[JamesBlackCSE]

🙂 Hello, I noticed everyone has been trying to get Windows Media Center to work on 2008 Server. I have the fix for this problem.

I recently installed Visual Studio 2010 on my Windows Ultimate machine. It did an update and .NET 4 was installed. Previously I had a Haupague WinTV-HVR-1600 ATSC/NTSC TV card installed in the machine. It came from an HP Touch Screen (circa 2007 – I smashed the touch screen and scavangered the parts). The TV capture card worked perfectly until Visual Studio 2010 and NET 4 update. The system was sound and very powerful. I only use HP machines. This one has 8 gigs of ram 6 TB of raid (JBOD) and 12 – 2TB external usb drives. total storage of 30 TB. One DVD multi by LG. Quad core Intel processors 2.5 I believe. All of this is housed in a Sniper case. This is a huge over size case with all kinds of fans.

After spending 3 days looking for a solution to fix Windows Media Center I found none. All the solutions online did not work. Microsoft was not even close to helping. The Card failed like a chain reaction. First the recording, then the guide, then the library, then the pictures library. I installed XBMC and it worked fine. However there is no DVR-MS recording feature. I need this format for our AVID editor and NAS/SAN array. Ulimately, I got boned by the .NET 4 update and the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. The Visual Studio was nearly $13,000. Yes I purchased it for our media company Movie Star Web. I am just warning other to expect problems with your Windows Media Center and .NET 4 until Microsoft figures out a series of patches.

I scrubbed the machine and bought a copy of 2008 Server Data Center edition. It works great but no media center. The operating system is much faster and stronger than Vista. I installed Windows Media Player, Windows Media Encoder and all the codecs and utilities that Microsoft has to offer for their media platform technology.

I did extract Media Center from a Vista Ultimate disk only to find that there are tons of problems with installing it directly on 2008. That ultimately lead me to this forum.

The work around I found was very simple. I installed VMware on the 2008 server. After configuring the utility I created a VMware package of my original Vista Ultimate operating system from my Vista Ultimate CD. I opened VMware and loaded the Windows Ultimate operating system. I had to install the Haupague drivers in the Windows Vista Ultimate to get it to recognize the TV card. I also installed the normal drivers associated with Visa and performed all the updates. I resaved the VMware Vista Ultimate operating system disk image. Shut down VMware. Then Shut down (not reboot) Windows 2008 server. After a I powered up Server 2008 I ran an update check. I installed the last few updates on 2008 server. Then I started VMware and loaded the updated Windows Vista Ultimate disk image. I opened Windows Media Center and began capturing DVR-MS streams from the Haupague TV capture card. I set the capture to an internal drive on my raid JBOD. It has 3 GB of thru put at 10,000 rpm.

I have been capturing the channels from cable tv with no problem. There has been no malfunctions.

As an experiment I opened another VMware window and loaded my Vista Ultimate. I started Windows Media Center and selected a diferent chanel to record from cable TV. I selected another internal drive on my raid JBOD. I did this so there would not be any conflicts. Capturing two streams to one disk is hard on the drive and you get errors eventualy.

I repeated this process 4 times. I now have 3 Windows Media Centers capturing three seperate channels from one TV card. I also have an ATSC (digital antena broadcast) being captured to one of my USB drives. All four streams are being captured by 4 VMware windows and one Windows 2008 Data Center server. (One Box to Rule Them All ! – Lord of the Geeks)The system works flawlessly. 😀

💡 I use MAC and Final Cut Pro to rough edit the streams. I then send them to our AVID video editor system. This is a professional movie rendering machine built by AVID and it is in a colocation cabinet. Once I have the final edit the content is stored on our NAS (built on FreeNAS). When it comes time to publish the content the NAS sends the content via fiber optic cable to our data center hosts. We use AT&T, XO Communications, West Host (Utah), Just Host (UK) and APT Host (Seattle Washington) to distribute the content to mastering houses and digital distributors like iTunes.

I am a computer science engineer. Movie Star Web .com is a 13 year old company that produces streaming video solutions and social networking applications for the entertainment industry. It has been a real bite in the azzz when the Media Center decided to go under. Microsoft should realy test .NET 4 on real world situations instead of dumping it on the public so they can fix it. I fixed this problem in 48 hours.

I charge $565 an hour 😮 if Microsoft would like to hire me for trouble shooting.

James Black CSE :ugeek:
Computer Science Engineer
Movie Star Web .com

I hope this helps some people out there to get their Windows Media Center going.

[Author]

Posts