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Mar11
Media Center Health Monitor
Ian Dixon is one busy man. Not only is he managing and constantly growing The Digital Lifestyle into THE site for Media Center information, but he’s also pushed out an update for his Media Center Health Monitor.
If you’ve been using Media Center for any length of time you know that it can have issues recording programming from time to time. These things happen when dealing with HTPCs. Using the Media Center Health Monitor, not only will you know whether or not things are running the way they’re supposed to but you’ll be able to do so away from home.Using the web interface you can check the status of your recordings as well as whether or not there have been any errors since you last checked. But it doesn’t stop there. If you take a look to your right you can see that MCHM provides an RSS feed which you can subscribe to or post like I have. Oh and one other thing, you can have it tweet you your updates using a second twitter account. (See mine here) Every time a recording finishes correctly or if there’s an error, I receive a tweet letting me know. This is great for someone like myself who spends a lot of time using the service. Yeah, Ian has really put a lot of thought into this little app.
Even though MCHM is still in beta, everything works like a charm. Ian has set up the download page so that the extra apps you need get install automatically and everything flows. The only hiccup I’ve noticed is that when you first start the service, if there are a lot of status messages it’ll take a little time to start up. Not a bug at all but something to be aware of. The only other thing I became aware of after installation was that auto updates are off by default. This means that your RSS and twitter feeds won’t update automatically. A simple button click at the top of the window fixes this.
You have a lot of options as far as what messages you receive. You can make it so you just receive warnings or so that the app will tell you every time there’s a successful recording as well. I’ve configured mine to tell me everything. It’s helped already as I’ve started getting messages that such and such a show couldn’t record because there was no TV signal yet it records anyway. I’m not sure what this means and maybe someone can help me with that, but I never would have known about the issue without MCHM.
Overall, for a beta app, this is a must install for all Media Center users. Never mind that it gives you a run down of what’s going on with your system, but add in the fact that you can monitor it from afar and you need to have this. Even though it’s only a beta, Ian has done a great job updating it to make it work with Windows 7 as well as making it play well with x64 systems.
Also, I just had an exchange with Ian and he’ll be pushing out another update soon so be ready for that!
Head to The Digital Lifestyle Media Center Health Monitor site and sign up to download this app now!
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