5 years of Mediaportal Bugs, now moved to windows media centre

I cannot count the man hours I spent on mediaportal over the last 5 years, but I'm sure it must be over 1,000, which even on minimum wage represents a hefty investment despite it theoretically being free. Eventually at the start of this year I'd had enough of the 3-4 times a week, reboots and kids "daddy can you fix the tv" whining so I migrated to windows 7 media centre. The pros are it works, rarely crashes and takes up minimal time to config. The cons are some feature losses and clients cannot be other pc's (needs to be xbox or extenders).

At the end of the day though if a system is unreliable it really doesn't matter how many features it has. I had grown to truly loathe mediaportal despite even coding for a few weeks on a plugin at one point. Every new version bought new features and new bugs to the point where it just became pointless and directionless. Everyone appreciates the free time the devs put in, but it seems to have remained as a hobbyist project for years on end. Sure it works but not reliably enough that you can just turn it on and forget about it as you would any set top box. MCE for me feels and looks pro and having traversed through xbmc -> mythtv -> mediaportal -> mce, I have hopefully found a system that I do not need to tinker with and can rely on like a set-top box.

I ought to write a blog on how to config mce, as there was a frustrating learning curve, and when I get the time, I may well do so. Suffice to say it does everything MP did for me, the clients aren't perfect (cat6 to 2 xboxs + extender), though TV looks a lot better (smoother) on MCE.

PS - I also just abandoned firefox after 6+ years as it has also become too buggy and memory leaky, back on ie9. MS annoy the $h1t outta me, but their progs are now, in 2011, at least fairly robust and reliable. Also got into apple's stuff (iphone/ipad) for same reason of reliability, I no longer care about feature-sets as without reliability they are meaningless, I'd far rather have a 100% reliable mini than a ferrari that broke down every other day!

Oh, features does matter to me. There are days that I almost throw everything out the window and consider that stand alone BD player, PVR and so on. But in the end I'm hooked. I, nor my family, can't live without MP now. It just do everything I want it to do. Considering the time it has taken me to get to the point where I'm with MP today, I'm never gonna change to another media center (wife would kill me). For me it's MP or no HTPC at all.

sorry to hear .... judging by ur post i dont blame u lol ..... honestly i run both MP(FOR ME AND SHOW OFF)& xmbc (for kids and family) because of ur same reasons i wish i had the know how to help develop & help with this complicated group of programs and add-ons to help iron out the wrinkles.

it is very addicting ... when it works it works GREAT .... when it dosent u wanna rip ur hair out.

all that considered ive been using media portal for GOD KNOWS how long and ive seen it grow to this awsome program .... u cant flush it out of ur life .... ull always find that one feature mp did flawless that NOTHING else can do lol drives u crazy.

One thing (suggestion) I would love to see :

Dedicated bootable iso - i think that could iron out alot of the probs associated with making it cross platform ... not only that but if it were to run fine in its own lil unix shell i would love to dedicate a htpc to it. The Ad-ons for mp are unbelievable .

Sadly ... even using other media apps .. i ALWAYS end up using add ons in mp (third party or plugin) to help them along its almost funny

(opinion) sorry if i talk to much lol:sorry:

I'll be honest, I have often doubted whether I would switch back to mce .. But I'm glad I did not do!

As a user of MediaPortal you need to be a tweaker, because the software is just not good enough out-of-the-box for most people..

Still, I can say I now have a stable setup, that video plays very smooth, slick looking menus that are, and nothing stutter..

The only few problems that I have left are a few incompatible plugins..

What exactly do you use for TV setup?

I use a Anysee E30C with Forthrecord TV server, and for me this is very stable! I have NEVER problems to my system to get out of standby, and zap goes super fast. (1 / 2 sec) and the image quality is for me much better than in mce! This with the latest SAF6 codecs.

Will continue (believe me), infoservice stutter a lot of your system. Since I've turned off this plugin, the system is alot faster, and menu's scroll a lot more smooth. (have report that on that topic)

I regret that MediaPortal is not configured that good if you just have installed it. Example: Roll speed is normally 50. When you set it to 60 (or 100), everything suddenly a lot smoother. I think this had better be set as default.

I also believe that Media Portal is very stable, but by a number of plugins is that the whole is sometimes wants to be unstable.

I have been perhaps 2000 hours in Media Portal tampered with, but it works here nad also super nice!

I am never going back to mce!

PS: I'm using MP 1.2.0 beta, latest streamedMP skin, and fortherecord 1.6.0.0 and this is my system:

Moneual 932 with 7" touchscreen
Intel E7300 @ 2,66Ghz
2X 2GB OCZ platinum DDR2 800Mhz
Ati HD5770, 1GB
OCZ Vertex 2, 60GB
Samsung Spinpoint F3, 1TB
ASUS Bluray drive
Windows 7 64Bit ultimate

Yea, if one would count the hours one has put into this and compared it to how many hours you boinked your girlfriend during the same period, the result would be quite surprising...

Coming from Media Center -> Media Portal I feel quite different. Media Center has MyMovies (which is amazing), but outside of that... The Music Player is so bad I almost stopped playing music, and the time I take to get everything right on that software is better spent elsewhere. The lack of features (for Me) in Media Center has left me not using it at all... Personally I have made not used a HTPC software for months because Media Center is SO BAD!

Now I have encountered some bugs in the Media Portal, and the limited amount of time I have spent on it is a big warning. But I cant complain unless I get working on a dev team. I would hope that Devs solve bugs, but if they are not experiencing they cant fix them

Unfortunately not allot of people have the resources of a MSDN subscription, and the hardware/software combinations that cause the issues, but I think allot of this is solvable. Anyways, GoodLuck with Media Center.

Your abandoning Firefox because that too is too buggy... Something else is going on here...

Im thinking that HTPC may not be for him. I am an active member on allot of help sites and work on the Open Source project Drupal. I understand the frustration, but HTPC's are not plug in and play devices (yet). Media Center does a good job, but if you want to do more then record TV and listen to music then you will find a host of challenges. BluRay Playback is a PITA, storing video on NAS servers presents more challenges. Mounting Drives, Codex's, Windows Task Manager, (and many others) have all been area's part of My 4 years of HTPC fun!

It would be nice to know what errors you are having in Firefox and in MediaPortal, as I think we may find issues.

You said you ran Media Portal for 5 years. That means you where running at most a core 2 duo. I have found that MY core 2 duo e6400 is lacking in power. When I recently upgraded the chip from my wife's machine (to the X6800) I still had issues with Bluray playback. Turns out the problem was rooted in the Schedule Manager, and certain maintenance activities starting while TMT 3 was playing.

Granted I had Microsoft Home running on that machine and remote desktop into it was unavailable. I started to use 3rd party software, but finally came to the conclusion the media center does not offer the features I really want.

Its been frustrating. 4 and 5 years ago we where pioneers in HTPC's. Even today most people never heard of or know about HTPC's, and the accurate amount of information is limiting. People are not testing most processors on MPEG 4 1080 playback, and even less are testing High Bit Rates.

I know your pain, and hope your switch works for you. I have no interest in deterring you to switch. Its nice to support Open Source, but I am not a Open Source purest or snob.