(s) the Tasks | Settings | TV menu should look like this…
Windows 7 Media Center properly configured

I’m sure this is an ‘edge case scenario’ since most people aren’t configuring Windows Media Center on Windows 7 via RDP, but it’s good to know that there are differences in MCE depending on how you login.

My original plan was to install this server in a media closet as a headless unit with all of the other AV equipment. But now that I know some features will be missing with RDP, I’m going to plug a physical monitor into it (or maybe install LogMeIn instead).

VN:F [1.9.20_1166]
Rating: 9.7/10 (9 votes cast)