[hyde01]

Hopefully this can become reality so I can finally stop switching between XBMC and WMC to watch/record live TV. I have HDHR and I don't see any straight-forward guide to have HDHR working the way it does with WMC (flawless).

If you don't care for protected content nextpvr works flawlessly within XBMC.

I used it for quite a long time with Comcast Copy-Free stations, and I can say it never works flawlessly. In many cases, pressing stop leaves the HDHR tuner light illuminated for up to 5 seconds, during which you will not be able to tune another channel. Try teaching that to everyone in your household, because if a new channel is requested sooner you get the "tuner not available" timeout even though you are supposed to have 3 tuners available. In WMC, you can press stop and go right to the next channel and play without a hiccup. You can also change channels as quickly as you would with a STB from you cableco. In NPVR, even with margro's XBMC builds for fast channel changes, the channel changes take 3-4 seconds for full a/v. If you constantly change channels you can still break playback (tuner not available) whereas WMC never breaks playback.

However, if you just use NPVR (outside XBMC) you actually get the WMC experience. Just doesn't work as good with XBMCs internal player. You can't use external players (like NPVR or MPC-HC with a similar filter selection) for live TV either, so there is essentially no way to get flawless playback even if your cableco sets channels copy-free

I am sure bry- meant well, because it does seem to work pretty good -on the outside... When I looked at it, I couldn't believe how easy and fast it was to get all my channels (and then some, npvr caught a few unscrambled channels wmc/hdhr could not find). Most importantly WMC's QAM tuning is very limited, you end up having to input all channels one by one. I did have a similar problem with NPVR but their great forum support team was able to help me add the missing channels.

As for the rest of your comments, I totally agree. For the 3 days I have been trying NPVR+XBMC, I faced freeze-ups, tuner getting stuck, tray icon turning red (occupying a tuner and won't switch to another), getting "tuner required for a recording" even though I know tuner should be free, and of course not being able to keep a channel on for more than just a few hours. I tried leaving it running overnight, and I did warn my wife in case if she sees it not responding she should do CTRL+ALT+DEL, which she had to in two instances. Like you said NPVR as a standalone seems to be working well, but if we need a standalone PVR I would just stay with WMC, it is extremely reliable, very quick to tune and switch channels, has total tuner management, great built in guide solutions, and with add-ons like GuideTool makes it even easier to manage channels.

I am planning to try OTA/ATSC with NPVR+XBMC this weekend, to see if it makes things easier, I am even willing to let go a few channels that I only get from my QAM provider just to get my Live TV and Media Center in XBMC since I spent so much time and effort in getting everything running smoothly.

We didn't mean to stray from the topic here, but above are all reasons why we all would hope to see WMC back end one day. Not that WMC is the easiest to deal with, but the most reliable and compatible one out there. I once forgot WMC running with scheduled season recordings and came back to nearly a full season of a show recorded, not one skipped or cut in the middle, whereas XBMC with NPVR struggles at the moment.

Shame on Microsoft for not further developing WMC on desktop PCs/Laptops. Imagine MS offering something like WD TV, a small box with built in storage running a simplified OS strictly for WMC, no other desktop services enabled, teaming up with Silicondust or Ceton and offering a built in tuner.. One can dream.