Windows Media Center Electronic Program Guide Alternatives

I have been running Plex for the last couple years alongside Windows Media Center as well. The biggest complaint I have with Plex is the reliability. A few times a year Plex will just not record some TV show and sometimes not even give any indication that it attempted but failed. Meanwhile Windows Media Center records the same show without problems.  I keep thinking each new version, month after month, has the bugs ironed out, but then just last week it failed again with an episode of Magnum P.I.

I think if I need to start paying for a guide in WMC, then I'll rethink my subscription to Plex.

The other top DVR contender for me is Channels which is strictly a DVR system. It doesn't have all the media management that Plex has, but the recordings from Channels will play back in a Plex library. The downside to Channels is that it costs more than most and they don't have a Roku or Windows app. The upside to Channels is they are experimenting with "tuning" cloud cable streaming, and they also mark commercials on the timeline in the apps they do provide (Apple TV, Android TV, and Fire TV).

David,

Before I retired, I was the escalation / factory support person for the HP Pavilion desktop systems - including the former Digital Entertainment Center PC, sort of the buck stop here (the person that packaged the SoftPaqs (SW updates), wrote the READMEs, etc).  Totally bought into WMC back in the XP/Vista days and used it up until now.   A few years ago I revamped my home theatre system to use an HP i5 SFF business desktop w 16GB, using an SSD boot drive and a 4TB NAS quality 3.5" drive in the chassis, low profile nVidia GT730 and Dual Channel Hauppauge Tuner.  As you can see from the string above, have been experimenting with the alternatives.  Plex, while so configurable, makes for a very crummy DVR compared to WMC.  I bolted WMC onto my Win10 Pro boot drive and while it works, I can't seem to get my Media Center Extender to configure to it - am guessing it's a firewall issue in Win10.  I'm also seeing lots of video frame drops, jerkyness, but it could be the fact that in the process of switching I went from an XGA projector to a 4K big screen, with much more work on the part of WMC and the older nVidia card.  WinTV works, but is made for a keyboard interface, not the 10' UI with a remote.   I'll probably put back in the Win7 boot drive and setup WMC using the EPG123 that GARyan here has put together / packaged/ championed.  I've purchased Norton for the firewall / antivirus (in case MS kills off the Defender updates) and will just use this as a local DVR.  I still want to test Emby though and am hoping that Amazon puts out a next-gen of their Recast TV box soon (the current one maxes out at 720p) - that would be a more logical platform, as we've got a couple of Fire TVs already.  A couple of my former coworkers using WMC have switched to EPG123 and have had good luck with it.  It's been an interesting experiment, and as I've already said a time or two, makes me appreciate the robustness and simplicity of usage of WMC all the more.

Thought that i would post an update to my previous post.  As I mentioned before I’ve been running Plex and windows media center in parallel for the last couple of months. I also purchased the EPG 123 programming guide for use with windows media center as an alternative to the microsoft guide. In short, both are working well. The Plex works fine and the guide that comes along with the flex pass is fine. The only thing about the Plex is that the response time is not always the best when you want to fast forward or rewind while watching a show. The nice thing about Plex is that you can watch it outside the house, on your phone, or laptop, at gym or in hotel while traveling. The best part of windows media center, is it works fine with the alternative epg123 guide and you get the very nice windows media center interface. Quick response times easy to set up recordings, stuff like that. so bottom line, is that for I’m still going to run the windows media center install using epg123 as the guide as my normal day-to-day TV watching set up, I still have Plex running on the same computer, that I use to store audio books and shows that I know that I’m gonna watch while I’m out of the house.

YES … I have the Microsoft Lumia 950XL and it is a fantastic phone. Best phone and best camera ever made, but unfortunately apps are not getting updated and some have dropped support entirely (the latest two have been Bank of America and United Airlines, both of which I really depend on). Uber still works, thankfully.