Import Vista Media Center settings into Windows 7
- Is there a way to import Vista Meda Center settings including scheduled recordings into Windows 7? I know MCE Backup worked for Vista, but I tried it with Windows 7 and it didn't import any of my settings or schedules.Thanks!
Answers
- MCE Backup doesn't work due to the differences in how Win7 (as well as Vista w/ TV Pack) stores its MC configuration.
Old way (all MC versions, up to Vista): recording and ATSC config is stored in XML files, and tuner config in Registry.
New way (Vista w/ TV Pack, and Windows 7): tuner config is still in Registry; however, recording and ATSC config are stored in a database.
To the best of my knowledge, there's no way to automagically import 'old' settings into the 'new' system (nor, unfortunately, a way to copy 'new' to 'new', either.)
If you were to upgrade a Vista system to Win7 (via in-place upgrade), then your settings should be migrated over; however, there isn't (yet, anyways) a third-party app that can do it.
HTH,
Chris
[If this post helps to resolve your issue, please click the "Mark as Answer" or "Helpful" button at the top of this message. By marking a post as Answered, or Helpful you help others find the answer faster.]- Marked As Answer byIvan Samuelson Thursday, July 16, 2009 1:41 PM
All Replies
- MCE Backup doesn't work due to the differences in how Win7 (as well as Vista w/ TV Pack) stores its MC configuration.
Old way (all MC versions, up to Vista): recording and ATSC config is stored in XML files, and tuner config in Registry.
New way (Vista w/ TV Pack, and Windows 7): tuner config is still in Registry; however, recording and ATSC config are stored in a database.
To the best of my knowledge, there's no way to automagically import 'old' settings into the 'new' system (nor, unfortunately, a way to copy 'new' to 'new', either.)
If you were to upgrade a Vista system to Win7 (via in-place upgrade), then your settings should be migrated over; however, there isn't (yet, anyways) a third-party app that can do it.
HTH,
Chris
[If this post helps to resolve your issue, please click the "Mark as Answer" or "Helpful" button at the top of this message. By marking a post as Answered, or Helpful you help others find the answer faster.]- Marked As Answer byIvan Samuelson Thursday, July 16, 2009 1:41 PM
MCE Backup doesn't work due to the differences in how Win7 (as well as Vista w/ TV Pack) stores its MC configuration.
Old way (all MC versions, up to Vista): recording and ATSC config is stored in XML files, and tuner config in Registry.
New way (Vista w/ TV Pack, and Windows 7): tuner config is still in Registry; however, recording and ATSC config are stored in a database.
To the best of my knowledge, there's no way to automagically import 'old' settings into the 'new' system (nor, unfortunately, a way to copy 'new' to 'new', either.)
If you were to upgrade a Vista system to Win7 (via in-place upgrade), then your settings should be migrated over; however, there isn't (yet, anyways) a third-party app that can do it.
HTH,
Chris
[If this post helps to resolve your issue, please click the "Mark as Answer" or "Helpful" button at the top of this message. By marking a post as Answered, or Helpful you help others find the answer faster.]
Chris,
Thanks for the reply. I was afraid of this. Hopefully, something comes out soon that allows someone to export their schedule from Vista and import it into Windows 7.We just figured out how to do this (with some inside help from a MS employee). What I'm providing here is to be used "As-Is". First, I've not tried this with a Win7 box that has already had Media Center configured so at that point you might have to experiement a bit, but here's how to do it on a virgin install:
1) Copy the recordings.xml file from C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\eHome\Recording on the MCE 2005 box and paste it into C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\Recording on the Win7 box (you will have to create the "Recording" folder on the Win7 machine.
2) Now, fire up MC but be VERY CAREFUL, you MUST setup MC in custom mode NOT express. Walk through the custom setup and it should import your recordings.xml file.
NOTE: This does NOT bring over your recording history, only what you have scheduled.
Now the sad thing. My recordings.xml file is like 1700 bytes, the db Win7 creates is well over 100MB. Now how is that more efficient? In fact the eHome folder is almost 250MB when it's MUCH smaller on the MCE 2005 box. I guess MS figured out that 1TB HDDs are out there and it's ok to waste as much space as they deem necessary - that, or they own stock in HDD companies and hope people will have to buy new HDDs when space fills up ;-)
Everyone should be insisting/begging/demanding that MS provide a tool to do this for users without having to jump through these hoops. There's simply no excuse for not supporting this. magine, if you will, an upgrade from Office 2003 to Office 2010 next year and Excel not being able to use 100% of the data entered in the version 2 builds ago. Corporate users would simply refuse to upgrade. Losing several thousand recordings and thus forcing Media Center to rerecord all those episodes is a burden on Media Center users that shouldn't be forced on them.
Anyway, good luck.
Sincerely,
Brian Bergin
Terabyte Computers, Inc.
Information posted here provided "As-Is". Use at your own discretion.- Proposed As Answer byBrian Bergin Saturday, November 07, 2009 7:15 PM
- Brian:
Good tip on how to import a Vista or MCE2k5 recording schedule into Win7. That would have saved me some pen-and-paper fun when I upgraded my main MC box. (But, that also helped me to cull the no-longer-applicable items from the series-recording list, too.)
But, what does saving & importing the scheduled recordings list have to do with playing back previously-recorded shows?
Unless the recordings are 'protected' (anything that came off a digital cable tuner (w/ CableCard installed), or some shows that came off of a STB), anything recorded in an earlier version of Media Center will still play in Win7.
I can prove this:
my main MC box formerly ran MCE2k5. I upgraded it to Win7 Pro last month. Recorded TV is on a dedicated drive. Everything that was already there (from the previous OS) still plays back in the new OS.
So, not sure what you meant by that ("needing to re-record all those episodes")?
-Chris
[If this post helps to resolve your issue, please click the "Mark as Answer" or "Helpful" button at the top of this message. By marking a post as Answered, or Helpful you help others find the answer faster.] BTW, I initially poseted this reply at ~23:30 ET but when I went back to look at it the Forums said I'd posted it as "Grudge". I'm not Grudge, have no idea who that is, and absolutely did NOT log in as "Grudge" to make this post. I would say MS has a security problem!
Anyway...
Just a misunderstanding, let me clarify. An example, if I want MC to record every episode of Fox's House, my MCE 2005 box knows every episode it has recorded and doesn't rerecord it. So let's say it's on Monday nights and I decide to watch football and not House, I can tell it to not record that episode and it will record it the next time that episode airs (which in this case is Thurs night on UHD, but it's not always that soon after). Now that I'm on 7 and can't upgrade directly from MCE 2005 that history is gone so 7 assumes I've never taped any episodes so it just starts rerecording all of them over again. I don't want to set it to New only as there may be episodes in previous seasons I may have missed (I started watching House in its second season and MCE dutifully recorded each of the first season's shows until I'd seen all of them).
In my family's case, we're obviously TV junkies with several thousand, on the order of 8000, shows and movies previously recorded. That's a lot of rerecording going on.
Now, as for protected content, I'm really out of luck with that. I have a lot of stuff taped from DRM-enabled channels and that stinks. XBox users get to break DRM to move games to new XBoxes but Windows users are left out in the cold. That's unfair and unacceptable, IMHO. DRM is out of control and only encourages people to do illegal things by trying to break into the files when the US Supreme Court ruled many years ago that it's perfectly acceptable to record anything on personal devices for use by the person/family recording it. I've done this for decades. MS's lack of vision for backing up and restoring systems to new hardware if a full hardware failure occurs is unacceptable. I'm looking at Sage TV that won't have this limit as it records in MPEG only without of the junk MS imposes. It may just be the perfect solution (with no more upgrade issues either).
Sincerely,
Brian Bergin
Terabyte Computers, Inc.
Information posted here provided "As-Is". Use at your own discretion.- Does any one have a definitive answer or a work around to this question which I'm sure has been asked thousands of times? I'm running MCE 2005 on a five year old Sony with a lot of USB drives attached, I have approx 6 TB's of Movies that I just do not want to lose. So the $64k question is can I move my library to a new Box running Windows 7 Media Center?
Since I'm sure this may be an annoying question to be asked again, I'll give a tidbit that may not be all that well known; I just finsihed studying all the online backup services and decided to go with Mozy.com due to their unique value proposition but mainly because they will back up all of my external drives (yes all my recorded content). Since I have moved movies from one drive to another without any problems I'm assuming this backup will be just as applicable. Their pricing is very competitive. this may be old news to many but hopefully it helps some.
Which brings me back to my original question; hopefully there is a straight up way to transfer or simply connect an external drive to a Windows 7 box, if not; is there a solution and where can I find it?
Thx for your assistance,
Marc - Are those ripped moves? If so, what you want to do isn't a problem. Actually, it'll work quite well, as you don't have to worry about backing everything up to do the OS installation - just disconnect the drives (for safety's sake), reconnect when installation is complete, and (possibly) take ownership.
My main Media Center is set up much the same way (except, not quite as much storage, and all internal.) I simply disconnected the storage drives, installed Win7 on the system drive, and reset the Owner when done.
Now, if those movies are all recorded (and, from premium channels), and are flagged 'copy-never', then (AFAIK) you're in not-so-good shape, as there's no way I know of to back up and transfer the DRM licenses from the 'old' computer to the 'new' one.
HTH,
Chris
[If this post helps to resolve your issue, please click the "Mark as Answer" or "Helpful" button at the top of this message. By marking a post as Answered, or Helpful you help others find the answer faster.] - The answer is, well, it depends on the source of the movies. If they came off channels like ABC then the answer is yes, you can move them. If, on the other hand, they came off sources like HBO then you are out of luck (at least without doing something that will likely not be satisfactory, I'll get to that later). Microsoft ignored pleas during the beta for a way to handle DRM transfers from 2005 to Win7. They've TOTALLY dropped the ball here. There is NO leagal reason why holders (remember, you do NOT own any digital content you created by recording it from another source on MCE or any other product) of DRM content cannot move it from one PC to another. iTunes has done it from day one and XBox users now have the RIGHT to move their downloaded DRM-enabled content but MC users have been shunned by MS. Imagine iTunes users without the abilty to move their music from one PC to another! They'd be furious and Apple wouldn't sell a single iPod or iPhone. This is why Microsoft fails at almost everything multimedia they do, they're clueless about users' desires and rights. They believe they can just tell us this is how it is and we will take it lying down. The problem is, for most MC users, that's EXACTLY what they've done. Users should be calling MS 100x per day @ 800-426-9400 and demand this RIGHT. That MS ignored ALL our pleas during the private betas of Win7 tells me they simply do not care. The hard and cold fact here is MC makes MS no $ and perhaps 0.1% of their users actually use it for TV shows, the vast majoirity use it for photos and/or music and that's it so until people start to realize that with a $50 TV tuner they can record and play back TV on their PC Media Center will get ZERO support from upper management. Even threatening to go to Sage TV (which records in MPEG format without DRM from what I'm told) will get little if any attention from MS because MC is not a money maker, but thousands upon thousands of calls might get them to consider, but you'd have to have almost 100% of MC users calling to make a noticble number of users.
Now for the UGLY, and I do mean UGLY, option. To keep your movies avialble to you in 7 you "could" upgrade your 2005 box to Vista nd then upgrade it to 7. That will let you run 7 but not on your new hardware, but you will find 7 runs better on the old hardware than Vista ever did so that might be a choice for some. In my case, my 2005 box has component connections to my TV and my new Win7 box will have HDMI so I can leave my 2005 box and just boot it when I want to watch one of the old recordings, but that's not going to be an option forever as eventually the box will die and I'll be out of luck. Time to start the phone calls. Pass the # around, it's a public MS number so there should be no issue with my posting it here (it's not like I gave out Ballmer's personal line! Oh to have that one!).
Anyway, I recommend you look at Sage TV (www.sagetv.com). It won't solve your current problem but it may be your answer for the future.
Sincerely,
Brian Bergin
Terabyte Computers, Inc.
Information posted here provided "As-Is". Use at your own discretion. - Thanks so much for posting this. In my case, I had already run the setup once, so in addition to the above steps I had to do the following first:
1. Open Task Scheduler
2. Browse to Task Scheduler Library -> Microsoft -> Windows ->Media Center
3. Run MediaCenterRecoveryTask
It can take a while, and may keep saying Running, when it is in fact done. Try pressing Refresh when it seems like the computer has come to a rest.
After, this, follow the steps above. I didn't get any indication that my scheduled recordings imported, but there they were!
DW- Proposed As Answer byChewedtoothpick Tuesday, November 10, 2009 8:31 AM
What's sad is we're having to figure this out on our own and MS has just left us hanging. It's pretty clear MS doesn't give MC very much consideration when it comes to usablity. It'd take them all of 30 mins to run a little tool to execute this manually and convert the xml to the db (wasn't xml the next best thing to sliced bread a few years ago and now xml is out for dbs that have been around for decades???). Oh well, my next step is Sage TV but MS doesn't care about that anyway because MC makes them no $.
Sincerely,
Brian Bergin
Terabyte Computers, Inc.
Information posted here provided "As-Is". Use at your own discretion.- QUICK IMPORTANT WARNING:
Performing the MediaCenterRecoveryTask will force you to reconfigure all of your settings from scratch. I was stupid and only skimmed over this article, and had to set up all 7 of my tuners etc a second time as if I had never performed the initial TV Tuner setup.
However, after a very long and tedius re-setup process, I can verify that this works to import the recording list.
