Pal I need your help!

I have my wifes laptop here and the software for media center for my laptop which is in the states. It's the whole restoration cd and was wondering if theres a way to install just the media center part on her laptop. Can you jump on TS today so I can explain it to you and maybe talk me through it if it's possible?

Mikey wrote:
I have my wifes laptop here and the software for media center for my laptop which is in the states. It's the whole restoration cd and was wondering if theres a way to install just the media center part on her laptop. Can you jump on TS today so I can explain it to you and maybe talk me through it if it's possible?

I will be glad to help, you know that.

As far as I know Media Center is not a separate install. I have not played with it all that much but my understanding is that it is part of the OS or comes with it I should say.

Restore CD's are usually an OS image with specific drivers of the laptop it came with. Good odds are it won't even work on another laptop unless you know what you are doing, if at all. I am unsure if you can restore just one part of it like that, especially on another laptop.

Lets do it this way. What are you trying or want to do?

IF you want to record/Playback TV etc... you will need the TV hardware which sometimes is built into the laptop itself. Sometimes it is on a PC card. Without this you can do nothing but you already know that. 😉

Or do you just want to just play videos?

Either way there are 3rd party software alternatives you can use. This is the best way to do this.

The best FREE one can be found here:
TV Media Portal http://www.team-mediaportal.com/

Media Center is just more like a cooexisting program than part of the OS. You can run the computer with MediaCenter or just ignore it like I do. At the end of the restore if it is like the initial you will just get a setup screen for setup up preferences on MediaCenter. So unless you can identify the Mediacenter files, which is just like a facelift for WMP.. you miight have to do a whole wipe if you continue that line of thought. So hopefully you have your wife's restoration disks as well.

And another small but highly effective and recommended program you can look into for video playback/broadcasting/streaming is called videoLAN, VLC for short. -just google oone or the other for DL-

Silent Cold wrote:
Media Center is just more like a cooexisting program than part of the OS. You can run the computer with MediaCenter or just ignore it like I do. At the end of the restore if it is like the initial you will just get a setup screen for setup up preferences on MediaCenter. So unless you can identify the Mediacenter files, which is just like a facelift for WMP.. you miight have to do a whole wipe if you continue that line of thought. So hopefully you have your wife's restoration disks as well.

And another small but highly effective and recommended program you can look into for video playback/broadcasting/streaming is called videoLAN, VLC for short. -just google oone or the other for DL-

VLC is a great player. It may replace BS Player but I still like BSPlayer's interface better. Looks like Power DVD 😉

VLC does seem to play stuff BS won't as it comes with it's own set of codecs.

I like the minimalistic aspects of VLC, and the fact that I have an extremely hard time finding files it will not play and allow full scan/seek access to, I have tried...

Silent Cold wrote:
I like the minimalistic aspects of VLC, and the fact that I have an extremely hard time finding files it will not play and allow full scan/seek access to, I have tried...

Oh I agree, VLC rocks for anything video. Newest version even allows crop, zoom, all dvd functions too.

Silent Cold wrote:
Media Center is just more like a cooexisting program than part of the OS. You can run the computer with MediaCenter or just ignore it like I do.

This is something that always bothered me about the media edition. I wanted to buy a logictec remote last year that was designed for MediaCenter, but I have Pro. MS should have made it a seperate added disk to install over XP, at the very least could have used the 'add/remove software' in control to add windows components like chat or outlook.

Now I just use uICE with a cheap AST remote and VLC. Covers my video needs 100%. You can also program the hell out of those cheap X10 6 in 1 learning remotes with uICE. Although I just picked up a Gyro mouse/keyboard, which is nice for just pointing at the screen accross the living room. Damn thing works 50' feet away through walls at that.

Now to just find a decent quality analog TV tuner card. With showshifter you can have pause TV, but the video just plain sucks with most of the tuners out there, and digital won't do much for you in the US.