A favorite capability of the My TV feature of Media Center Edition PC is being able to take charge of your TV experience in two key ways:
Control Live TV: My TV lets you pause, rewind and fast forward whatever show you're currently watching. You don't have to do anything special — a rolling 30-minute recording session starts whenever you use My TV.
Time shift your TV: Time shifting is the capability to watch the same content aired on TV, but just shifted in time — so you can record a TV show and watch it when you want.
Controlling live TV
My TV always records onto your MCE PC's hard drive up to last 30 minutes of TV you've been watching, so at any time you can rewind up to 30 minutes. The only limitation to My TV's control of live TV is that Media Center supports only a single TV tuner, which means it can control only a single channel (the one you're watching).
My TV records the channel currently on the screen. Whenever you change channels, MCE dumps its buffered content and starts fresh on the new channel. So you can go back only 30 minutes or as long as you've been watching the current channel, whichever is shortest.
Controlling live TV is easy — just use the Pause, Play, FWD, and REW buttons on the remote.
Doing the time shift
Controlling Live TV is a great thing. When the phone rings (darn those telemarketers) or the dog has to go out, pausing your favorite program seems like a lifesaver. But sometimes you want to record entire shows for later playback. No reason to rush home for that vital Buffy repeat when your Media Center PC is on the job, ready to record for you.
Media Center offers you many opportunities to record a show whenever you're looking at the Guide or viewing detailed information about a program. Here are the four easiest ways to record a show in My TV. Note that these are individual showings; see the next section when you want to record a series.
To record a show, you can
Browse through the Guide, find a show you want to record, and press OK. By selecting the Record menu item that appears on the screen, you can set up the recording.
Search for a show in the Guide and set up recording.
Manually record (the VCR way!) by entering the channel number and time into Media Center.
One-touch record by navigating to a show in the Guide (or even the show you're currently watching) and pressing the REC button on the remote.
After you've scheduled a few recordings, you can quickly check what Media Center is planning on recording by going to the My TV main menu, selecting Recorded TV, and then selecting Scheduled.
Recording a show from the Guide
To record a show from the Guide, do the following:
1. Open My TV by pressing the My TV button on the remote.
2. Select Recorded TV.
3. Select Add recording.
The screen shown in Figure 1 appears.
Figure 1: The recording process starts here.
4. Select Guide.
The Guide window appears.
5. Select the show you want to record.
The Program Info screen appears.
6. Select Record.
Media Center saves this recording data in its little computer brain and records the show when it airs.
In MCE 2002, your MCE PC had to be running or in standby mode — not Hibernate mode — for this to work. Waking from Hibernate mode is now supported in MCE 2004. (Microsoft needed to do this to support notebook computers.)
7. Press the Back button (or any other Media Center function button on the remote) to get back to what you were previously doing.
The program you selected for recording now has a little red dot next to its title in the Guide. You can check that you did things correctly by navigating to the show in the Guide and looking for the dot.
Media Center checks to make sure that you haven't already set up a different recording at the same time. Recall that an MCE PC has only one TV tuner and can record only one program at a time. If you try to make your MCE PC record two things simultaneously, a Conflict screen appears, as shown in Figure 2. It's up to you to make a choice — use the remote to select the program you want to record. The other program will not be recorded.
Figure 2: Oops! You can't record two shows at once, so choose the one you want.
Searching for shows to record
Just as you don't have to manually scroll through the Guide to find shows to watch, you also don't have to manually scroll through the Guide to set up recordings. With Media Center, you can search for shows to record, as follows:
1. In My TV, select Recorded TV, and then select Add recording.
2. Select Search.
3. Search for the show by category, title, or keyword. When you find the show, select it.
4. When the Program Info screen appears, select Record.
Pretending your MCE PC is a VCR
Suppose your favorite show is on a local access channel that doesn't provide programming information in the Guide. To record this show, you have to set up a manual recording on your MCE PC:
1. In My TV, select Recorded TV, and then select Add recording.
2. Select Channel and time.
The Manual Record screen appears, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Looks like a VCR display, doesn't it?
3. Use the remote's arrow buttons to navigate between the Channel, Frequency, Date, Start time, and Stop time options.
Use the numeric entry buttons on the remote to type the channel and times. For the other settings, navigate to the plus or minus button and press OK repeatedly to scroll through the settings.
4. To add a descriptive title to your manual recording, do the following:
• a. Select Add title (on the left side of the screen).
• b. In the screen that appears, use the numeric entry keys (or your keyboard) to type a name.
• c. Select Save.
5. Back in the Manual Record window, select Record.
The recording settings are saved, and your MCE PC is ready to record for you.
Taking the one-touch approach
The easiest way to set up a recording in My TV is to just use the REC button on the remote. Anytime you have a show actively playing on your screen or selected in the Guide, you can mark it for recording (or start recording it immediately, if it's currently playing) by pressing REC.
Are your kids watching a program on a school night, but it's time for them to go to bed? Press REC, and tell the kids they can finish watching the program tomorrow. Can't get much simpler than that
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