Some frequently asked questions to help you get the most out of Remote Potato.
Do you have logos displayed within the EPG of Windows Media Center itself? If your logos are displayed within Media Center, they should automatically appear in Remote Potato.
An excellent program to install channel logos into Media Center is
My Channel Logos.
I tried to stream a show for the first time and nothing happened!
Do you have Windows Firewall turned on, on your home PC? The very first time you stream a recording, Windows Firewall will throw up a window asking if you want to allow
Remote Potato to send out the video stream. You should tick both 'Private' and 'Public' networks and click OK to continue.
It can be frustrating to discover this the very first time you're away from home, so we suggest you do a test stream first while in your house and you can allow Remote Potato
through the firewall in this way.
How do I access Remote Potato away from home, over the Internet?
You may need to forward a couple of ports to your PC. The default ports for Remote Potato are 9080 for the UI and 9081 for streaming. To access RP over the Internet, you would usually
forward these ports on your router to the home PC that you have installed our software on. You may also choose different public ports (on your router)
e.g. if you choose port 80 on your router, because this is the default for web servers, you won't need to enter anything except the URL of your home
PC into the browser - the router will take care of sending this through to port 9080 of your home PC.
Please note that for the second of these two ports (the streaming port), the public port must be the same number as the private port, i.e. you must forward port 9081 of your router to port 9081 on your PC to get streaming to work.
Excellent guides, and a free config program, are available at
this site.
How do I get the web address of my home computer?
Every time most people connect to the Internet, the IP address of their home will change. Therefore, to remotely contact your
home over the Internet, you may also want to consider a
free dynamic DNS service.
This keeps track of your home IP address, so that you can always access your Home PC over the Internet, simply by
using the URL that they give to you. Many modern routers will allow you to set up a Dynamic DNS system from within the router's configuration webpage.
When trying to stream, nothing happens - and I get an error message in the debug log saying 'No common media type between these pins'
This error can occur if you have installed non-standard codecs onto your system - we've seen a user experience this error when using a codec pack from shark007. Try uninstalling any extra codec packs one by one to find the codec that is causing the error.
I keep getting the 'login' screen yet I'm sure I'm typing the right username and password.
There was a known issue with some characters such as hashes (#) in passwords; try removing these, or upgrade to version 0.92.10 or later.
I have a bug / strange error message / feature request. How do I get in touch?
You can post a message on the
Remote Potato Forums to let us know - we welcome feedback and suggestions.
How do I design my own theme?
Good question, have a read of the
theming guide.
Why aren't any movies showing in the 'Movies' section?
There are two possible reasons - firstly, do you have 'Show only movies from favourite channels' checked in the 'Advanced' settings tab? If so,
then no movies will display unless you have selected some favourite channels within the 'channels' tab.
The other possibility is that movies are not correctly being categorised by your EPG source. If you're using mc2xml with the newer 'Microsoft' servers, this
will happen - it's is a known issue and is being addressed.
In the HTML skin, how do I make the EPG wider / narrower for my display?
You'll need to change the theme; read the
theming guide.
Alternatively, why not check out the
support thread to see if others have created a suitable theme for your requirements.
Is there an API so I can access the data for use in 3rd party apps?
There is a fully working demonstration app, with source code, that demonstrates how to access the basic features of the API; download it from the main Remote Potato download page. (version 2.0)
The documentation for this is still being finalised and will appear soon.
Known Issues
I tried to re-scan my channels in Media Center, and got a message that 'A serious error has occurred... please re-start'
First off, don't panic - there almost certainly hasn't been a serious error. This is a known side effect that can occur because Remote Potato is accessing your media center database; and Media Center isn't expecting it to be.
If you get this error, just re-boot, stop the Remote Potato server from running, re-scan your channels and then re-start the server.
I can't get Remote Potato to run on port 443 - instead I get an 'Error 99'
Certain ports, such as 443, are reserved by Windows for secure net activities by default and are therefore currently unable to be used by Remote Potato.
Picture thumbnails not displayed in Tech Preview if certain windows explorer settings changed on Server
Remote Potato gets its picture thumbnails from the Windows Explorer thumbnails that are generated. If your Windows Explorer settings on your server are set to "Always show icons, never thumbnails", they won't be displayed.
Please re-enable this setting on the server to get your picture thumbnails to display.
No thumbnails are displayed for very recently recorded shows.
The thumbnails are not generated until you physically go to your Windows Media Center PC and choose 'Recorded TV' within Media Center. This can
also be seen by opening your 'recorded TV' folder on the media center PC, before the above step - you will see the missing thumbnails. We are looking into alternative
ways to generate thumbnails without having to physically go to your PC, but as most users regularly visit 'Recorded TV' anyway, this is not a
high priority issue.
A show in [my language] does not stream.
Remote Potato currently has an issue streaming some shows with non-ASCII characters in their filenames. We're working on this as hard as we can!
Additional known bugs and issues
There is a list of further known bugs
here - check this for more info.