Oct 19 2004

“Movies” in MCE 2005

Yesteday I went through the process of upgrading our Gateway Entertainment PC (FMC-901X) from MCE2004 (SP1) to MCE2005 (SP2). I was actually surprised that it only took a few hours and that I did not have to revert to the backup I created before starting the upgrade.

All in all I did:
1) install Service Pack 2 (while MCE 2004 was still installed)
2) verified that MCE 2004 was still working
3) installed the upgrade to MCE 2005
4) installed an MCE version of the display driver for the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (before doing that I would always get an error message upon starting MCE which said that my graphics card or driver was not compatible with MCE)
5) used Windows Update to install the update 1 for MCE 2005 (do yourself a favor and install that as soon as you have MCE 2005 installed otherwise you’re going on a wild-goose chase with some of the other problems)
6) reinstalled the latest WinTV drivers from hauppage.com

After doing all that, everything seems to work just fine (if we forget about the LCD display of the Gateway unit for the moment, but that’s only a minor problem).

You’ve probably read about MCE 2005 at other sites already and I’m not going to repeat that, however I did not see the “Movies” feature in any of the other MCE 2005 descriptions (or at least I can’t remember seeing it).
From the “My TV” menu you can get to a new menu entry called “Movies”. When you select that, this is what you’re going to see (partial screenshot only):

Right hand side shows all movies that are currently on all the channels you receive. “On Next” will show you all the movies which are going to start in a little (so you don’t miss anything).
You can drill down and get to details about a movie and can also directly select an actor or a director:

When you do that (as for Dustin above), you see all the movies that the system knows about for this specific actor. This does not necessarily mean that the movies are actually on TV any time soon.

Neat – well done.

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3 Responses to ““Movies” in MCE 2005”

  • Nathan Mueller Says:
    December 3rd, 2004 at 8:34 am

    Thanks for posting your experience. Unfortunately mine has been an experience from hell…

    Here is what I did. I did a fresh clean DVD restore from Gateway on my FMC-901x and then I upgraded to MCE 2005 using a full version I bought from http://newegg.com

    Everything works well, even when I enter the Media Center Application. The only thing that doesn’t work is LIVE TV. the animation spins to wait and then it freezes. The little TV preview has a black square that says STOP.

    I reinstalled the WinTv drivers from Gateway’s site. That didn’t work, then I tried to reinstall using the MCE 2005 drivers on WinTv’s web site ( I used the WinTv-250-MCE drivers).

    For the life of me I can’t figure out why the LIVE TV freezes… Any suggestions? I even did a windows update….

  • Robyn Myers Says:
    December 27th, 2004 at 12:10 pm

    TV was not working on my MCE and I reloaded the same video driver and it fixed it. Worth a try.

  • Kyler Says:
    November 14th, 2009 at 3:12 am

    Hi there. I came across your blog entry about the Gateway FMC-901X. I just bought one but the guy wasn’t able to find the original CDs. Is there any chance you would be able to help me acquire a backup of the original restore discs? Gateway will not sell them any more as it is too old now. I am desperate because I would like to have this machine start as new out of the box. It currently has a valid copy of Vista Home Premium installed but I don’t want to activate it as I intend to go back to MCE 2004.

    Any help or advice is appreciated.

    Kyler

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