Today we’re going to take a look at the Media Center setup process under Windows Vista RC1. The hardest part in setting up Windows Media Center is just getting all of your hardware identified. If you read our Vista RC1 install posting, then you’ll know the trouble we went through with the DVICO HDTV TV Tuner. Ironically we first installed the DVICO tuner using the latest drivers (3.4.1) and everything appeared OK in the Device Manager applet. But as you’ll see in this screenshots, MCE told us otherwise.

One final note before going. RC2 went out to testers on Friday and we’ll officially cover the new build shortly. We don’t believe anything significant happened between RC1 to RC2 for Windows Media Center but we’ll report on that soon.

Remember that unlike previous versions of Windows, Media Center is no longer it’s own product within Windows. It is now an integral component of the following editions of Windows Vista.

You can find Windows Media Center in the Start menu under <fill in the blanks>. The very first time you start up MCE, you’ll be presented with the following screen:

Media Center now has a new slash screen presenting the user with three options – “Express Setup”, “Custom Setup”, and “Run Setup later”. The following screen shots are all from the Custom Setup option which most people should be fairly familiar with.

Choose Custom Setup and you’ll get the following installation wizard.

 

Care to join the Customer Experience Improvement Program? Well normally we’d say no but since we enjoy MCE so much, we thought we’d say this time.

Under the typical MCE setup, there are four items you can configure:

  • Tuners, TV Signal, and the Guide
  • How MCE will look on your display
  • Speaker setup
  • Music, Pictures, and Videos

Most of the screen shots here are focused on the TV tuner setup process.

You have the option of automatically detecting your TV signal or setting it up yourself manually. I’ve never had a problem with the automatic setup so I’ll stick with that as my default answer.


Once you begin the automatic detection process, Windows Media Center will run through a variety of configurations. It’ll check to see if the TV signal is connected directly to the tuner or if there is a set-top box in between.

Although we had two tuners in our system, MCE only detected one tuner (the Hauppauge 250 analog tuner). This is when we knew we had a problem with our DVICO HDTV tuner setup. We decided to go ahead with the analog tuner setup but we’ll revisit the HDTV setup shortly.

The next step is to set up your electronic programming guide (EPG). Setting this up is fairly straight forward – you provide your zip code, Windows looks up the providers in your area and then the appropriate guide is downloaded to your system. Nothing too different here.

 

We passed in our zip code…

and MCE looked up the providers in the area..

and found the following providers (yes we’re out in the Los Angeles region)

Once your provider is selected, MCE will begin the download process for the EPG. The download will take a few minutes depending on your connection speed.

Once we’re done with the TV tuner setup, we can optimize our display configuration.

Display configuration boils down to:

1. Selecting the type of display you are connecting to

2. Selecting the type of connection used

3. Selecting the aspect ratio

4. and finally selecting the display resolution. That’s it!

The next step is to setup the speaker configuration on your PC. Not much here except to pick your speaker configuration and test the individual channels.

 

The last step for Media Center configuration is preparing your music, pictures, and video folders. What you’re basically doing is telling Windows Media Player where your media files are all located. Windows Media will catalog your media and make it available through MCE (as well as Media Player). 

 

Now going back to the DVICO problem earlier – I solved the device driver problem by installing an earlier version of the driver (what do you know eh?). Once that was remedied, I re-ran the tv tuner setup portion under MCE which required me to go through the entire setup – even the analog portion.

 

As usual, we went through the auto detection setup process and what do you know?

MCE found a digital TV antenna connection! 

 

Once the analog tuner setup is finished, Windows will go through the digital TV antenna setup.

 

Media Center will run through each of the digital channels and attempt to detect the signal strength of the channel. For our HDTV setup, we have an external atenna attached to the card (note that it’s not an amplified antenna which would help boost the signal some more).

What you need to do is select the channels that have the best signal strength and deselect the ones that have low or no signal strength.

 

And that’s it! We’ll go over the actual guts of Media Center in RC1 tomorrow. Stay tuned!

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