Hello JRiver,
I'm a new JRiver Media Center user (on trial at the moment), and I believe your program will suit all my (stringent) needs well. First a bit of backstory, then a few question, if I could please! I apologize in advance, I'm a pretty wordy person, so sorry about that.
Ages ago, my household converted one of our TV's from a set-top box to Windows Media Center. Eventually CableCard tuners were released, so we completed the conversion away from set-top boxes and went with Ceton Echo extenders on two TV's plus a main HTPC with a Ceton InfiniTV 4 PCIe on our living room TV. This worked great for a couple of years but obviously, Windows Media Center is going away and the Ceton Echo extenders are useless unless you run Windows 7 on your WMC box forever.
The guide data is also getting spotty it seems. For my TV-addicted wife and daughter, it simply won't do anymore. So, another conversion has begun ... I've built a new HTPC/media server for the living room TV, and I've replaced the Ceton Echo extenders with low-power slim HTPC's on the bedroom and basement/workout room. All of them run Windows 10 and are wired to a 1 gbps ethernet network.
So I am now at the point where I need to find the ideal PVR backend and nice GUI frontend to make all this work. I started out with NextPVR as the backend and Kodi as the frontend, but it has a strange quirk where, if the channel is changed on one instance of Kodi, sometimes it changes on a different instance (in other words, I was watching playoff football while my wife was watching a movie on Hallmark ... she changed the channel when a commercial came on, and suddenly I wasn't watching football anymore even though my instance of Kodi thought it was still tuned in to the game, and similarly, her instance of Kodi thought the channel had changed but the commercial she tried to change from was still playing). That's neither here nor there, because she does not like Kodi's guide anyway.
So now I turn my attention to MediaPortal 2 and JRiver Media Center. Obviously free is good, but I figured I'd give JRiver Media Center a try first. I've got it installed and working, and I really like it so far. My wife really likes the guide, so that's a strong plus in getting me to purchase the app. The setup was also very easy, but a few issues remain.
1) Color-coding of the guide - a total necessity in my humble opinion, but it seems only the Obsidian skin provides this color-coding. Am I mistaken on that, and if not, will the other skins eventually support a color-coded guide?
2) Guide and repeats - I might be missing it, but is there a way to add original air date when looking at a repeat show in the guide?
3) Guide data - as I understand it, JRiver MC pulls guide data, by default, from Microsoft's "Rovi" service. None of the competing softwares seem to be able to do this. Do you have an agreement in place that allows you to pull guide data in this manner? Just a curiosity thing, really.
4) MCE remote issues ... all three TV's in my house have always been controlled by MCE remotes. But I am finding with JRiver MC, they barely work right at all. The back button generally does what one would expect, and the numbers work correctly, but hardly anything else does. I got around this for the most part by going into Tools -> Options -> Remote, where I went into Devices and unchecked the MCE remote option. Then I ran through with the second option checked and "taught" JRiver MC what buttons to use on the remote. This seems to work ok, though I still can't skip 24 hours ahead in the guide with only a quick button press. Any thoughts?
5) WebGizmo - I haven't done much with this, as I ran out of time yesterday before getting much done with it, but I can't seem to access my main HTPC via web browser anywhere but on the HTPC itself, using the loopback address. This suggests a firewall issue (either on the HTPC's software firewall or on my router), but I don't believe that's the case. I've added the Media Center executable to the Windows 10 software firewall, both public and private networks, and I've set up port forwarding on my router. I've done it a million times before, for an FTP server on my network, to run game servers at home, and so on and so forth, so I know what I'm doing there. Again, I haven't given this much work because I was out of time, so I'll look at it further tonight.
6) Your iOS/Android JRemote app costs $9.99? That kind of stinks.
That's about it. All in all so far, I really like JRiverMC and I hope to get my issues sorted. Thank you!
