trevor the sheep on 9/12/2007 at 16:18

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yeh man, i remember using it for a brief period last year when my TV card was still working, it was prone to lockups but i much preferred it to the shitty counter-intuitive interface of GAYcrosoft's GAYdia GAYcenter (of gayness)

Rug Burn Junky on 19/12/2007 at 19:47

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I've had an HTPC for years, and I've played around with TV cards in my PC for over a decade.

Right now, I have a Thermaltake Mozart Media PC set-up in my living, jacked through my plasma. It came with a freeware software suite called "iMedian" which I actually thought worked pretty well.

Here's the thing though. For DVD's, I have a pretty good disc changer, runs more quietly than the PC. For music, I have an iPod dock, which lets me run all of the same playlists I normally listen to in my car or on the subway, and if I want access to all of my music on my desktop, I still prefer Winamp. For TV and DVR, my cable box not only works smoothly, but is the only way I can get the HD channels, and, quite frankly, gets much better reception than the tuner ever did.

In short, the more I build my set up, the less I use my PC on it. In fact, the only thing I use it for now is to watch TV shows I download from usenet, or to play games. Occasionally, I'll surf on it, but really only when I'm watching football and want to keep up on my fantasy team in real time (I'll PIP it, and swap back and forth with the games themselves). For games, obviously, the front end is useless, and for avi files, while the front end can sort things a bit, I'm perfectly comfortable just using windows for it. In fact, I yanked the TV card and gave it to my nephews only a month or two later. With a gyro mouse, windows is easy enough to run that the front end becomes more of a hindrance than a help.

All in all, other than playing around with it at first to tweak it, I can't say I've ever used the media center. Do you find that it really adds value?

I mean, if you're cramped for space, and relegated to only using OTA TV broadcasts, I can see the value, but other than that, my experience has been that it does a little bit of everything, but nothing well.

As for other media software, like I said, I thought the iMedian stuff worked really, really well. The Hauppage WinTV software is pretty atrocious, but there are switches you can use to get to "WinTV Classic" or something of the sort, which I found was much, much easier to use, more powerful, and more stable. I didn't use that on a media PC, however, but on my main desktop so I could watch TV in my office. It was strictly so I could have an S-vid input for my cable box.

I've also used the ATI media software, which was hands down the worst I've ever come across. I simply stopped using my ATI HDTV Wonder because the software pretty much crippled it. Buggy, unstable, and just plain didn't work. For the past year, I've been pissed off that it won't recognize the VIVO aspect of my vidcard, and there's no way for me to run it under XP, simply because ATI's software is fucked. It worked (after hours of tweaking) under XP64, but I gave up trying to get it right under XP after about two weeks of fiddling, and installing and reinstalling drivers.

ATI did, however, have one great feature that I miss. It would transcribe the closed captioning from a TV show into an html file, and take a screenshot every 15-30 seconds to go with it. It was mostly a gimmick, but a pretty cool one nonetheless.