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.