Initial impressions & rant from a faithful XBMC User (1 Viewer)

[LaTropa64]

Sadly, IMHO, MP is a far cry from being XBMC for the PC. The interface is not up to current XBMC standards and, as a whole, it "feels" like a PC application, whereas XBMC "feels" more like a standard appliance, like a DVD player with a nice interface... I don't know if I'm explaining myself.

Admittedly, working on XP is different than working on a single-hardware console. But the Mplayer based XBMC is in my opinion far more efficient. I guess Mplayer had been ruled out for PVR needs, if I remember correctly.

All this IMHO and with great faith in future developments for MP-

Not good news. Oh well... hopefully, like you said, the future will bring a lot of positive changes to MP. I'll still probably try it out one of these days when I get around to it but I might have to start seriously looking into upgrading the Xbox's CPU so it can keep up with HD. With the microsoft component HD pack it can output 720p but unfortunately it just isn't fast enough and stutters on playback of hd movies/tv shows.

 

[Frodo]

I'm sorry to hear you find MP useless, slow and 10x worse then XBMC

Now we can keep continuing repeating this over and over again, but you might ask yourself the question
How come that we 12315 registered users and most are very happy with MP?
Offcourse MP is not perfect, but its not as bad as you tell us it is.
Maybe your experience is bad because:
- your system is under-specs
- you dont have any experience with mp yet and are still learning how it works

If you took the time to look at the system requirements for MP (mentioned on our homepage) you would see that your system is clearly under specs. MP needs a DX9 vga card with at least 128MB graphics memory onboard.
If you decide to use a onboard vga card with 64 megs shared ram then indeed MP will be very slow and sluggish. Who's fault is this?


Now the question about 'putting in a zipcode and getting the tvguide'
This would be very very nice to have i agree, but its impossible for us.
why? It would mean that we had to have a database (or consult one)
which contains all zipcodes, channels, epg for all cities, all tv channels, all radio channels including all tuning details whether it be analog, dvb-t, dvb-c, dvb-s etc etc etc.

Unfortunaly such a database does not exists.
I know Microsoft MCE supplies a feature like this, but they made exclusive contracts with external parties like the BBC to get this information.
As an opensource project we cannot do this.

What we have now is that :
- James did a terrific job to get the tvguide for a really large amount of analog tv channels using webepg
- for digital channels (DVB-C/T/S) the tvguide is grabbed from the digital transmission in real time automaticialy. No need to set it up

 

[gxtracker]

Dont forget Jonathan and his awesome work on the zap2it EPG plugin. If you live in North America then updating your EPG data couldn't be any easier!

https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/viewtopic.php?t=16034

In fact, im impressed so much by his work with this plugin that with a little fine tuning I think it should be integrated right into the TV core - totally getting rid of XMLTV dependence. :wink:

 

[Paul S]

.. I might have to start seriously looking into upgrading the Xbox's CPU so it can keep up with HD...

Don't waste any money on trying to upgrade the xbox. Use it for what it was intended, playing games. Start planning on building a dedicated HD-HTPC and save your money for that. You can spend alot of cash on this, so looking for deals is a priority.

Just my opinion,

Paul

 

[LaTropa64]

Don't waste any money on trying to upgrade the xbox. Use it for what it was intended, playing games. Start planning on building a dedicated HD-HTPC and save your money for that. You can spend alot of cash on this, so looking for deals is a priority.

Just my opinion,

Paul

A good HTPC is the plan one day but if I could get the xbox to do HD for less than a couple hundred dollars it would be the ultimate home theatre appliance.

I'm sorry to hear you find MP useless, slow and 10x worse then XBMC

I never said any of that. My comment about PM3 on XBMC looking 10x better than all the fisher price type skins was mainly directed at those Windows Media Center looking kind. They are such an eyesore... like they were setup for 3rd graders. I've messed with a few friends MCE machines and it is a joke both featurewise and looks wise when compared to XBMC.

I haven't even tried out MediaPortal yet so I wouldn't know if it is slow or useless. I would hope not. The entire reason I came to this site was because I was told MediaPortal is the PC version of XBMC but from reading comments here and on the xbmc forums I'm finding out it probably isn't as nice... at the moment. I'm also hoping the future brings good things. And like I said I will try it out one of these days so I can actually be qualified to say.

 

[aholdt]

-> SandmanCL

I build my first mediacentre a couple of weeks ago on a old Compaq Deskpro with specs similar to yours (P1.5 768 MB RAM). Only difference is that I have a Radeon 9200 graphics card.

I'm really happy with it and everything is running smoothly.

So my suggestion is this. Find a used (MP compatible) graphics card or borrow one. I'm sure you will find that MP will run fine on your (kinda lowend) hardware too