MediaPortal to MCE and back!

[ziphnor]

Hi,

I just thought i would share a few thoughts on MP vs. MCE after i tried to switch from MP to MCE for a while.

My reasons for switching was the state of MP development, it was obviously a great program, but also clearly in development.

As i will describe below, MCE did have some advantages, but its flaws has driven me back to MP. Ive written some of my observations below, in a slightly chaotic fashion, but i thought it might be interesting for someone out there.

MCE Good:
* Faster channel switching times(Hauppage 500MCE/150MCE)
* Better usage of buttons on MCE remote( perhaps not surprising
* UI in TV guide and My Music slightly better than MP
* No problems with VMR9
* Is very good at prioritizing recordings and live TV so that even with Xvid encoding in the background and multiple recordings, its only the GUI that is unresponsive, live tv and recordings work without issue.

MCE Bad:
* Horrible reg hacking needed to use more than 2 tuners(BIG minus!)
* TV Guide tied to closely to channel setup, its nearly impossible to manually set up channels and still get guide data, very confusing for me, but may be easier to understand for newbies.
* No real configuration program, if the wizards dont work for you, its into the registry(seriously frustrating).
* My Music cannot index Ogg Vorbis files(!)
* Quality of TV guide data questionable, official data here in denmark lacks channels, or they are misplaced. Furthermore you either have to choose channels premapped to guide data or unmapped guide data, but if you choose the last, there is less guide data, making it impossible to fix wrong channel positions(it kept believing the disney channel was Kanal 5)
* Very difficult to provide custom TV guide data, i tried for a while, but failed.
* Never got the deinterlacing options set correctly, i use a VGA->SCART adapter to an 28" CRT TV, and run at 720x576@50Hz to match the PAL resolution. Even with Weave deinterlace set(which is supposed to work with an interlaced display) it still looked ghosted.
*Sucky quality control over recordings, you can choose between "Good", "Better" and "Best", but to figure out the corresponding bitrates you have to look in the registry(and i never figured out whether or not it was CBR or VBR).
* Not free, but no support anyway(unless you buy a complete HTPC from some company which probably cant help anyway).

Media Portal Good:
* Pretty easy to get high quality TV Guide up an running(also thanks to o2grabber and/or xmltv).
* Cooler plugins
* Better setup/configuration options, even though some of the codec setup options could need to some work.
* Better community.
* Open source, so there is at least a chance to fix problems yourself(okay so this only applies to people who can program, but that includes me).

Media Portal Bad:
* VMR9 renderless has many problems(and last i checked, so did Overlay).
* Album art doesnt work properly.
* Still very early in development.
* No CD ripping

Anyway, now im back with Media Portal, and im hoping for the best

[Callifo]

No CD ripping

Was added a few weeks ago, so you should see it in 0200RC2.

[ziphnor]

Originally Posted by Callifo

Was added a few weeks ago, so you should see it in 0200RC2.

:lol: I noticed it myself just now. Does it also perform a CDDB lookup for album name and track data? One advantage that MCE has is that it is actually pretty decent at finding album covers, which is nice.

[SiLenTYL]

yes it finds album coverart, even on burnt cd's (thanks mPod)

[ziphnor]

Originally Posted by SiLenTYL

yes it finds album coverart, even on burnt cd's (thanks mPod)

Great, im looking forward to trying it out.

[first407]

Hi ziphnor
Thank you for your review of MP/MCE. Because of my problems having satelite card working in MP 0.2.0 RC1 up, I must admit that I have been thinking to install MCE. But after I have read you comments I will stay to MP and hope the programmers of MP will work out and make the TV part stable and effective in the near future. :?

[Marcusb]

I had a similar experience recently. Under direction from the chief financial officer (heheh) I had to install MCE. we both were very surprised at how hard it was to skip commercials. In MP four pushes of the left arrow takes you three minutes foward. In MCE you have to press the skip button six times but if you hold it for a tiny bit too long it accellerates but at an unusable rate. You end up at the end of the program with a dialogue box asking if you want to delete or rewatch the program you have just finished. It only took a few commercial brekas before I was allowed to go back to my beloved MP

Like most things MS, MCE looks great but has very few features. It's all smoke and mirrors...

[johnna]

very interesting reading your comments

i actually went from mce to mediaportal, to mce to sagetv to meedio, to mediaportal and then after not recieving much support on the most important issue being the epg i decided to go with sky+. Maybe in a year when my contract is finished the next version of mce or mp will be sufficient.

john

[ziphnor]

Originally Posted by johnna

very interesting reading your comments

i actually went from mce to mediaportal, to mce to sagetv to meedio, to mediaportal and then after not recieving much support on the most important issue being the epg i decided to go with sky+. Maybe in a year when my contract is finished the next version of mce or mp will be sufficient.

john

My primary reason for switching back to MediaPortal was the EPG as described above. I couldnt get xmltv data to work with MCE even though programs facilitating this exists, and the MS provided guide data was simply not good enough. What was the problem with the epg?

This together with lots of our music files missing in My Music since they were .ogg files, made my gf. ask for media portal back, the remaining issues were comparably minor(since the reg hack for 3 tuners is not that hard, just silly).

I also noticed one more thing that MCE is missing: build-in compress/archive option. There does exist a nice program called Crunchie, but its a seperate program and doesnt attempt to control priorities of the encoding meaning its dangerous to run in the background.Admittely in the current CVS version i cant get the MP compress option to work, but at least its there and being worked on.