Media Portal - The supreme HTPC application?

[Travesso]

Here's my story for all those that have been pulling their hair out with either XP MCE or Vista MC

I upgraded to Vista from XP MCE due to an unexplained phenomenon of jerky ass video playback (DVD or HDD records) after a resume from S3.

Vista gained me a much nicer (IMO) interface, but some standby issues (randomly stays awake, other times sleeps perfectly) - those I can live with. Video playback is perfectly smooth however.... No channel 10 or SC10 in VMC!

Both XP MCE and VMC share the same shortcomings in functionality. You cant queue a folder of videos (filmclips or tv series) nor can u create a playlist of videos as u can with MP3s.... a very silly oversight from Microsoft in my opinion!

With months toying with this problem and no solution in sight I tried Media Portal 0.22 last night. I LOVE IT! It does everything I want in terms of functionality, and picks up ALL stations! Its early days yet as I dont have EPG info working yet so I'm yet to record, but timeshifting has been working perfectly, along with live TV, Videos, Music and pictures playback.

[leigh]

im using media portal at the moment and cant fault it.
for the epg, get it setup with http://www.team-mediaportal.com/file.../GetOzTvGuide/

its the one done by jrobbo, works perfectly for me and its free.

i think i will end up using vista at some stage, its just that i got media portal working so well that its been pointless to change it.

[ExtremePC]

Besides which, you can do an XP embedded OS running on a 1GB CF Card/IDE Adaptor combo with Media Portal installed! Boots in 12 seconds (depending on the motherboard) and STAYS stable because you can configure it to be read only for the OS. You would need secondary storage for recordedings/configuration files. It can be configured so that the only thing that ever comes up on screen is Media Portal (ie. the desktop doesn't exist) basically its a roll your own STB.

For the record I was doing exactly this in 2004-2005 with MyHTPC (which later became Meedio)

I've had an XP embbedded fully working install in less that 512Mb with ALL drivers, desktop and firefox/thunderbird!

Ah! ****e, I've got myself excited about XP Embedded again. I'm now going to have to try it again using current hardware with the current Media Portal and HDMI video out.

Just checked out the MP site, there's a plugin that adds TV Series functionality like in XBMC with sorting by folder with TV Show coverart that automatically gets downloaded from thetvdb just like XBMC!

[Travesso]

Damn ExtremePC, I thought I was excited about Media Portal hahaha