Quote:
Originally Posted by Strada916
Hey there Brad can you give us a small reveiw and how easy / hard it is to install ?? As I am interested in this Mediaportal
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Sure, probably best for a mod to split the post and move it somewhere else.
As was stated in the reply post to my original post, MediaPortal is 1.0 RC2. This is the first time I've seen this.
The installation was pretty simple although there are a couple of noobie things that you will probably get hit by as I did.
The installer package does install everything that is required. The first issue I had was wondering what to do after I'd installed the packages. The first thing you need to do is make sure you have the appropriate login/pwd for your SQL 2005 DB. This is required for the TV Server I think and most likely your Movies DB as well. Make sure you download
Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express -
http://www.team-mediaportal.com/manu...agement-Studio because it IS required to set a password for "sa" for your DB server on localhost.
One of the first things to realise (and I'm still learning) is that this IS very configurable, however, most of the options you might of seen in the main GUI for MCE, the config is in two separate config programs which run separately. TV config and the MediaPortal config itself.
TV config
- Go in here to scan for channels etc. If you check up the top on TV servers, you will see your TV card instances. You can select these and scan channels. You can also select your region which speeds up scanning channels quite significantly. So I selected Brisbane and it scanned the channels faster than MCE ever did.
- I currently use ICE TV for MCE. For some reason, the EPG just "magically" worked. At first I thought maybe there was some sort of free EPG which magically downloaded the guide for me, but I put it down to the fact it is probably importing the XML and its likely the guide data is from the MCE instance I was previously running. I still have yet to actually set this up for MedialPortal, but ICE does have a guide on their web site.
MediaPortal config
- You can select codecs to use etc. I had a problem with playing dvd's which I fixed pretty quickly by setting the codecs to use the cyberlink ones I had installed. DVD playback was then fine.
- Video playback or rather "movies" you can select codecs just like any other section. In each of the movies, pics, music section etc, you will be able to select directories. There is a section in the "movies" part which allows you to scan and download IMDB data for each file it finds but I don't think the matching for this is that great, but I haven't experimented with it that much. You can create movies or rather titles such as "Dexter" and then assign multiple video files to that title then display by "Title" in MediaPortal but I had this lock up on me when I had an entire 2 seasons of AVI's assigned to the "Dexter" title but I'm not sure why that is. Either way the video playback works fine.
- Remote Control. My MCE remote control was just not working at first. i.e. Back not working I had to whip out the keyboard and hit escape. This is a simple thing in the config where you can actually select the "brand" of remote control you have. Really NEAT! I believe you can also map buttons to do certain things also.
- Skins. YES Skins. Although the skins available are actually quite an older version, you can actually customize MediaPortal to look the way you WANT it to look and you can do some awesome stuff with it. My screen is display is actually on a Sony TV (not flat screen qq) running at 1280x768 or something similar I think through component so my resolution is probably kind of bad and doesn't suit the available 16:9 ones. I'm sure they would look fine though.
There are some little features I really like about MediaPortal, and so does the woman! One of the things with XP MCE that really annoyed me is seeking into AVI files. Using your arrow keys, you can actually step into the AVI in "steps". You can set the increments in the GUI config section. So the steps are like 15 secs, 30 secs, 45 secs, 1 min, 2 min etc etc. The more times you press the arrow, the further it skips into the file.
If you stop playing a video file and you go off and do something else. When you come back to it, it asks if you want to continue where you left off!
I think the playlist stuff is a lot better but haven't really done much with it. The Media Player stuff really annoys me with music.
One of the things I want to do is to use the magic green button to start up MediaPortal but haven't really looked around how to do it yet. The TV server runs on start up so I'm guessing any recordings would happen regardless of the GUI being up or not. I believe it runs on VISTA but I am running mine on MCE 2005 so I'm not sure how it goes up that avenue.
The only thing I want to get working now (besides looking at the guide) is getting multiple videos working under titles and the Green button thing I said above. Pretty much TV and everything else works with minimal effort.
I've tried installing open source Media Center stuff before with MythTV, and whilst it is probably less effort than using MCE, its certainly not as hard as MythTV is. MCE mind you comes with it own big pains but with the amount of configurable options in the config files, such as selecting which codec you want to use etc etc, this way is definitely better.
I hope the mods pick this up and even make a new forum on here as I think the RC2 is in really good shape and worth discussing in its own area.
