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I’ve been playing around with Windows 10 for a few days and, while I love the new OS, I do miss watching live TV on Windows Media Center. I used the HDHomeRun media streamer in conjunction with WMC to watch and record live cable TV broadcasts, including premium channels. It worked great.
I knew I would lose Windows Media Center when I upgraded to Windows 10 and was OK with that. I’m hoping a similar solution eventually gets developed by a third party developer.
In the meantime, I thought I’d try to get Windows Media Center running on a virtual machine using Windows 10’s built in Hyper-V manager. Alas, I wasn’t able to get it to work. Here are the problems I ran into:
- When connected to the VM via remote desktop and attempted to watch the sample video in WMC, I get a message stating that Windows Media Center cannot play video over a remote desktop connection. Note that I was able to watch and hear a YouTube over RDP with no problem.
- When I try to watch the sample video in WMC by accessing the VM via the Hyper-V Manager, I get a video error stating that the files needed to display video are not installed or are not working correctly.
- Even if I were able to get past these problems, I was also unable to successfully complete the Digital Cable Advisor setup that would allow me to watch cable TV. When you run the system analyzer, a test failure occurs.
Oh well.
While running Windows Media Center on Windows 10 was an epic fail, at least I learned how to set up virtual machines using Windows 10 Hyper-V. It’s surprisingly easy to do and I already have a few plans for using them. Thus, the effort wasn’t a total waste of time. 🙂
Do you also miss Windows Media Center?
Do you have any ideas about how to fix the issues I mentioned above? Have you come up with any workarounds? Are you using a WMC alternative on Windows 10 to watch and record cable TV? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
I, too was disappoint that WMC is not available on Windows 10. I am able to watch live TV using HDHomerun View but have not figured out how to record what I view. I also tried one of the 3rd party packages but was unable to use it because Windows 10 does not have the decoding software now that WMC is gone. Any ideas?
Can you Record the TV with the VM with Media Center, and use the Win 10 machine to watch the recordings/live TV?
I know this is an extremely old post but I thought I’d give my two cents. I also am having to upgrade and abandon Windows 7…However can’t you create a Windows 7 VM inside Win 10 then launch it and then use WMC in a desktop window? OR is there an actual solution, now, that enables using a TV Tuner with Windows 10(with 3rd party software) that will essentially do the same? Thanks.