Watching TV Shows with a Media Center PC

If you have a PC that's running Windows Media Center, and if your PC has a TV tuner card installed, you can use your computer to watch and record television programming -- just like a TiVo or other digital video recorder (DVR). You use the PC's TV tuner to watch television, and the PC's hard disk to store the programs you record.

Choosing Programs with the Program Guide

The home base for all your television viewing in Media Center is the Program Guide. This is an electronic program guide that lists all scheduled programming for the channels in your area (or on your cable or satellite service) for a 14-day period. You get to the Guide by going to the Media Center Start page and selecting My TV > Guide, or by pressing the Guide button on your Media Center remote control.

When you use the directional buttons to highlight a program, information about that program is displayed below the Guide. You can view even more information by pressing the More Info button on your remote, and then selecting Program Info from the pop-up menu. When you click a program that's currently showing, that live program is displayed full-screen for you to view. If you click a program that's scheduled at a future date or time, you display the Program Info screen, which you can use to schedule a recording of the show.

Pausing "Live" Television

Having a hard disk in your Media Center PC not only enables you to record television programs, but it also lets you pause and rewind "live" programs that you're watching. Note that the word live is in quotation marks; this is because you really can't pause reality as it happens. What you can do, however, is pause a television program that was recorded a millisecond earlier.

The way this function works is deceptively simple. Unbeknownst to you, the program you're watching is not transferred directly from your Media Center PC's tuner to your television screen. Instead, the program is automatically written to your PC's hard disk by the disk's magnetic write head. Then, a millisecond after the information is written to the hard disk, the disk's magnetic read head reads the just-recorded information, and sends that information to your television screen. So, although it appears that you're watching live TV, you're actually watching a recording of the live program. The playback happens so soon after the recording, it's as good as live.

Because you're watching a recording of the live program, you can pause and rewind that recording as you like, just as you can any recorded program. It might look as if you're pausing the action during a live broadcast, but you're merely pausing the read head on the hard disk; the write head continues to record the real live program as it continues in real-time. This process, of course, is virtually transparent to you, the viewer. All you know and care about is that you can use the Pause, Rewind, and Fast Forward buttons to manipulate the playback of the program you're watching. When you press one of these transport buttons, Media Center displays a progress bar (called the seek bar) at the bottom of the screen. The green part of the seek bar shows how much of the program has been recorded; you can rewind to the beginning of the green bar, or fast forward to the end of the green bar -- which corresponds to the current point in the live program.

Michael Miller is a writer and commentator on technology and digital lifestyle topics.