Convince me to swap (1 Viewer)

[jgriffin]

Hey all. I'm currenly building / testing my first HTPC with Vista MC and am considering switching to MediaPortal. I just have a few questions that cover a host of topics..

a) I'm playing with 0.2.0.0 on my XP x64 machine (i installed it ages ago when it came out) and it's really really slow. Is the load time of the app and the config app normal? It will be loaded on Vista x32 in "production" but wanted to check to see if this was the performance to be expected.

b) I want to be able to watch TV and listen to a CD in my collection at the same time. MC can't do this, can MP? If not i will have large problems with WAF

c) Can i record radio?

d) The original idea was to have a central htpc and use extenders, but the MS ones have a gazillion limitations. Are there any hardware clients that work with MP ? Or is it possible to build a tiny PC with enough guts to run as a client?

e) Can i turn off the album titles below each image in the "My Music" display when i display by album? In MC you just get a heap of images, with the title at the top when you have that album selected. In MP i'm seeing this mess of truncated titles.

TIA

 

[The_Stig]

Hey and welcome jgriffin,

ad a) How slow is slow?
ad b) Imho impossible atm.
ad c) No. Maybe with an external plugin.
ad d) There are some posts in Forums about very small clients, which seem to work very good.
ad e) Don't know if I understand you correct, but you can configure your Music-View in Setup->Music.

Regards,

Paloema

 

[mPod]

No extender boxes are supported yet. Only "real" PCs (even as stupid clients).

 

[jgriffin]

Thanks for the replies so far.

As for slow, it takes approx 40secs to load, which may not sound much, but when you are waiting it's forever, especially compared to the ~3sec for MC. The config program takes about 2 mins.

I don't understand why none of the HTPC clients allow you to mix music with TV, all i can say is that the developers don't follow crickets 5 day test matches.

as for the CD view - the bits in red. I've tried modifying the views, but maybe i don't understand

 

[The_Stig]

To the musicview: Imho what you want isn't possible.
To the startup time: Seems to be quite a bit long for your machine (tho it won't start in 2 secs...). Maybe try to disable not needed plugins and change to standard-b2-skin for testing.

And if that doesnt help, try a clean install. Sorry, that I have no other hints for you :-|

Regards,

Paloema