As cool as showcase video. (1 Viewer)

[craige1]

Did anyone else wish that MediaPortal was as good as the showcase video made it out to be?

 

[captainjack]

Don't know about you but mine works just like the video says.

 

[craige1]

Same except it to two years worth of playing with the dam thing to get it to work right . No one without a real decent amount of IT knowledge is going to get even half of that working.

 

[DieBagger]

Sorry but I don't agree that you need a computers degree for installing MediaPortal, MyTvSeries, MovingPictures and OnlineVideos. Throw in the BlackGlass skin and you have the same setup as in the vid.

Plus it's a promotional vid afterall so of course it tries to show MP in the best possible way.

 

[captainjack]

It took me a couple of hours to really think about what I wanted and how my back end TVServer was going to work.
I know that running everything off of one drive was a no no (Common senese not to try and have software running, recording and timeshifting on the same drive).
Minimal cost and energy consumption was a goal as well.

Windows 7 Backend
Cheap 45 WATT AMD CPU
Cheap ASUS MB with onboard vid.
Cheap 4GB RAM
3 Drives - OS, Timeshift, Recording and Share, Videos (OS and Timeshift are each on older 80GB SATA drives)
2 hauppauge nova-s (Got them really cheap)
Crap case
Total build and setup time with TVServer - About 3 hours

Windows 7 Front End
Cheap 45 WATT AMD CPU
Cheap Gigabyte MB
Cheap 2GB RAM
Cheap 80GB SATA drive
ATI 4870 (Got it for $65 on sale)
Antec fusion HTPC case (Not cheap but had ir built in and looks good)
Logitech Harmony (existing)
Total build and Setup time - 2 hours

So front and back end took let's say 5 hours.
Installed Power DVD 8
Configured MediaPortal client and pointed to Cyberlink and Microsoft codecs for TV and Video.
Now we are up to 5.5 hours.
Took a litle tweaking here and there for the network and RTSP (ended up using direct access to shares) - 2 hours
Now up to 7.5
Tweaked and programed my remote (took a while for the right combos) - 2 hours
Now up to 9.5

That was in November of 2009 and everything works great. No super CPU power house (video does it all anyways), no super codec packs. Blu-Ray uses about 7% of my CPU.

And I do not have any sort of degree in comuters.

Even if you went with off the shelf software you still have to be able to troubleshoot any problems you may have.

So all your post tells me is that you should stick to set top boxes.

You may have had problems but don't point the finger at MP.
This is an awsome open source product and I have tried a few others. I will stick with MP.

Awsome job guys.
cj