adam1991 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 24, 2020 12:52 am
IT Troll wrote: ↑Thu Jul 23, 2020 7:52 am
adam1991 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 23, 2020 2:40 am
IMHO, Gary's efforts are simply the ventilator pump. The patient is, for all intents and purposes, dead.
Disagree.
Media Center is working as well as it ever did. In fact better, as a result of community projects. I don’t see why it can’t live on until traditional broadcast TV is completely replaced By streaming.
I think we're in violent agreement here.
I'm not saying it doesn't work; absolutely, it works great.
For that matter, so does the USR Courier HST DS 56.6 modem that's sitting on my shelf. It's the best piece of computer hardware.
WMC will live until broadcast TV, as WMC can use it, is gone. That's not very far away.
The value, the ROI, of tinkering is low in the current and ongoing environment.
My two cents worth ...
I agree that most folks still using WMC have certainly, at some point, been "tinkerers". e.g. I've been "tinkering" with computers since I was a 15-yr old college freshman in 1963; and have had PC's and networks at home for over 45 years ... most of which I built myself (in later years that more of an assembly process; but in the 70's it involved a lot of soldering).
However, I'm long past most of the tinkering -- I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of code, but virtually none in the last decade. And I've done a lot of hardware mods along the way, but again, none in nearly two decades.
As for epg123 => I love it. My "DVR" is a Windows 7 box with 10TB of storage and a network interface to a server with over 50TB of storage. Three 3-tuner cable card tuners (HD Homeruns), so I can record 9 channels at once and have space for thousands of hours of recordings. The main HTPC drives a 60" TV in our family room; three XBox 360 extenders on my home network drive TVs in the Master Bedroom, a spare bedroom, and an extra "man cave" where I watch sports, etc.
EPG123 allows this setup to keep on working perfectly with WMC, which I plan to use until the content is no longer available via the cable company (which, I agree, may not be all that many more years). But I have (a) NO desire to tinker with EPG (it already works perfectly); and (b) absolutely no need for the "Get Latest Guide Listings" choice in WMC to work --- EPG updates every night via the scheduled task and that's plenty good for me. If it ever fails, the little green icon simply changes color to let me know that -- and in fact I basically ignore it if it's yellow (happens rarely) or red (has only happened once) => my experience in recent months is that it changes back to green within a day (usually) or two (it was yellow once for 2 days in a row). If that didn't happen, I'd look at the log and see what's going on (I did that a good bit when I first switched to it; but once I decided it was plenty reliable I don't even bother with that anymore).
As for WMC -- with the EPG guide I do not agree it's "dead and on a ventilator". As long as the underlying hardware works well, it'll work just fine for as long as there is content available for it. And I think it'll be some time before cable is totally overcome by streaming services -- although I agree that will likely be the case sometime during this decade. Even then WMC will work just fine for playing all of the content we've already got recorded.
I just hope Gary keeps EPG123 working as well as it does now. I've donated a couple times and plan to do so annually to help ensure Gary stays motivated