Switching from MCE to BTV

[treason]

I have MCE 2005 on 4 boxes in my home right now, and due to some lame microsoft issue's I am considering a switch to BTV. I would just like to ask some questions before I do this.

1. Will I have to downgrade to WinXP for BTV to work. Or can I run both on the same OS? I read some other threads about getting MCE remote functionality to work with BTV, but will the MCE 2005 OS introduce conflicts?

2. Is it true that I can get 2 totally different epgs on one tuner, and map channels however I want?

3. Can I stream live TV to other boxes on the network? Eliminating the need for mulitple STB's? How good is the quality? Can I change channels on the STB from a remote PC?

4. How much can a developer do with BTV? Is there documentation etc? I found when writing plugins for MCE, I was very limited in what was actually exposed to developers.

5. MCE does some cool things with the Guide data. It automatically downloads box covers for movies in the guide. Does BTV have similiar capabilities?

6. I have tons of XViD DVD backups, are there any plugins like "My Movies" for MCE to grab movie info, box covers, actors etc?

7. How does BTV handle MP3's? Using ID3 tag indexing like MCE or does it offer a file based solution?

Sorry this list is so long. Any help is greatly appreciated.

[wayner]

I can't answer all of your questions but I can answer some.

You should be able to get BTV working on MCE - in fact you could probably set it up so that you use BTV as the TV app for MCE. On my MCE machine BTV is one of the Other Programs that come up. The only problem I am having is that my IR blaster (that came with my PVR-150 MCE) does not work with BTV. Other than that the remote seems to work with BTV.

There doesn't appear to be a "My Movies" type of plugin. BTV is only for TV - you need Beyond Media for other stuff. I also have not seen any move covers or integration with other movie data as MCE has but I may be missing something.

You can stream live TV to other PCs but you need a software encoder to do so.

I found MCE to be better at customizing guide data - but I didn't play with the XMLTV alternative for guide data on BTV.

As far as MP3s go, again BTV is only for TV - you will have to try out Beyond Media for that - I don't have any experience with that myself.

Hope that helps.

[treason]

Thanks Wayne, you answered a lot.

Just one pending question:

Is it true that I can get 2 totally different epgs on one tuner, and map channels however I want?

[wayner]

These may be possible but they aren't obvious to me. I believe you can set up two epgs but they have to be from different sources to be used at the same time - i.e. you would need multiple tuner cards. I don't believe you can map channels however you want - for example you can manually scan for channels but there is no easy way to assign epg data to the manually scanned channels. For example, I have an HD tuner and I can tune in CBC - a Canadian OTA channel. But I can't assign guide data to it even though my cable lineup, used on another tuner, contains the guide data for this channel. You can easily do this with MCE.

I believe there is more flexibility if you use XMLTV importer to get your data rather than the default Snapstream guide, but I have never used that. That addin was written by Stephane M and is available at http://www.lmgestion.net/@en-us/4/22/20/article.asp

[ZetaVu]

I set up my hauppauge card with two inputs. For over the air, I use the coaxial. For directv, I use the s-video. In btv it is setup as two tuners this way, but treated of course as one. I have two epg sources, one for coax and one for s-video, but they are seamless in the epg. If that's what you want to do, yes, it can be done. I also have an HD card which uses a third epg, that is integrated in as well. Btv picks the correct tuner and input for the channel. You can also edit shows being recorded and let it record from one channel, one input, or any available channel or input (letting me record in HD or sd depending on which tuner is used in conflict)

[treason]

Are you telling me that if my tuner has a coaxial input and RGB inputs I can hook up 2 STB's to it and record from both? I have a hauppauge Win tv pvr 150 btw