Starchoice Satellite, Canadian listings, it's all good!

[ertman]

After seeing the mailing about snapstream.net starting to support Canadian guide data, I plunked down my $205 for a PVR 250, PVS3.3, and an Actisys IR blaster.

Waited a couple of weeks for the (hand-addressed!) package to arrive, and tore into it as soon as it did.

Installing the Hauppauge IR software was a bit tricky (couldn't do it from the PVS installer, had to install all of the Hauppauge software and then delete everything I didn't want!)

Getting up and running on the Canadian beta guide was easy once I actually found the forum posting explaining how to do it.

Toyed with things a bit, found out that you need to run in true full-screen mode to get rid of the MPEG tearing on playback.

Mucked with the IR ini file a bit to get the remote to behave -properly-. (The default settings for the remote are a bit wacky, and don't include the last-channel feature)

All said and done, pretty impressive. I have a short list of items that I would love to see changed/added, but this beats the heck out of the RCA Scenium 7000 I just got rid of (it ONLY works with cable feeds. Even though it could change the channels on my satelite reciever, it couldn't grab the guide data making it just a digital VCR.)


- Schedule recordings ACROSS stations. This is a big one. With satellite, I get the same show on up to 10 different channels on different days and times. If I want to record "All new episodes of Angel" and "All new episodes of Jake 2.0", PVS should be able to see that even though they are both on at the same time, Angel comes on again at a later time on a different channel, and record that one for me.

It would also be nice to just say "Record all Episodes of the Simpsons" and have it find the Simpsons on every channel, not just the one I am currently on.

As it is now, my best bet it to use the web based guide and manually work out the conflicts and figure out if the show comes on at some other time on another channel.

- View Live TV in a window while using the guide. Boy do I miss this.
- Provide better channel descriptions in the guide. Simply "CBMT" doesn't tell me much. "CBC Montreal" would be a better description (and before you ask, yes I did try editing it in the listings XML file, but the interface only shows 4 characters...)
- Provide network logos.
- Allow me to change the font/grid size in the program guide. I've got a huge TV, I can squeeze a LOT more guide data onto it that what is currently supported.)
- Better help files. The forum is great, but I shouldn't have had to turn here to figure out why I couldn't record more then 4GB to a single file (a quick change to NTFS fixes that!)
- Ability to customize on-screen help. Even though my Hauppauge remote is supported, it isn't listed in the help files. Showing me pics of the other remotes doesn't help much!

As for other things like MP3 playback, picture viewer, etc, I can live without it. With a bit of mucking about, I'll get myHTPC working and integrated with PVS and it will be all good.

Gotta go, there's like 14 hours of unwatched programming waiting for me...

[ertman]

I almost forgot one other feature I could use... subfolders!

Right now, even though I can add new video folders in the web admin, they all show up as one giant list in PVS. And when you have, say, every episode on Farscape in there, that list is pretty long (and ordered by date! Makes it really hard to find just the episode I am looking for.)

And if you are going to add subfolders/multiple folders, how about adding the ability to make those folders password protected? This isn't something I could use, but I'm sure the folks out there with little kids would like to be able to restrict which shows on the PVR that the munchkins can access.