Considering MP (1 Viewer)

[dmeglio]

Hello,

I've just built an HTPC and after using Vista MC for a few days, I decided it's a piece of garbage and wasn't worth the money I spent on it. I next jumped to SageTV for about a week, and, while I'm impressed by it, I find it to be lacking in some key areas. At this point, I see my options as SageTV, BeyondTV, or MP. MP certainly has the advantage of being free, but I'm hoping it has others as well! I have a few questions that I'm hoping will let me decide if MP is the best option:

1.) Is firewire from an STB supported? Seems every MC app now has a hack available to support changing an STB channel over firewire as well as capturing the content. For me, this will be the only way I can get digital/HD content... Unfortunately, I see very little on the forums about such a hack for MP.

2.) Can I sync with my MP3 player? I have an MP3 player that syncs fine with WMP and therevire VistaMC. Does MP have any feature like this?

3.) Can I play DVDs and burn my recordings to DVDs?

4.) Any support for commercial skipping?

5.) Can I have different EPGs for each tuner? I'd like 1 tuner to be 2-99 (analog) and one 100+ (digital). Is that possible?

6.) Anything else you can think of that would set MP a part from the rest (other than the pricetag)?

I'm really interested in what sets MP a part. Unfortunately, I've yet to find any good comparison. In fact, the only way I even heard about MP was because BeyondTV users were saying MP has much better features for music/video/photo/radio support. Basically, what I'd love to know is what can MP do that Vista/Sage/Beyond can't, and what can Vista/Sage/Beyond do that MP can't...

I hope that's not too much! Thanks in advance!

 

[Noelix]

1.) No clue, I've never heard of such a connection, but then again I haven't crossed the digital line yet.

2.) There are no options within MP for syncing with any MP3 devices. However, I'm not sure I understand what exactly the syncing does for you and what purpose it serves.

3.) Yes.

4.) Yes. Comskip is a free command-line utility that, when configured with batch files, can cut out the commercials of your tv shows.

5.) Yes. You can create groups for whatever channels you choose. So you could make two groups, one called Analog, and one called Digital. When you choose your group, only those channels show up in the EPG. A third group called All Channels is also available by default if you want to see every channel altogether.

6.) TV Server functionality. Plugins galore. Beautiful skins. Support for a wide range of capture cards, remotes, etc. An incredibly helpful community.

Hope this helps a little, maybe someone else can elaborate on #1 and #2 for me.

 

[dmeglio]

About the channel groups, this is per tuner though? Meaning I can make the Analog group tuner #1, and the Digital group tuner #2? And for that matter, I can assume I can have overlaps in the channels each tuner can record?

Also, about the MP3 syncing. Well, I have my WMP library, but I also have songs on my MP3 player. Essentially, if I run WMP, it says "you have 5 extra songs on the MP3 player and 2 extra ones on the PC" it then ensures both have the same music. Essentially, I prefer to play through my HTPC than the MP3 player headphones so I'd love if it could pull down whatever songs I have on the MP3 player so I can listen to them.

Thanks for the info though. If I can find a hack for firewire, MP sounds like the way to go!

 

[trevor]

I have a fair idea what you are trying achive on the channels front, had the same experiance as you with Vista MC and dumped it after about an hr as you cant specify channels against source.

I have 3 sources, 2 analog and a DVD-S, the 2 analog sources are fed from Sky STB's into a PVR-500 via the SVHS inputs and the DVD-S is a card. The EPG source is the same for all 3 sources but the channels avaiable to each source is different.

MP allows you to map channels to source and the same channel can exist on multiple sources, the EPG is shared.

The group option is more for viewing the lineups as the groups are not linked to source. eg if you have the same channel on all sources and are selecting a channel from 'source 1 group' MP will not necessarly tune to that source but any available source which is capable of providing that channel.

Now I am using TVEngineV3, which is beta but the same functionalty exists in the stable 0.2.2.0 release using the older TVEngine.

I have found nothing else the seems to offer the same level of functionalty and (so far) support all the hardware I use...and tried a few, the only other is MythTV (linux)..also opensource, kind of says it all.

 

[funkstar]

I don't think if would be possible to use a firewire equiped STB as a TV source in the current Media Portal, should be possible with the new TVengine3. At the moment MP relies on the Microsoft recording engine, which only knows how to use hardware analogue or DVB cards (and only one type at a time). With the new engine, virtually any source should be possible, as long as the appropriate code is written for it

 

[dmeglio]

That's what I figured... the question is whether we can find people with the skills and time to do it