(And thanks to Ben for the original idea)

I've posted a rather simple application (with source code) up on Codeplex (http://remotewizard.codeplex.com/) that monitors a gMail account for a message with a TitanTV TVPI attachment.  If the message is from a known good source (i.e. a name or phrase that we've designated that must be in the sender's email address), and if the subject contains a secret word (defined at program installation), the attached TVPI file is parsed, converted to Click-to-Record XML format, and submitted to Media Center using the CreateScheduleRequest method of the EventSchedule class in the Microsoft.MediaCenter.TV.Scheduling namespace.

For example:

1) On your remote computer, find a program you want to record in your TVTitan Program Guide

 

 

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2) Click the listing anc choose 'Record:'

 

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3) Save the resulting TVPI file somewhere handy:

 

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4) Email the TVPI to the gMail account (that you should probably set up just for this purpose).  Be sure to include your Secret Word in the Subject line:

 

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5) The RemoteWizard will download your message, schedule your program, and send you an email confirmation:

 

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6) Your program should now be scheduled in Media Center:

 

A few additional thoughts:

• You should really have a dedicated gMail account for this, especially until the application has been thoroughly tested and debugged.
• You'll also need a free Titan TV account, which will provide you with access to a web-based program guide that matches (more or less) your Media Center guide
• Speaking of bugs, I can't get the schedule by title function in Click-to-record to work reliably with TV Pack systems, so I'm scheduling by mapped channel number, start time and duration.  That's why in the example above the Media center schedule reads "Manual: Three Rivers."
• It works pretty well on my home systems, but is provided strictly on an 'as-is, at-your-own-risk' basis.
• Both the service source code (in VB, no less) and an installable binary are available at the Codeplex link above.

If you give this a try, please let me know how it works for you.

 Thanks,

Henry

 

 Great job!! Its a start at least.

Thanks!  I'll keep plugging away at a more general solution, but the lack of schedule data (without resorting to a for-fee bases service like Schedules Direct) is a killer.  Hence the TitanTV workaround.

Sorry, I think I've missed some of the discussion from the original thread (or it maybe went over my head) but can't this be handled like MythWeb does it?  Or is the problem the inability to read the guide data that's stored in MS's format?

Bingo!  When TV Pack was introduced, Microsoft changed the way guide data is stored and accessed on the computer; that's one of the reasons that WebGuide won't work with TV Pack or Win7.  There are undocumented ways to access the guide data, but there's no guarantee if and when they'll keep working.  There's an "official" way in managed code to pull guide info, but there's a hard limit on how many 'extended attributes' you can pull in a 24-hour period.  So far, the only alternative I've come up with is a Schedules Direct subscription, with the guide data downloaded weekly to a SQL Server on my development system.  This works, but 1) it costs $20/year; 2) it's a big download; and 3) you have to run some flavor of SQL Server on your local to manage the data efficiently.  All to duplicate the information that Microsoft already has available on my pc!

I have a WCF windows service running on my Win7 box at home that will accept and schedule programs quite nicely.  I have a private website on my WHS box that has the guide data from Schedules Direct; when I click on a program on the webpage, it sends a request to the WCF service, schedules the program, and sends the acknowledgement back in real-time.  Thus, I have a complete remote scheduling application that lets me schedule recordings from anywhere I can access my WHS (i.e. anywhere over the Internet).  But it's such a kludge that I could never offer it for sale.

Maybe I should just offer the WCF part for a few dollars and let everyone roll their own web interface.  Or not.

As you can see, I've got some work to do...

The problem thus far is accessing guide data directly from media center right?  I have looked around, but I can't find anyone that has done it that has any source available.  I believe MC2XML does work with Windows 7 now, but I have no idea how they do it.  I had considered using their application to export it to XML then reading the XML into a web-page, but its $20 for the test version that supports Windows 7.  I think I would prefer to try and access the SQL Lite database that holds the information.

 Anyone have any thoughts on how to accomplish this? :)

Interesting work around, I guess I'll just stick to my old (tried and true) clunky way of scheduling shows remotly when I need to...

RDC to my server, then from that RDC to my Media Center system, restart MC and schedule a show, all over a Windows Moblie phone (very slow and clunky). It's very slow but, works in a fix...

Why don't you cut out the middle man.  (The home server).  Install a program called hamachi on your windows mobile phone and on your desktop.  This sets up a secure vpn to your media center pc.  You can remote desktop directly to your media center pc then.  Also you may want to check out orb and kinoma play for your smartphone.  You can stream all your media to your phone through the orb client on kinoma play.

Actually, I have Orb running on my WHS, and while it streams my DVDs and such, I've never been able to get it to work with dvr-ms (let alone wtv) files.  Perhaps a codec problem?

I would put orb on your media center pc instead of whs instead of trying to install a bunch of codecs on your whs.  It probably has more power for transcoding and more codecs to make it work.

Looks awesome, but I'm having trouble getting it to work on my VMC with TV Pack install. Upon launching the service through the services snap-in I'm getting this in eventvwr

The RemoteWizard service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s).

- System

- Provider

[ Name] Service Control Manager

[ Guid] {555908D1-A6D7-4695-8E1E-26931D2012F4}

[ EventSourceName] Service Control Manager

- EventID 7034

[ Qualifiers] 49152

Version 0

Level 2

Task 0

Opcode 0

Keywords 0x80000000000000

- TimeCreated

[ SystemTime] 2009-11-21T08:34:54.000Z

EventRecordID 218848

Correlation

- Execution

[ ProcessID] 0

[ ThreadID] 0

Channel System

Computer computername

Security

- EventData

param1 RemoteWizard

param2 1

Sorry about that!  Could you please look to see if you have a log file in C:\ProgramData\RemoteWizard; if you do, please email it to remotewizard@remotewizard.net and I'll take a look.

Sorry again for the inconvenience!