Mediaportal TVServer on WHS

I am a tech geek at heart and love new tech and trying to get it integrated in my home, workplace, every day life.

One thing I purchased about 8 months ago was an HP Windows Home Server (WHS from now on) EX495. I know there is debate on this and someone may give me slack for getting the higher end model but I did it for two reasons. I wanted the extra CPU power for having the potential ability of being able to do some transcoding of videos without having to void the warranty and mod the system. Second, with the beta release of Vail (next version of Windows Home Server) recently released I thought I would gamble and hope that if there was a machine that may be able to upgrade this would be the machine.

Here is what I am attempting. Rid my house of having 2 machines on for most of the day.

• Machine 1 is my WHS naturally
• Machine 2 is to record the little TV we watch

How I am going to attempt to accomplish this:

1. Install Mediaportal – free TV Server application which allows for the watching and recording of shows in a client/server configuration. Here is the TV Engine I am using: http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=fa6ba91fd6b5d11a1bee9a6e9edd9c764fc3696e526346da4ca8d2a77d7aad89
2. Install the Mediaportal web tool for being able to set up recordings where I have web connectivity. Here:

http://www.team-mediaportal.de/dateien/Download/Plugins/Web/MPWebInterface/

Challenges:

• 1. Mediaportal is not support on WHS but will install

I have been fighting this battle for some time as I tried installing the latest build of Mediaportal (1.1 RC2) but found the recording to be very inconsistent. It would record one scheduled show this week and the next it wouldn’t and record one that it missed the next or it wouldn’t record at all.

I found a post not that long ago of someone claiming a certain release of the TVServer worked well on WHS. I downloaded it, installed it.

NOTE: I had mediaportal 1.1 RC2 installed as I mentioned prior. That being the case I had MS SQL Express installed and the database already setup so I didn’t have to go through this and a lot of the settings I had were preserved. I am not going to go into the installation of the tool. This is simply to possibly remedy a few common issues on the WHS side people may see.

Once installed I tried opening up the config tool to receive the following error:
Error: 31456 Connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.

Couple of things I first tried was making sure the following ports were open 31456 (TCP) Remote Control 554 (TCP) RTSP Streaming. This did not seem to fix the issue. I did some further googling to find a post on some obscure site to simply rename the following files:

1. 1. C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal TV Server\TvService.exe.config
2. 2. C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal TV Server\SetupTv.exe.config

Both should be renamed to TvService.config and SetupTv.config. This allowed me to open the tool and was the fix I was looking for. At first test I tried scheduling a manual record, which did not work prior. Low and behold, it worked. I have a few scheduled programs to start in a few days and am going to see if I can get them to record.

The web interface seems to schedule stuff just fine and is what I used to start the one time recording I mentioned above. The install instructions worked and come with the installer so follow them and you will be on your way.