Automatic “back to live TV” after watching a recording

[jeam]

Hello,

Question from wife:

With the cable company DVR, if you press the Stop button while playing a recorded program and exit out of the recording, the screen then goes back automatically to whatever live TV channel was tuned before she launched the recorded show.

Is it possible to do the same thing, somehow, in Windows 7 Media Center? She’s liking 7MC, especially for the immense storage space, but finds it slightly aggravating that after you exit a recorded program the software goes back to the Recorded TV option instead of live TV. More remote clicks are needed this way.

I understand that there’s a way to modify 7MC so that it goes straight to live TV when you first open it. Would this take care of her issue, or would it take a different tweak (assuming that what she wants can even be done)?

Thank you.

 

[TheEmirOfGroofunkistan]

if you have a harmony remote, you could program a sequence to use as the stop button that does a stop and then a live tv.  This might get annoying if you’re trying to stop live tv though (stopping livetv is one of the things I like about media center).  Or you could just set up the live tv command as a button – it’s not that much work to press one more button after stop.

[mikinho]

[quote=jeam]

Is it possible to do the same thing, somehow, in Windows 7 Media Center? She’s liking 7MC, especially for the immense storage space, but finds it slightly aggravating that after you exit a recorded program the software goes back to the Recorded TV option instead of live TV. More remote clicks are needed this way.

[/quote]

The easiest thing to do here is to press the Live TV button instead.  You could also setup a background add-in that whenever you hit stop it would check if you were watching Recorded TV and if so launch Live TV.  But I think that would get irritating myself as sometimes you could want to watch multiple recordings in a row.  Learning to use the Live TV button may be a better idea.

[quote=jeam]

I understand that there’s a way to modify 7MC so that it goes straight to live TV when you first open it. Would this take care of her issue, or would it take a different tweak (assuming that what she wants can even be done)?

[/quote]

That wouldn’t do it.  That just launches Live TV at startup.

[Aaron Ledger]

I would like to convince you that this is a bad idea 🙂

Imagine that you are recording <insert your favorite show> and you conclude watching a recorded show. If the <insert favorite show> is on the last channel you were viewing, the behavior you describe will dump you right into the middle of the <insert favorite show>.

[jeam]

Hi,

Thanks for all the ideas!

The solution was in fact to click on one of the mysterious little buttons on the remote that I hadn’t tried out yet.   We were watching a recording, clicked on the button, and it took us to the channel that was tuned before we started to run the recorded show.

The instructions for this cheap remote aren’t very helpful. Now that we know that 7MC does work for us (or should I say, for my wife), maybe it’s time to invest in a good remote where they spent more than 10 minutes preparing the manual.

I can see the problem with going back to live TV and landing in the middle of a show that we’re recording. But in our years of DVR use, this has happened maybe twice. Most of the time we have one of the news networks tuned in as our “default” live TV channel, so it’s not really an issue for us.

Thanks again!

 

[babgvant]

Get a Harmony.  Makes controlling everything, especially if you have more than two components much easier.

[Author]

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