Fun While it Lasted: Live TV on my Desktop

Last week I wrote about how one of the coolest things about Vista Home Premium Edition (along with Ultimate) is having Windows Media Center built in. We've been using Windows Media Center in its various permutations for years, and have a Media Center PC attached to the widescreen TV in the media room as well as a second MCE PC and Media Center Extender in the bedroom. The main Media Center has dual tuners and we use it to record dozens of programs every week. It runs XP Media Center Edition (MCE) 2005 and we've seen no compelling reason to upgrade it.

We love Media Center for all the reasons I mentioned in last week's editorial. We recently added a Maxtor 750 GB OneTouch to ours (we got it at Fry's for $189), bringing the total disk space up to about 1.5 terabytes . That will hold a lot of TV shows.

Even though I've been running Vista Ultimate for two years now (first in betas), I had not fooled around with its Media Center application much, other than for music and pictures. I didn't have a TV tuner on my desktop machine and figured it was probably best not to install one, in the interests of getting more work done.

When perusing the after-Christmas sales at Fry's, though, I ran across what seemed like a great deal on a USB tuner from Hauppauge and decided to give it a try. At fifty bucks, the WinTV-950 was just too tempting to pass up. Last Monday, I set out to add TV to my Dell XPS 720.

Nothing ever works perfectly the first time, so of course I ran into a few small glitches right off the bat. I attached the little receiver to a USB port and Vista immediately recognized that new hardware had been found. Installing the drivers, though, didn't proceed exactly according to the steps in the Hauppauge instructions, but installation only took a few minutes.

I didn't particularly care about using the WinTV software - I wanted to use Vista's Media Center, and the box said the device was Media Center compatible. But when I opened up Media Center, things got scary. First I had black screens on all three monitors. Ouch. After a few long moments, though, my desktop came back to two of the monitors and only one was black. The cursor was visible on it, and I could click around and hear the Media Center sounds, but I couldn't see anything. That was no good.

I decided to try installing the WinTV software after all. At least maybe I could watch and record TV with it. That installation process went smoothly, but did require a reboot. After restarting, I opened the WinTV software and was asked if I wanted to scan for channels. I consented and the scan began. At that time, I had the receiver hooked up to the small antenna that came with the package. It was supposed to pick up both analog and HD over the air channels, but the scan only found three analog channels, and none of them came in very clearly. That was a disappointment, but it did indicate that the device itself worked and so did the software. So I disconnected the antenna and ran a piece of coax from one of our CATV outlets to the USB receiver, then figured out the process to rescan.

This time the device found 99 cable channels and the picture quality was fine (as analog cable goes). I accessed the online program guide and experimented with the scheduler. It worked, but the interface was a little clunky. Not at all elegant like Vista Media Center.

I decided to see if maybe installing the WinTV software might have made a difference, especially since there was an option in the software installation that said "Install Soft MCE support." Sure enough, this time when I fired up Media Center, there was no black screen. I went through the TV setup process (selecting the signal source and provider) and lo and behold! I had full TV functionality. I could watch live TV, schedule recordings, etc. in the Media Center interface I was used to. It all appeared to be working great.

I had a wonderful time watching the pre-primary news from New Hampshire as I worked. Having TV in the small screen was pretty cool. Enthusiastic about the software, I put screenshots on my tech blog at
http://deb-tech.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!49551AC4A11853DE!921.entry

I was ready to sing the praises of WinTV. Although it works only with analog/HD over-the-air and analog cable signals (not digital cable output from a set top box), it seemed like a pretty useful little gadget at a more than reasonable price.

Then I got up Tuesday morning to find that my TV capabilities were gone. The WinTV program wouldn't open; I got the standard Vista error message saying the program had stopped working. Media Center opened but when I tried to play live TV, I got that same message. What happened overnight to mess things up?

I rebooted the system, and TV was back again. However, now I had other system instabilities. When I tried to open Word, Microsoft Expression or any other Office program (except Outlook, which for some reason opened and worked fine), I got the Windows Installer dialog box and then, after a bit, a message saying Installer was not installed correctly. I tried to open Microsoft Live Writer (blogging program) from its Vista gadget and got one of the weirdest error messages I've ever seen, which said the program is not supposed to be run this way.

My system, which had been rock solid stable for months, seemed to have gone completely haywire and the only change I had made was the installation of WinTV. I rebooted again and all my Office programs opened with no problem. I realized that the last time, I had opened Outlook before I tried opening WinTV and Media Center. And the first day, I had Outlook and Word open before opening Media Center. Best I could tell, everything worked okay until I watched TV on either of the programs. Then I couldn't open Office and other Microsoft programs until I rebooted. Any programs I had opened before opening the TV program still worked.

Of course, it could be a coincidence that these problems started after using one of the TV programs. I ran a full virus scan, but found nothing there. I continued to experiment, and was able to recreate the problem. Each time, things would work fine at first but after live TV had been playing for a while (an hour or two), I wouldn't be able to open other programs. I also can't open web sites when this happens.

I don't feel compelled to uninstall it yet, since my system seems to be stable after a reboot, as long as I don't watch live TV. I'm hoping to find a solution. I'll keep you updated on my blog at
http://deb-tech.spaces.live.com/

If you've used WinTV on Vista, let me know if you ran into similar problems (or if you didn't). If you've used a different USB tuner device, tell us about that, too, and how well it worked. Or do you think watching TV on your computer is silly? Send us your opinions