But because the channel changing is very poor and the digital TV support made me cry I decided to try out Media Portal. The change only brought me good fortune. I could finally change channels they way I liked. Being able to see which show was running. And even better have a good TV Guide.

I do have to admit that the first version I used had a few problems:

• Setting up the channels was hell. It took me over 2 hours to build a full channel list. Mainly because there was no dvb file for my region, so I had to create one manually. And once I completed a scan it only found 10 channels. So I had to rescan over and over and over and……
• The damn thing kept crashing if I left it on over night in TV mode, real bummer since I don’t turn of the HTPC.
• Media Portal seems to be unable to record anything if the program is closed, but if left open it crashes.

Luckely for me a new version was released not that long ago. Hoping some problems might disapear I downloaded and installed. Not wanting to do the pain in the ass scanning again I first saved the channel list to an XML file.

It all installed nicely, not much fuss and pretty quick. But when I tried to import the channel list I got really f**ked. The new version did not want to import the channel list. I was really worried that the scanning would take forever again. I was in for a big surprise when I found that I could start a channel scan and at the same time organise them the way I wanted. All within 10 minutes, so a big improvement.

Another big surprise was that the recording happened dispite Media portal being closed. And even better even if I didn’t close it the program no longer crashed after being open for the whole night.

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