Win 7 - The Stench of Failure

I have not completely given up on Windows 7, but this weekend I trimmed 100 GB off my media partition and restored a Vista backup on the NAS. I fired it up and started to record normally for the first time since early August.

I got here because while WinTV 7 was able to record normally, and it's viewer is pretty good, it has a very elementary scheduler. Windows Media Center has an OK scheduler, but it doesn't record HD very well. (It doesn't appear to use the hardware encoding on the card. Of course, it also doesn't appear to use a standard file format, so perhaps it is reencoding it. All I know is that the audio is fine and the HD picture is jerky. So, the latest beta for SageTV 7 came out. I ponied up money for it and I reinstalled it from scratch. Everything was going well until I got to scanning the digital channels. SageTV reported that there were no digital channels. I tried to play one manually and got bits of audio and no video. I checked with WinTV and Windows Media Center and they could view the channel fine. I thought that perhaps it was a problem with the capture card drivers, so uninstalled the card and reinstalled the same ones that worked on Vista.

So, at the end of my rope, and with the new TV season upon us, I fell back to good old reliable Vista. (How often do you hear that?) Unfortunately, I have about a half a week's recordings on the Windows 7 partition in Windows Media Center format, and nothing else appears to be able to play them, so I'm going to have to boot Windows 7 to watch them, which means I can't watch them when something needs to be recorded, and I don't feel like installing Windows Media Center for Vista. (I didn't really want to install the Windows 7 one.)

I reported the signal problem to SageTV and I'll keep trying SageTV on Windows 7, but I just can't deal with this nonsense anymore. I want to watch TV on my HTPC, not fix problems with it.