Turning Windows PC to Media Center TV Part 3 Schedule recordings, Stream Media Center

In our last tutorials, we have learnt about configuring the hardware and configuring the Media Center application to adopt the new hardware and also talked about configuring the Media Center application, and making a Media Extender with the help of Xbox 360. Now in this concluding part of our tutorial series on how to convert your Windows PC to a Media Center PC or a Home Theatre PC, we will learn how to configure a lot of settings, so that we can schedule recordings and stream our Media Center and the Live TV. This is a bit difficult to do,  so just lets go step-by-step. I have already mentioned earlier that we will use third-party software to make our Media Center even better. We will use Remote Potato to schedule/stream our Media Center.

Configuring the Remote Potato Server

1. Download Remote Potato Server.
2. Download Streaming Pack.
3. Download Microsoft Silverlight.
4. During installation, the setup will ask for a username and password. Enter the username and password of your choice.
5. Install all the three applications and install every plug-in that it may prompt you to install.
6. Run Remote Potato Server UI and click on the Settings icon
7. Go to the “Channels” tab and click on “Reload from Media Center”. It will load a list of channels.
8. If you want to share some of your videos and music you can do so by going to the “General” tab and clicking on any of the folders you want to configure.
9. Click on the Play button near the Settings button.

Now that you have successfully configured the sever, let's see how to schedule recordings and stream them over your home network or anywhere in this world.

On your device or any other device connected to your home network, open the Internet Explorer browser and type your LAN IP. It generally starts from “192.168”.  Now type “:9080”. See image for more clarification.

Scheduling and Recording TV

1. After opening the Remote Potato web UI, click on “TV Guide”. You will see the complete lists of shows available.
2. From the recorded TV option, you can watch those recorded TV clippings from Windows Media Center.
3. You can also schedule your recordings from the same UI itself.

If you are connecting to your remote server from any other PC, which is not in your home network, instead of your IP, you would have to type your original IP instead.

Tweaking Windows Media Center with Third Party Add-ons

You have now configured it all, but now it is time to tweak your Media Center PC and load it with some plug-ins. You will be able to find a huge list of plug-ins on the web, but I would like to give you some recommendations. So go through the following list of some awesome plug-ins for Windows Media Center:

• Media Center Master
• My Channel Logos
• Media Center Studio
•  Media Browser
• My Movies 3
• Remote Potato
• Macrotube
• Heatwave
• mcShoutcast
• DVRMSToolbox.

I hope that you have liked our tutorial series on turning your Windows PC to a Media Center PC and hope you have successfully configured out your Media Center. If you have any questions, you can always ask me here.