WINDOWS MEDIA CENTER (One last nostagic look)

[AnotherITguy]

PREAMBLE: 

Windows Media Center, since its inception to the OEM Market back in WINDOWS XP MEDIA CENTER 2005 has had a soft spot in my heart. Recently I became aware that someone had ripped WINDOWS MEDIA CENTER out of Windows 8.1 PRO PACK and made it into a standalone download for 8.1/10/11. As luck would have it, I happen to have a complete desktop in storage, so with a shoelace budget, i took a headfirst dive into the unknown, except.... someone forgot to tell me that the pool is mostly empty, and there's a good chance of injury on impact. All kidding aside, this Frankenstein Media Center is barely alive. So let's move forward...

THE MACHINE

• AMD RYZEN 2200G 4C/T4T with a Vega I8 IGPU
• 8GB DDR4 3200 MHz
• 500GB WD BLUE SN750 NVME Drive
• Windows 10 Professional X64 (Latest Version)
• Onboard sound.
• ATI TV TUNER 650 (Dual Tuner).

THE INSTALL

The installer is fairly straight forward, it will install WINDOWS DVD PLAYER, then WINDOWS MEDIA CENTER what is being referred to as Version 8.9.0. After the install of the software here's where the headache begins. 

CURSE YOU PLAYREADY!!!

In theory, when you go into setup your TV Signal, it should go through the setup and only ask you to Install WINDOWS PLAYEREADY if you happen to have a cable subscription and it's accompanying equipment. In my case I was vying for just over the air locals. And then, it happened, WINDOWS PLAYREADY wanted to install not matter what, and did it fail spectacularly on the install, every single time! Manually installing PLAYREADY 1.3.0 does not work by the way.

CONCLUSION.

Unless you want a centralized and well-polished interface to show your Photos, home movies, and music. MEDIA CENTER is well... Dead.

 

UPDATE 1: The machine will remain active, serving the secondary roles of offline music player and photo gallery. 

[+InsaneNutter MVC]

I was an avid user of Windows Media Center from the XP to Windows 7 days so was sad to see this get killed off. It would have been great if Microsoft open sourced Media Center as it had quite the cult following, even when it was killed off with the launch of Windows 10.

I suspect even if you had got it to work their would have been no guide data, Microsoft stopped paying the company that provided it (here in the UK anyway) sometime in 2017. I did manage to work around this for my parents using EPG Collector to pull the OTA tv guide and convert it in to something Media Center could use:  Windows Media Center TV Guide Data Fix [WMC OTA EPG].

I think my parents used Windows Media Center until sometime in 2019 / 2020 on their HTPC, I eventually formatted it and installed LibreELEC. With that they now use Kodi to watch live / recorded tv with Tvheadend running in the background to handle the recordings / guide data. Pretty easy to setup and it just works, LibreELEC even includes mappings for all the buttons on the official Media Center remote.

[Brandon H Supervisor]

man I used to love media center back in the day too; used to use it in my room back in high school with a tuner card so I could have PIP functionality and still do other things on my computer since the TV in my room doubled as my monitor.

now a days doing something like @InsaneNutter mentioned is your best bet for similar functionality. I do miss the simplicity of the setup on media center though. not that I have cable anymore to make use of it though  

[neufuse Veteran]

I remember when it came out and it had cable card support, thought this will finally kill those horrible cable boxes, because it's guide and UI was WAAAAAAAAAAY better then the cable company ones... nope cablecard requirements basically killed it......

[Brandon H Supervisor]

On 26/01/2023 at 13:25, neufuse said:

I remember when it came out and it had cable card support, thought this will finally kill those horrible cable boxes, because it's guide and UI was WAAAAAAAAAAY better then the cable company ones... nope cablecard requirements basically killed it......

yeah that was the other issue. I remember looking into that. most cable companies didn't allow just a normal tuner card, you had to get a tuner that could take cable cards which in itself was more expensive but the cable companies also tended to charge more for just the card than they would the combo with a cable box. even if you didn't have digital/satellite cable (looking at you COX after they switched to the mini box for standard cable).

made it not worth it to most. and before any of that could be rectified, streaming services started becoming more the norm so all the more reason it slowly just died off.

[bikeman25]

I remember in the early days of WIndows Media Center on XP, opening it up and watching Classic Lassie Episodes, not sure what else i watched on it back then, but i used it quite a bit, even in Windows 8 a little bit,   though benefit of having Windows Media Center key back then,  did enable me to get Windows 10 Pro when that launched.      ((First time ever used Pro edition of WIndows)   Previously only used Home with Media Center during XP Days and Windows 7 & 8 Days

 

Also had a TV tuner card with direct connected coax for a while back then with XP Machine, and Windows 7 PC a little while,  sadly the card didn't support Windows 8 on newer Desktop at the time,  so had to live without it

 

 

 

[sysadminafterdark]

I think the “modern day” solution to Windows Media Center is Plex with an HD Homerun. Jellyfin and Kodi are also popular options I’m aware of. 

[Steven P. Administrators]

On 26/01/2023 at 22:40, crankysysadmin said:

I think the “modern day” solution to Windows Media Center is Plex with an HD Homerun. Jellyfin and Kodi are also popular options I’m aware of. 

Absolutely. I have Plex with a lifetime pass, and also Emby Premiere Lifetime, and I would recommend Emby if they weren't so anal about locking out your own content without subscribing to Premium which is not cheap at $4.99 monthly to access your own content, or slightly cheaper yearly $54 or a one time $119. The only place you can trial it longer is on LG because their app store does not allow app purchases, but on other platforms you're limited to something like 5 minutes of playback after a two week trial.  They also do not have access to Rotten Tomato critic reviews, but they do have the scores.. You can use the free version of Plex forever with your own content on your LAN, you'll need Premium if you want to access your own content over the Internet or transcode using hardware.