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.
Advertise with Download Squad
| # | Blogger | Posts | Cmts |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Brad Linder | 161 | 17 |
| 2 | Romeo Wahed | 12 | 0 |
| 3 | Jay Hathaway | 12 | 1 |
| 4 | Kristin Shoemaker | 12 | 21 |
| 5 | Todd Ritter | 11 | 2 |
| 6 | Danny Mendez | 9 | 5 |
| 7 | Christina Warren | 9 | 5 |
| 8 | Simon Kerbel | 6 | 0 |
| 9 | Jason Clarke | 6 | 2 |
| 10 | Michael Schleifstein | 4 | 0 |
| 11 | Ian Dumych | 3 | 6 |
| 12 | Dolores Parker | 2 | 1 |
| 13 | Gordon Finlayson | 2 | 0 |
| 14 | Chris Ullrich | 1 | 0 |
| 15 | Lisa Hoover | 1 | 1 |
| 16 | Emily Price | 1 | 0 |
| 17 | Cory Bohon | 1 | 0 |
| 18 | Nik Fletcher | 1 | 0 |
| 19 | Grant Robertson | 1 | 3 |
BitTorrent Firefox FreeWare Facebook WindowsVista Web2.0 GoogleMaps web2 fun youtube music Linux Mozilla microsoft SocialNetwork iphone twitter business vista outlook email Safari googleholic developer search video news yahoo leopard Apple privacy ubuntu Wikipedia mac linux-switch iTunes opera rss blogging gmail office tweet-this storage windows google flickr TimeWaster mobile maps advertising
Other Weblogs Inc. Network blogs you might be interested in:
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-02-2005 @ 2:05PM
Lee said...
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.
Reply
7-02-2005 @ 6:22PM
e-sin said...
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.
Reply
7-02-2005 @ 8:35PM
MikeTiger said...
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...
Reply
7-03-2005 @ 12:00AM
bobm said...
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.
Reply
7-07-2005 @ 1:41AM
Duncan Riley said...
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
Reply
7-18-2005 @ 6:24PM
Oliver said...
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 ;)
Reply