Hopefully I'm not the last remaining dinosaur to be running Windows Media Center and someone is able to help...  I setup WMC as a VM.  In order to set Recorded TV to point to one of my Unraid network shares, I followed the procedure outlined in comment #17 here:

 

https://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/viewtopic.php?p=116353#p116353

 

It basically says to create a 2nd disk for the VM and use "mklink" to point it to the network share location.

 

I've done all of that and set WMC to store recorded tv to the network share.  That's working well so far.  However, whenever a new recording is saved, WMC shows the recording twice in the recorded tv section.  So, it's showing duplicates for every recording that it makes.  Then, if I delete one of the recordings, both copies are deleted.

 

Has anyone run into this?  Anyone know what is causing this or how to fix it?  Also, if anyone has any other general advice for running WMC on Unraid, I'd love to hear it.  Thanks!

The following is from Windows 7 MC.

 

In MC, go to Tasks | Settings | TV | Recorder | Media Libraries | Remove folders from library.  Verify that you do not have a reference to the recordings share on Unraid.  If you do, delete it.  Media Center should only know about your local drive, which is linked to the share.  It won't show up in this list because its the recording drive).  If MC knows about both, you'll show the duplicate recordings.

 

@aim60, thanks for the advice.  That was indeed the case.  Not sure how the network share got in there, as I never added it manually.  But case closed, so thanks!

 

Are there any other tips/tricks for configuring WMC in Unraid that I should know about?

  I've always been reluctant to try your method, except on my test MC server.  Especially with reports of array slowness in 6.7.x.  I record locally, then weekly, copy the recordings to Unraid, and remove them from local storage.  At the very least, consider limiting your recordings share to one disk, and have the link reference \\server\diskx\sharename rather than \\server\sharename, bypassing the overhead of the Fuse file system. 

 

There's no problem having MC use unc paths to previously recorded content.  Its only the recording drive that needs the mklink trick.

 

Nothing else comes to mind about using MC with Unraid.

@aim60, sounds good.  Thanks for the tip!  If you copy your recordings manually (or some automated task) to a network path and point recorded tv to it as an additional library location, won't you need to manually manage your recorded tv files?  Would you need to manually delete the oldest episodes, etc from the network folder as you want to free up space instead of having WMC handle this automatically?

I'm recording to a local drive on the MC pc.  Weekly, I am moving the recordings to unraid.  They never exist in both places at the same time.  After moving recordings, I need to restart the Windows Media Center Receiver Service so MC registers the change in the location of the recordings.

 

Keep in mind that with your method, you are asking unraid to do something that it was never designed to do - receive data on a real-time basis.  The more simultaneous recordings that you do, and other things you may have running on on the server (plugins, dockers, VMs), the more difficult it will be for unraid to keep up.  The forums on www.thegreenbutton.tv have several threads on user experiences recording to a NAS.

 

In the future, I am going to attempt to run Win7 MC as a VM on unraid.  And I'll either direct recordings to a dedicated Unassigned Devices drive, or pass through a physical drive to the VM for recordings.  In my house, all sh*t breaks loose if recordings are corrupted.

I have WHS 2011 running in a VM and it archives all my recordings from my WMC box - files remain managed through WMC directly. I only keep a 500GB SSD in the WMC box for immediate recorder storage before it's shuffled off

I've had Media Center setup in a VM for a couple weeks now.  What I have noticed is that watching live TV works well.  However, when we watch recorded TV, it will often stutter during playback and gives the "Network Issue" warning.  The stuttering happens several times throughout a 30 minute episode.  It's VERY annoying and basically ruins the whole experience.

 

Anyone seen anything similar or have advice to fix it?  I'm almost at the point of abandoning WMC as a VM right now if I can't get this fixed.