Over the past few weeks, I have been trying to figure out a way to get Windows Media Center working on a Vail machine. My first attempts were along the correct path, but I had some hardware that was not cooperating and probably would never cooperate.
The path?
- Install Windows 7 Home Premium as a Virtual Machine on top of Vail. It does work!
The non-cooperative hardware?
- A USB port. While I can only guess, I really think that there is simply too much software overhead to push the transmission data from a USB TV tuner through to a virtual Windows Media Center.
Why do I need USB?
- To provide a path to record TV in a virtual WMC. As *all* other features of WMC should be available through a virtual Windows 7 installation, the one problem that remains is the ability to record TV, hence the need for USB and a USB TV tuner.
Your next question might be: why use USB?
- Quite simple, really. PCI cards cannot be shared with a VM, while USB devices can be. At least with certain VM managers.
Lastly, your next questions would be: why do I want the ability to record TV and have Windows Media Center in Vail?
- Quite simple, again. Windows Home Server v2 (Vail) is a server. It is designed to be an always-on device. It is (or should be) there to serve your other computers and media devices at any time of the day. Do you want to record a show that starts at 3:00AM in the morning? With the Vail/WMC combination, you can. Want to watch a movie, watch a TV show, view pictures, or listen to music on an extender such as your XBox? From a computer that is always on vs. one that is not?
Perhaps in the end, you don’t need WMC to perform those functions, but the option is there to have both on one machine. If desired.
In addition to getting a USB TV tuner to work in a virtual WMC, I also had some problems getting WMC to perform certain tasks, but that was a problem to tackle on another day. Before I could debug those problems, I needed a way to record TV. One problem at a time.
At that point, I needed to regroup. I was not going to be able to watch or record TV directly in WMC, so I needed an alternative to provide this function. Which brought me to start looking at various TV recording alternatives to WMC. Among those alternatives were the following:
- DVBLink
- GB-PVR
- Sage TV
- Beyond TV
- MediaPortal
- TVersity
- DVBViewer
- HD Homerun (hardware alternative to USB tuners)
I had varying degrees of luck with these alternatives. Some I documented in Part 4 of this series. During all these attempts, I refined/focused my thinking on what I really needed. As in I was not really interested in watching TV in Vail; I was interested in recording TV in Vail so that I could watch those recordings in Windows Media Center.
Of all those options above, most were regarded as a failure simply because I could not get an Electronic Programming Guide (EPG) to work. No EPG, no record scheduling.
So today I have
