Damn I Hate Windows Media Center

Actually hate is not strong enough of a word for I feel about WMC. Loath might come closer.

WMC almost immediately began complaining that it didn't have enough space to record programs. There was 60 GB on the C drive for Pete's sake and 30 GB on the media volume. At first I thought that it was freaking out because it the media volume was a mapped drive and not a using a drive letter, thereby making it difficult to tell how much space was left on the media volume. Then I discovered that there was even more space on the system drive (Drive C). So, I don't know what the heck its problem was.

So I went through and told WMC not to delete programs that are older than 2 week. ("Yes, I know how far behind I am. I don't need a piece of software to nag me.") So, I figured that it would just do the best it could when it actually ran out of space, or perhaps delete old programs if it actually ran into trouble. Nope, it didn't do something sensible like that. It just didn't record the program... that it had plenty of space to record... because, well, because its disk space estimation algorithm is horribly flawed!

No wonder Microsoft is not going to support this piece of junk in Windows 10. I really wish there was another game in town for recording encrypted programs.

So, my intention was to work really hard a watching all the programs on the media volume and then give it a drive letter. But after I discovered this crappy software was just refusing to record, I looked at the Fry's online ad and found that Western Digital 1 TB hard drives were on sale. I started to get an external drive and make my life easier, but my HTPC won't support USB 3. It did support eSATA, but Fry's didn't have any external drives with that, so I was going to need to purchase a drive enclosure and drive separately. After I picked the hard drive, I decided to dispense with the enclosure and try to install it in the machine directly. That went well, except for one little wrinkle: The SATA power cable, which had the perfect number of three connectors on it (two for the hard drives and one for the Blu-Ray DVD) wouldn't quite reach to all three drives. No matter how I turned it. The first connector would reach to the original hard drive, and the last connector would reach to the second hard drive, but I couldn't quite make the middle cable reach the DVD drive, although the new drive and the DVD drive are in the same cage. Or, I could make the second and third connectors fit into DVD drive and the new drive, but not quite reach to the original drive.

I almost purchased a SATA power cable extension when I discovered that I still had a second SATA cable for the Seasonic power supply. (Hooray for module power supplies.) I plugged it in, connected it to the original, booted the machine, created a volume for the entire 1 TB hard drive (this time with a drive letter), and told WMC to record TV programs there. (I had created a WMC\Recorded TV folder for it, but no, it just created its own Recorded TV folder on the root of the drive. Grrr.)

I hope it's happy now. I hear that Silicon Dust is running a Kick Starter campaign to write a DVR program that can handle encryption. I need to check that out.