I have been a long time happy user of Windows Media Center since it’s XP days. My current systems is Windows 8.1 an ATOM based Acer Revo with a pair of USB PCTV Nanostick T2 Freeview HD tuners. For media storage I used a USB attached StarTech RAID disk sub system. This has been working well for a good couple of years, sitting in a cupboard under that stairs. However, I am about to move house and all the kit is going to have to go under the TV. The Revo is virtually silent, but the RAID crate was going to be an issue. It sounds like and aircraft taking off as the disks spin up.
A change of kit was needed….
I decided the best option was to move to a NAS, thus allowing the potentially noisy disks to be anywhere in the house. So I purchased a Netgear ReadyNAS 104. It shows how price have dropped over the past few years as this was about half the price of my StarTech RAID, and holds well over twice as much and provide much more functionality. I wait to see if it is reliable, only time will tell!
So I popped the NAS on the LAN and started to copy over content from the RAID crate, at the same time (and this seems was the mistake) reconfiguring MCE to point at the NAS. All seemed OK, MCE reconfigured and background copies running, until I tried to watch live TV. MCE said it was trying to find a tuner, I waited. In the end I gave up and went to bed, assuming all would be OK in the morning when the media copy was finished and I could reboot the PC.
Unfortunately it was not, after a reboot it still said it could find no tuner. if I tried to rescan for TV channels it just hung (for well over 48 hours, I left it while I went away). All the other functions of MCE seemed fine. I tried removing the USB tuners, both physically and un-installing the drivers, it had not effect. I had corrupted the MCE DB it seemed, something I had done before looking back at older posts.
In the end I had to reset MCE as detailed on Ben Drawbaugh’s blog. Basically I deleted the contents of c:programdatamicrosoftehome and reran the MCE Live TV setup wizard. I was not bothered over my channel list order, or series recording settings, so I did not bother with mcbackup for the backup and restore steps.
Once this was done the tuners both worked again, though the channel scan took a good hour.
Interestingly I had assume clearing out the ehome folder would mean I lost all my MCE settings including the media library settings, but I didn’t my MCE was still pointing at the new NAS shares so a small win.
One point I had not considered over the move to a NAS, is that MCE cannot record TV to a network shares. Previously I had written all media to the locally attached RAID crate. The solution was to let MCE save TV to the local C:, but use a scheduled job to run ROBOCOPY to move the files to the NAS over night. Can’t see why it shouldn’t work, again only time will tell.
Update:
Forgot to mention another advantage of moving to the NAS. Previously I had to use the Logitech media server to serve music to my old Roku 1000 unit connected to my even older HiFi, now the Roku can use the NAS directly, thus making the system setup far easier