I’m playing with AppleTV at the moment and i’ve hacked it with XBMC – which is a great product. This setup plays nicely with a NAS and overall it almost works. BUT still fails on the PVR front. AND it fails the kid test.

Let me know when you’ve got it suzzed. I’m sure there’s a business in this.

I would like to know the ease of streaming media to a PS3 or xbox 360 from WHS? Have multiple PVR’s, but don’t really want to add another if I can just (simply) stream to a PS3/XBox360. Have a Wii but don’t fancy Orb.

I’ve found Vista itself to be very stable when all it’s doing is running Media Center (as you would expect, I suppose). All of the issues I had in getting this setup and working reliably could be traced back to other parties – e.g. video cards causing driver problems, the tuner card causing the picture quality issues, Sky (and the other broadcasters) being dicks over providing EPG data, case suppliers causing noise issues with their fans, etc etc.

My point is that from the perspective of a non-geek end user it’s all irrelevant. When your appliance doesn’t work you don’t stop to think about the particular third-party supplier that might have been responsible for the faulty part, you just treat it as a single package.

I’ve had to battle with both Windows 7 *and* ATI/Nvidia drivers. I won’t go in to all the gory details, but one of the fixes I had to implement was to copy across Vista USB drivers and overwrite the MS-supplied Win 7 drivers in safe mode.

In fairness though, Windows 7 is still in pre-release phase, so it’s unfair to judge it when the code hasn’t even been finalised. I’ve been super impressed with Windows 7 and I love the version of Media Center included, especially the photos screen saver. But I still stand by my statement that it’s not stable enough to rely on as an always-on media PC.

@Rowan – re the EPG. Freeview broadcasts a full, 7 day EPG, but it is based on the new MHEG5 which, as Mauricio pointed out, has little support from 3rd party vendors. Windows 7 and other PVR solutions can only read the now-and-next programming – not good if you want to schedule a recording for later in the week, or even later in the evening. I never liked the idea of scraping TV guides and hacking together xmltv guides – often a program will change times and dates, and it won’t get updated in the xmltv guides.

“Battling with NVIDIA and ATI drivers” would be more like it”.

I am just hold Stuart to a higher level because I know him personally.

I know that you’re right that many of the issues are caused by graphics drivers etc. But, that’s a bit like saying that most faults with your fridge are caused by cooling units (or whatever) – from the perspective of the user either the fridge keeps your food cooled, or it doesn’t. :-)

@ Jason

Thanks for your comment.

I agree that a 30 second skip feature seems like a conflict of interest for Sky. But, keep in mind that as well as selling advertising they also sell (or at least) lease the hardware to thousands of customers. And, what’s more, the only reason they have an audience to sell advertising to is because those thousands of people are prepared to pay to subscribe (and it’s not cheap for a MySky: the premium over and above a normal Sky subscription is either $99 up-front and $15 p/week forever, or $599 up-front)

According to the most recent financial results on their website (Annual Report 2008) they made $562m dollars in subscription revenue and just $66m in advertising revenue.

I think they should get their priorities sorted!

The issue of sourcing EPG data is not so simple. As I understand it MHEG5 (which is a new acronym to me) is what is broadcast by Freeview, but this only contains “Now + Next”, i.e. not the full week (hopefully somebody will correct me if that is wrong). While there are XMLTV sources available, the question is what is the primary source of that data? If it’s relying on screen scraping or some other method, then it’s likely to be unreliable to some extent.

Again, the solution to this is for the companies who ultimately own that data to get their priorities right. Do they want people to watch their content or not?

I doubt very much if Sky would be likely to implement the 30 second skip feature into their MySky device, as it be a conflict of interest for them given that they sell advertising.

For the EPG data on an HTPC, I thought most people would be using Internet sourced data (e.g. xmltvnz) rather than trying to get it from the broadcast signal (e.g. MHEG5)?

MHEG5 is a scripting environment and support for it is very small even in the rest of the industry.

I have been using Windows 7 since its first private beta on my Mac Mini and it’s been working well as a Media Center. No driver problems, great performance improvement, faster responses. And I am using the standard drivers supplied by Windows Update since Apple hasn’t released Bootcamp drivers for Windows 7 yet.

Remember, the majority of Windows issues comes from graphics drivers, and the bigger part from NVIDIA.

Rowan, I don’t hear a noise from the Mac Mini. It just sits there, quiet.

The only missing thing really is video downloads. I have an iTunes U.S. account and in general a full length movie can be download in about 20 – 30 minutes.

Zune Marketplace is coming to Xbox 360 in New Zealand in the next couple of months – dumb dumb dumb from Microsoft because those younger people don’t pay for movies. This kind of offering should have been included in the Media Center instead.

The “future” in the title of the post was with a question mark rather than an exclamation mark. I was hoping that it would solicit some suggestions, so thanks for yours.

I’m not scared of a little bit of hacking, but I think it’s important for those of us in that position to realise that any solution like that probably won’t translate to a larger audience.

A couple of questions about your setup: Do you have the Freeview EPG working in Media Center via DVB-T? And, how do you find the Mac Mini fan noise?

Does that include the full 7 day EPG? I’ve been battling with Windows 7 for the last few months and while it is an immense improvement, it’s stil not stable enough to rely on as a media center PC. And I’ve tried two motherboards and graphics cards based on both AMD and Nvidia solutions and neither is stable. You just need to have a quick browse through Geekzone to confirm that.

(And no, the full 7 day EPG is not available on Windows 7 – requires hacking to get it working.)

I’ve come to the realisation that if you want to subscribe to Sky – you are definitely going to need two devices, no way around that. Whether it’s MySkyHD, or the (future) Telstra PVR platform (which will be awesome by the way, and may help towards The Panacea) you’re going to need a separate box.

Then you need another device which will play all of your content from your NAS, and any other devices you want to connect to your network. Apple TV is no good because you’re locked into the iTunes trap. Windows Media Center is brilliant but very expensive to build a decent, quiet box, and you need to be prepared for the occasional error message to pop up while browsing your photos, or wondering why the hard drive lights are flashing furiously while the device should be sleeping, or trying to figure out why WMC doesn’t want to play a video file that played fine the day before… There are also numerous streaming devices from Linksys, Netgear, D-Link, etc – but the interfaces are always ugly and non-intuitive, and always result in a low wife acceptance factor.

My current solution is a PS3 which accesses media stored on our NAS (which is a Windows Home Server.) I’m anxiously waiting for the PlayTV to finally be released in NZ (before end of year apparently) which will provide a fully-integrated Freeview PVR into the PS3 interface. Early reports say that it works really well, but they are still trying to get it to work with the codecs and EPG that we use in NZ.

The PS3 with PlayTV will provide Blu-Ray, games console, media streaming, and a Freeview PVR, along with online content that will be added to over time. If you don’t need Sky, then I’m thinking that this will be as close to The Panacea as we’re going to get for now…

I run Windows 7 on my Mac Mini in the lounge (Bootcamp) because the Mac Mini is just… smal.

No hacking needed to get Freeview|HD. Windows 7 gives everything you need, providing your hardware supports DVB-T.

In my case I’ve just added a DVB-T USB adapter to my Mac Mini and that’s all I neeeded to get Freeview|HD.

You can currently get video cards with dual tuners and easily watch one channel on HD while recording another one – and I don’t use a NAS, but a Windows Home Server with about 4TB currently.

Another option is to add a HDHomeRun (http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?contentid=8184) to your home network. It just broadcasts Freeview|HD across your LAN – and it works with Windows 7, Linux and… Mac OS X.

Note that neither option requires more “hacking” than what you had already done putting an HTPC together with Windows Vista – that required hacking…

I also got the survey from Sky. Perhaps they will surprise me with upgrades to the MySkyHD product, but at the moment I’m not holding my breath for them to deliver any of those things any time soon.

There have also been solutions posted on Geekzone to get Sky working natively on a Media PC, with a bit effort and a DVB-S card. I understand this was written for SD Sky, but I am told the principal should also apply to an HD solution with the right gear.

Some of the new TVNZ channels currently only available on Freeview are also coming to sky at the end of this month.