TheDigitalLifeStyle.com the home of The Media Center Show! Microsoft MVP
For a while I have been working on a small program that gives me a little piece of mind when working with Recorded TV in Media Center. A while back I had a problem with Recordings not working due to a corruption in Recordings.XML, I only noticed the problem a while after it has started and I missed quite a few recordings. So that go me thinking that I would like to have some kind of monitor on the status on Media Center, something not unlike Windows Home Servers heath status. Now I know that corruption errors are very rare (once this year for me) but I wanted to get the status of other errors too, like if Media Center missed a recording due to the power being off or a IR blaster cable has been pulled out etc. Plus it's nice to see easily everything is ok . I also wanted an excuse to play with Visual Studio 2008 and thought it was better to start with a hobby program rather than on my core apps at the office :)
So I have written "Media Center Health Monitor", this monitors the Media Center Event Log and warns of Recording errors and any service issues that would effect the recordings. The program sits in the tray has has health status, Green = All is OK, Yellow = Warnings and Red=Service Errors. See the screen shots bellow:
The app is written in VB using .NET framework 3.5 and deployed using ClickOnce. This beta is a desktop only version but I do have plans for other ways of being alerted in the future, eg Sidebar, other network devices etc
Looks cool; I'll probably give it a try.
Does this monitor run only on the Media Center box itself? It would be convenient if -- like WHS -- one could see these health alerts on other PCs in the home. I often run Media Center in full-screen mode for days at a time, so I might never see the alerts. And if I don't happen to turn on my TV, I certainly won't see them. If they showed up on the desktop in my home office, or on my wife's laptop, they could be addressed much sooner.
Extra credit if I could somehow be alerted outside the home. I might not be able to actually correct the issue from work, but depending on the problem, I might at least be able to call home and have someone reboot the Media Center box, if that's what is needed.
This version should support remote pcs, in this build it will only work if the username and password are all the same.
In a future build I am going to build in better support for remote machines. The outside option I would love to do at some point
Richard Miller MCE MVP
I don't think XP has a Media Center Event log that my program uses. I don't have a XP machine here to check, anybody else know if there is a Media Center Event log?
Ian Dixon: I don't think XP has a Media Center Event log that my program uses. I don't have a XP machine here to check, anybody else know if there is a Media Center Event log?
Ian I insalled it on MCE 2005 looks like its working.
thats intersting!
So I guess the basic non MCML version should be fine :)
Another confirmation here. It installed and is running, no problemo :D. Be sure to install the critical update from windows update after installing it.
Ian, this app is pretty cool. Feel free to give it the attention you would the Vista version :D.
The XP version is the full version without the Media Center bits, so I should be able to keep two SKU going
The XP and Vista version will have a web UI version as well, eg You can monitor the health of mutliple Media Center PCs from the web