What are you experiences using Vista to Record TV

I spent about $1500 for an HP Pavillion (runing Windows Vista) to enter the world of "no-more commercials". The computer has a bulit-in "TV Card", in which you can plug in your TV cables. You now watch the programs on the computer monitor (I think mine was 22 inch), so you can get rid of your old TV set (just keep the cable box).

So far, I love it, but there are a few frustrations.

First, in case you have no clue what I'm talking about...

Microsoft first made a "Media-Center" edition of Windows XP. Then with the new Vista operating system, it's built in to some versions. Here's the "Compare Versions" page at Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/choose.mspx

My PC came with a remote control, and an USB/infrared receiver, so I can control the media functions without having to use the mouse or keyboard. HP included the mouse and keyboard, but unfortunately, they should have been wireless.

Configuration is not too bad. Getting it to work with the TV and cable only took about 10 minutes, but I later realized I was only getting channels 1-99. Getting it to work with my digital cable box was a bit of a pain (it took me about 90 minutes of trial and error). You have to attach the infrared signal-sender, and test various signals, to make sure that Vista can properly change channels on the cable box. I've had two cases where apparently the infrared didn't work, and it recorded the wrong show.

From the remote control, in additiona to changing channels and volume, you can click:

1) Live TV - watch shows currently playing

2) Recorded TV - watch shows you recorded on Vista

3) Guide - see what's on the 100s of cable channels

4) DVD - watch a DVD inserted in the PC

From "The Guide", you can select to record shows. So you have to decide how much time to "invest" in this activity. Maybe once a week, I will sit down and scan my 2 or 3 favorite channel for the upcoming shows of the week. This can take 10 minutes per channel, even if you are a speedreader. When you see a show you like, you click "More Info", and get the program details. If it's a movie, the DVD cover appears on the screen, and more detailed description might help you decide to record or not.

Imagine this, there is a show you like on the Discovery Science channel. You can click to record a single show, or the entire series. If a show is on twice a day, and is 30-minutse in length, that's one hour of "content" per day. Fortunately, when you super-fast-forward the commercials and the chit-chat, you can watch in about 40 minutes.

The machine can only one record one show at a time, so occassionally you are confronted with a major crisis, which one to choose (or go out and buy another media PC and another cable box).

If you watch two of the same show everyday, you quickly get the pattern of how the hosts put the little chit-chat before and after the commercials, how they always start the show, and how they always end it. They have their own formulas for producing these shows.

Now imagine there are five or six programs that you like to watch each week, plus two or three movies per week. It doesn't take long, and you have a backlog of viewing, which can be overwhelming. So instead of watching "Live TV", I find myself struggling to find time to watch my favorite shows (now all recorded).

I rarely use the "Live TV" button, except to recall "old times". When I'm ready to watch TV, I sit down and click "Recorded TV" and pick some recorded show that interests me.

After a month, you have about 50 to 100 shows, and your disk is getting near full. Okay, I admit, I'm a pack-rat, and I don't like to get rid of anything. Studying the delete options is on my "to-do" list. You can let Vista do it for you, or you can do it manually. I'm just afriad of losing something. I have been using Windows Explorer to copy some shows to another disk to archive, and thus to free up disk space for more new shows.

I watch mostly educational TV (Discovery, Science, History, Home Repair) but I also love movies. The whole concept makes you really think about the things in life you give your time to. Even with educational TV, how many hours a week should be invested (verses reading books like "Rich Dad Poor Dad" and planning your financial future).

When I starting thinking about which movies that I want to keep long term, it makes me realize that storing them is riduculous, if the price to watch them on a pay-per-view in the future is reasonable, along with the "instant availability" factor. The storage cost (i.e. disk space is not free) and my time to manage the storage could cost more than the future cost of video-on-demand.

In a future HubPage, I'll talk about the features that it is still missing. The biggest disappointment was trying to burn a movie to DVD, the digital rights management did not allow it. (That's perhaps an advantage of building your own Linux based recording system.) I created a HubRequest so you can "Hub" your own experiences, and we can compare.

In the upcoming months, I'll be travelling again as an enterprise software consultant. I'll be able to soon report my experiences with taking the media with me and watching it on the road (with my Vista laptop).

The video below is by the author of this book:

"Using Microsoft Vista Media Center"