So far Reader Q&A here on Hack7MC has been a great success. However, it hasn’t had a very regular schedule. From now on Reader Q&A should appear regularly on Mondays with user submitted questions. If you have a question for this weekly feature be sure to send it in at the bottom of this post for a future Reader Q&A!

Question #1 from Ili

I have an “Hauppauge PVR-150″ Video capture card. The card have a S-Video in and a Cable tuner in. The S-Video is connected to my Digital cable Box and the tuner connected to my analog cable. In 7MC I can configure the Digital TV with the TV guide and all and the analog TV with the TV guide and all But I can’t configure the Analog TV and the Digital TV together because when I configure the second connection Its overwrite the previous setting in the 7MC How can I configure Analog TV and the Digital TV together in the 7MC thank you very much

Answer

I’m not sure why this would be happing, you should be able to configure both separately (using the manual configuration option) and have both the analog and digital guide. However, if that doesn’t work there may be a potential solution.

Back when we were playing with backing up the recording schedule we found that if your entered the lineup information you ended up with duplicate channels. You may be able to use one of these lineup backup files to restore your analog lineup after setting up your digital lineup though.

After you’ve setup your analog tuner and have downloaded the latest guide information, open Windows Explorer and grab the latest backup file from C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\mcepgx-x-x\lineup. Then open a command prompt and type in C:\Windows\ehome\loadmxf.exe –i FILELOCATION and see if that works for you.

Question #2 from Mihailo

I tried using WMC7 while it was still in beta and was surprised by the now well known problem with Windows Media Foundation. Since I like to have subtitles with my movies I couldn’t use the subtitle filter (ffdshow or VobSub) with Win7 codecs. Is there a WMF filter that can read srt subtitles or is there a software that can make WMC use DirectShow without messing up WOW64 and System32 files and folders?

Answer

Currently, no. Soon? Maybe. The folks over at DivxLabs have got a Windows Media Foundation codec project in the works that should allow you to playback video using the built-in WMF features. Unfortunately, at this point it’s still very beta and doesn’t yet include subtitle support (or an x64 build).

Question #3 from Scott Kingery

Is it still true that, like Vista, only Microsoft codecs/containers (wmv, wtv, dvr-ms) support fast forward and rewind?

Answer

In a default install Media Center uses the Windows Media Foundation codecs and should support fast forward in any format that the codec supports natively. However, fast forwarding like that available in MS formats (fast forwarding with audio) will likely not be available outside the standard file formats. Essentially, if you need to install a splitter to play the format you’ll likely not get fast forward support in Media Center.

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