Filed under: Audio, Video, Windows
MediaPortal, a Tivo/MythTV/MCE clone for Windows
by Jordan Running Jul 2nd 2005 at 5:18AM
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.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Lee said 2:05PM on 7-02-2005
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.
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e-sin said 6:22PM on 7-02-2005
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.
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MikeTiger said 8:35PM on 7-02-2005
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...
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bobm said 12:00AM on 7-03-2005
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.
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Duncan Riley said 1:41AM on 7-07-2005
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
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Oliver said 6:24PM on 7-18-2005
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 ;)
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