Jonathan's blog

Recently I upgraded to a 1080p screen and a 5.1 speaker set to compelent my Windows Media Center home theatre PC. Suddenly those low-quality 700MB DVD rips with stereo sound and about as many pixels as a Nokia phone from the last millennium don’t seem so great. It was time to go high-definition.

I downloaded a slightly compressed BluRay rip, but it was 15GB and took a week to download. My ISP seems to be rate-limiting filesharers these days, which doesn’t help. I searched for legal HD movie downloads but I couldn’t find any in the UK. Even if there were such a site, there’s still no getting round the fact that a good quality video is going to be at least 10GB.

So I decided to buy a BluRay drive and some discs. I popped the SATA drive into my media PC and it was immediately detected. So I put a BluRay disc in the drive, but Media Center said that software had to be installed to play BluRay discs. That’s OK – not entirely unexpected and hopefully just as simple as installing any other video codec.

The BluRay drive came with a CD of software, including Cyberlink PowerDVD, which said it could play BluRays. So I installed it, and it can indeed play BluRays. Unfortunately it offers no integration with Media Center, and to play a BluRay you have to scrabble around on your hands and knees with the keyboard and mouse.

After some searching online, I discovered an app called TotalMedia Theatre. Several people in home theatre forums had recommended it as an app that sort of integrates into Media Center. It’s a bit ugly because it minimises Media Center and launches its own splash screen before starting to play the BluRay, but at least it doesn’t require manual intervention.

Getting 5.1 audio out of TotalMedia Theatre took a bit of prodding at the settings, and at the buttons on the front of my Sony receiver, but it seems to be fine now. So, my first high-defition, surround-sound BluRay experience tonight will be to watch… erm….  Frost/Nixon. A dialogue-driven political drama. Never mind!

When I get my Vista-based Media Center to scan for FreeView channels, it finds them all correctly. When I go to add listings, I choose my region and it fetches them. But ITV1 and ITV2 both lack listings – despite the fact that the listings in question appear to be available.

There’s a tweak you have to do, and then it all works wonderfully.

1. First go to the Main Menu, choose Tasks and then Settings.
   

   Step 1

2. Choose TV
   

   Step 2

3. Choose Guide
   

   Step 3

4. Choose Add Listings to Channel
   

   Step 4

5. Choose the channel that is causing you problems. For me it was ITV1 and ITV2 (although oddly not ITV2+1).
   

   Step 5

6. Scroll down the alphabetical list of available guides, and choose the right one for your channel. As you can see, there may be more than one available guide for some of the channels, so try both until you get one that works.
   

   Step 6

7. Choose Save
   

   Step 7

8. Rinse and repeat for each of the channels that is lacking guide data.
9. Open the Guide and make sure the data is now there.
   

   Step 9