If the title didn’t say it clearly enough, read this and heed the warning.  Get out now, Get out before it is too late.

If you read my previous post about the Linksys Extenders and my year of near perfect use, you are probably thinking as I did

“I can pretty much get Media Center to do just about anything, let’s add the HD cable box to media center using a totally unsupported piece of hardware using a 3rd party beta plugin, and be able to watch said HD Cablebox content on all the extenders in the house”

Call me foolish, call me a sucker for a project, call me whatever you want, I decided to embark on this quest, HD Cablebox in Media Center.

For those of you who are asking “what’s the big deal?” I will try to explain in the simplest way possible.

Media Center supports the use of what is called a QAM tuner.  These tuners pickup Digital signals from your cable company and allow you to watch them/record them on your computer. With one huge caveat.  They only work with the channels that are not encrypted by your cable provider.  For example, I love the ScyFy Channel (Yeah new name is pretty silly). I doubly love it in HD.  Problem, Time Warner Cable encrypts this channel, requiring you to pay for their cable box to watch it. This being the case my QAM tuners do me no good for anything other than the locally available network channels, which for the most part is just fine, we primarily record network tv shows anyway.

That being said I have the cable box I have a brain and I bought a HD-PVR after doing some research on it and a neat program from dvbsbridge.com DVBLINk for the HD-PVR.  They said what I wanted to do could be done, so here I am.

I got the HD-PVR installed and working with my Main media center computer.  I now had the QAM tuners for recording local HDTV, and the HD-PVR for recording and watch the encrypted content from the cable box.

Fantastic, it has gotten late and is way past bed time.

I go upstairs get in bed and fire up the Linksys Extender as I always do.  I bring up the guide and see all the wonderful new channels from the cable box choose ScyFy HD and BOOM!  wait no, error..WTF?

Unsupported content type?  How could that be?  Media center has never had an issue playing live tv to an extender before?  I try changing channels, nothing.  I try a QAM local channel, hey that worked, what is going on?

It is now about 4am if i recall correctly and I am not going to sleep without a fix for this.

Apparently I was the earliest adopter of this HD-PVR technology attempting to use it along side Linksys DMA-2100s, there is no information anywhere on this issue.

I start posting on thegreenbutton.com  avsforums.com. I even went so far as to post on the Linksys support forum.  I pulled out the old DMA-2100 box to read its specs everything looks good.  The HD-PVR records in H.264 the Extender box says Supports H.264 all is well I thought.

WRONG!!

While the DMA-2100 does support H.264 it does not support it in a WTV container, the new Windows 7 Media Center format.

Ok so at this point I have figured out the problem, the DMA-2100 firmware does not know what to do with a WTV with H.264 in it.  I am thinking well this should be a simple fix for the people at Linksys, they have released firmware updates in the past to fix things, no worries.

WRONG #2

The Linksys DMA Series had been discontinued!!!

One week after I started sending them support requests for H.264 in a WTV files, they can the entire product line!?!?!?!

How could this happen?  Was something new being released?

No information could be gleaned and other users in similar situations began posting.

There was no fix, and now 30+ days later I am stuck with the HD-PVR.  CRAP!!!

Then one rainy night….

Sydney was in the exercise room, where we have the Xbox 360 extender.  She started her workout and started yelling at me that the tv would not connect and that I needed to fix it NOW!

I get the Xbox 360 reconnected to the MCE machine and hit the guide and for fun I clicked on a HD Cable Box channel.  To my surprise I did not get an error, but a prompt from Xbox Live to download a Codec support update.  I clicked yes and to my surprise the 360 is playing live tv from the cable box.

H.264 in a WTV file works with the Xbox 360.  Amazing, but I have only one 360.

At which point I set out on a quest to offload the Linksys DMA-2100s.

Luckily I was able to sell them for $105 each shipped, and replaced them with bulkier, noisier xbox 360s for $146 each from Geeks.com.

They were refurbished units with HDMI output.

I installed them all and am happy to say I have premium HDTV through out my house now. On top of that the Xbox 360 i a far superior Media Center Extender.  The UI is fast, transitions are smooth, it is nearly the same as using the main MCE server in the theater.

Now how to eliminate the fan noise in the bedroom……

© 2009, Technoramblings of the digitally insane. All rights reserved.