Vista - Cannot Play Live TV on Vista MCE, please help.

Hello people. I've come upon a problem and I dread calling MS support. I have found nothing useful (without paying a subscription) on the net.

I have Vista U x64 and a Hauppage WinTV1600. Everything was working fine for a couple months, but now I cannot play Live TV as I get this error.

"Cannot Play Video: The file is currently in use by another application and cannot be played. Please try again later."

Well, later is now over a week. I can still record tv and all other functions, no other issues at all.

I can't exactly pin down when it started due to a 2 week period of not watching live tv or what software (if any) could have caused it. I also tried the maintanence feature of MCE, but did not correct it.

Does anyone have any thoughts or experience to this issue? I'm not sure what "file" or "application" could be doing this. I do have Nero 7 Essentials installed and uninstalled Cyberlink DVD in case, but I'm just swatting flies with these thoughts.

Any help would be much appreciated. Cheers.

Hi Rayder,

I have had a similar problem with my Compro DTV having some "issues" with MCE...Have you contacted Hauppage for answers? They do support the things they make.


Steven

Hi Steven, thanks for the suggestion, I do hear good things about their support. However, I feel hauppage is not at fault since the device and drivers are functioning well.
It seems a software issue to me. Thought it might have been the xbox extender, but uninstalling that didn't change anything.

I just cannot watch Live TV or watch a show while it is being recorded, so it's either the temp file (live tv) or the creation of a file (currently recording) that causes the error, once the file is done (fully recorded), then I can play it.

I was able to find the problem. If I right click the VMC button and run as admin, it works, but you had to keep doing that every time.
When I added "modify" as a permission for the user on the "Recorded TV' folder, it worked without right clicking and running as admin. All is back to normal.
Why this happened, IDK, but maybe had something to do with the UAC registry hack I followed, maybe SP1, ?.

hmm, that is weird and I guess it was something that wasn't carried over from before SP1.

Steven

I had the same problems. Vista Media Center could not find my tuner card that was working two days ago. Did a system recovery, no help. Looked around and here's what I came up with, (with the help of several posts from other folks...)

Windows Media Center Receiver was not starting. I was getting an access denied error. the fix was to open a cmd prompt (as admin) and run the following:

net localgroup administrators NetworkService /ADD

I could now start the Media Center receiver service but got an error saying that the file was already in use when I tried to fire up live TV.

The fix for this was to change the permissions on my Recorded TV folder. I added modify permissions for users on the folder.

VIOLA, after two days of hacking I can now use media center again...