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MediaPortal, a Tivo/MythTV/MCE clone for Windows
For Windows users who want a free alternative to Tivo, Microsoft's Windows Media Center Edition, or MythTV (which is free, but doesn't run on Windows), there's MediaPortal, an open source media center which runs on Windows. To run MediaPortal you'll need Windows XP SP2, a reasonably fast computer, and, if you want to be able to record and pause TV, a compatible TV tuner card. If MediaPortal works half as well as it looks, then it's bound to please.
Comments
6
Subscribe to commentsLeeJul 2nd 2005 2:05PM
While I haven't tried Media Portal since they went into commercial release, the early versions were unimpressive. Now I'm having pretty good luck with GB-PVR which is actually still freeware. It's not quite as polished looking, and it's not really easy to set up but it works better for me than either of the commercial packages Snapstream or Sage. I'm using it with a dual tuner hauppage card that allows me to watch one program and record another or record two at once.
e-sinJul 2nd 2005 6:22PM
runs very poorly on my moblile athlon xp 2400+...i dont have a tuner card so my use for this was limited anyway, but i thought it'd look nice on my tv screen. setup was annoying - they scan ur entire pc for media files and as a musician, i have about 10,000 .wav samples that it wanted to index. skins dont resize in a way that allows for widescreen monitors and overall, i think that they are close to having something that could one day be cool, but isn't yet.
MikeTigerJul 2nd 2005 8:35PM
This is the port of Xbox Media Center to the PC if I remember correctly...What I really need is a MythTV frontend for Windows...
bobmJul 3rd 2005 12:00AM
I've been running this on my old system with pretty good results. the app is much more stable now and has a lot of nice features.
there is also a pretty active community.
The big downer for me is that the default file format is not mpeg and there isn't an easy way to get to mpeg which makes taking the data on the road pretty hard.
Duncan RileyJul 7th 2005 1:41AM
Got to agree with Lee's comments, its still GBPVR for me over Media Portal, its not as pretty as Media Portal but it just works better on most things. Hopefully 0.1.3 of Media Portal due out later this month will do a better job
OliverJul 18th 2005 6:24PM
The 0.1.3 Release is out. You may also want to try daily test version to see the work in progress. You can get compiled cvs-snapshots at
http://www.myshare.de
btw. its not a clone, not from MCE, not from tivo and even not from the Xbox Media Center ;)