After some 8 years using Mediaportal, when XBMC was just an infant on the xbox, I finally made the switch after mediaportal had lost all it's settings for the last time.
Maintaining Mediaportal became a daily chore, whilst mediaportal crashed or hung regularly on a daily basis I was more and more looking for a decent replacement. I obviously adored mediaportal for its tv-series plugin and moving pictures, the edit-ability kept me away from xbmc for quit some years, so i'd like to share my thoughts on what i think is positive about mepo, and what makes xbmc such a smooth experience. Overall I Think it's just MePo1 that's getting old.
MePo Strongpoints:
To conclude, i had an awesome time with mediaportal, I saw my library grow from under 500GB in 2006 to about 25TB in 2014 and went from 4:3 CRT''s at which dvd-rips looked just fine to a more decent 50" ST60 panny with blu-ray rips. I did sincerely enjoy the program, and for a long time i did not take xbmc serious because of my my extensive usage of both moving pictures and the tv-series plugin, I have high hopes for MePo2 since the team has proven it can be very creative.
Maintaining Mediaportal became a daily chore, whilst mediaportal crashed or hung regularly on a daily basis I was more and more looking for a decent replacement. I obviously adored mediaportal for its tv-series plugin and moving pictures, the edit-ability kept me away from xbmc for quit some years, so i'd like to share my thoughts on what i think is positive about mepo, and what makes xbmc such a smooth experience. Overall I Think it's just MePo1 that's getting old.
MePo Strongpoints:
- Editable TV-series Database which actually let's you know what's going on.
- Editable Movies Database, I don't necessarily like renaming all movies that come in and mediaportal is strong in that respect.
- Configurability, I like the more advanced feeling of the mediaportal configuration process, it works well for me and i want to be in control.
- Well, xbmc only recently got TV, mediaportal has had it for years.
- I always liked the Christmas skins
- searchable databases
- shines of uniformity, addons simply work.
- Does not hang, is extremely quick.
- Is plug and play, this is essentially a well thought-out system.
- remotes actually work, i am currently using a x360 controller. Controller support should be improved for MePo, maybe even develop a new remote for use with both MePo and xbmc.
- music database does a decent job
- Slow booter, and generally just slow.
- Hangs regularly
- no uniformity
- no integrated plugin database, eventhough there's a plugin that tries to rectify that.
- no global search, the plugin doesn't work well, or not at all
- TV-series plugin's advantage was editability, for example i wanted my Anime to be shown in it's own genre, with a large collection editing the tags became tedious.
- the crashes and maintenance
- Enormous amounts of plugins are defective in some way or another, like the emulator plugin with pj64, or the difficult integration with hyperspin, the reality is that many plugins just don't work anymore as intended or feel like patches to the main program.
- I am not sure what is going on in it's importers
- Cannot edit the databases to add a new genre
- Subtitle annoyance hell: It can only play subtitles corresponding with the, to it, logical audiostream and i just hate that.
- Well thats pathetic, there should be more... i'll find them.
To conclude, i had an awesome time with mediaportal, I saw my library grow from under 500GB in 2006 to about 25TB in 2014 and went from 4:3 CRT''s at which dvd-rips looked just fine to a more decent 50" ST60 panny with blu-ray rips. I did sincerely enjoy the program, and for a long time i did not take xbmc serious because of my my extensive usage of both moving pictures and the tv-series plugin, I have high hopes for MePo2 since the team has proven it can be very creative.