Is mediaportal going to survive the new xbmc (3 Viewers)

[Dadeo]

the folders view takes a couple of seconds to load compared to mediaportal 2 mins to read my music folder.(libary mode excluded here that is about the same)

I really get mystified when I read things like that. I am not doubting you mbu10, but I just can't figure it out! I have over 65K tracks, about 13K artists and my music in MP loads in less than a second either in DB views or in Shares view. Of course I have separate folders for each artist/album, my music is all nicely tagged and indexed in the DB as well, but still!

I don't even have a fancy system. It must be 3-4 yrs old now (E6600) AND I just run my 42" TV as a secondary monitor via HDMI, so my PC is often running a lot of processes in the background while I use MP. It doesn't even notice! I have read posts from users saying MP uses a lot of resources, but for me it uses less memory than FF (hog) Opera or Chrome for god's sake! When using MP, my CPU load increases only 5-10% (other than occasional spikes, but not for more than a second ) even if I am playing a film and browsing through the GUI. Plus I have over 50 plugins installed.

So I don't understand. What could make such a difference?

 

[ijourneaux]

I am a long time XBMC user (under Windows). I just started looking at MediaPortal because of the TVserver capability. I have been using BeyondTV for that function in the past but it is nolonger supported and with Google's acquisition of SageTV, that product is nolonger available for purchase. It doesn't leave tomany options out there.

 

[ihaterich]

XBMC is the better media player.

I switched to XBMC about 6 months ago and was blown away by how much better it is than MP. My reasons:

1. Mediaportal is very slow. Scrolling through shared directories was laggy because MP does not cache folder.jpg files. It has to retrieve them over and over again. Folder pics would also often be displayed upside down. I read countless forum posts about this, but could never fix it. Granted, I was using an older computer as the client, but the same PC has no speed issues running XBMC. XBMC caches all images, so scrolling through files is lightning fast. Getting from A to Z in MP would require slowly (tons of lag) clicking past each item.

2. Mediaportal takes forever to open large shared folders. My movies folder is located on my server and has over 800 files in it. Without exaggeration, MP would take 10 to 15 minutes to open this directory. Once opened, MP would then take 2 to 3 minutes to actually start playing a movie. It's hard to watch a movie with friends when you have to wait 20 minutes for it to start. XBMC opens this same directory nearly instantaneously and begins playing a movie in about 5 seconds.

3. Thumbnail generation for shared folders would often fail in MP. I'd get stuck with solid grey images, or sometimes nothing at all. MP generates each thumb image on the server then moves it to the client. Alot of times it would fail and leave dozens of corrupt image files on my server. Generating thumbnails from networked shares would also crash the program after extended use. XBMC generates thumbnails quickly and without issue.

4. Folder pics and thumbnails are very small in MP. Hard to see from 10 feet away (at least in the default skin which is what I used). Most of the skin was just wasted space. XBMC allows high-res folder pics, and has larger thumbnails.

5. I had no luck with MovingPictures/MyTV Series. The scrapers for these plugins are almost completely useless, and only correctly identified about 50% of my movies, and 10% of my TV shows. My media server is very very well organized. Movies are labeled by name and year. Shows are sorted by season with SxxExx episode naming. Renaming 10,000 files to conform to these plugin's standards was not an option. XBMC correctly scraped about 95% of my movies and 90% of my TV shows without any modification.

6. XBMC will play anything out of the box. There is no need to setup codecs. MP needs advanced configuration. Some people like this because it allows them to choose their codecs, but most people won't care and just want their stuff to play. My girlfriend knows nothing about computers, and could never correctly configure MP to play a .mkv file. This will be a huge deal breaker for most people.

7. XBMC is more stable than Mediaportal. I wouldn't call MP unstable, as I usually had long uptimes, but it did crash or hang fairly regularly (at least a few times a month). XBMC has never crashed or hung.

8. MP settings cannot be changed within the program. I always found this annoying.

OK that was pretty negative, but here are some things I liked about Mediaportal:

1. MP can be accessed remotely using VNC. My media PC is controlled using a gamepad and has no keyboard or mouse. Sometimes I need to login via VNC to do stuff. XBMC uses OpenGL and cannot be displayed over VNC. I had no problem navigating the menus of MP using VNC.

2. You can pick your own codecs. Although most people just want their stuff to work, more technically inclined people might want to pick and choose their codecs. Technically you can pick your own codecs in XBMC by using an external player, but that kinda defeats the purpose of using a media center.

Sorry if this posts come off overly negative, I don't mean to sound like some fanboy trolling this board, I just wanted to share my experiences to inform others, and offer some constructive criticism.

My media PC is rather old, a 2.4 ghz P4 with 1 gig of ram on Windows XP. For the 6 months I ran MP, I mostly attributed its slowness to the age of the PC. However XBMC provides a much faster and more fluid experience on the same machine.

Based on my experience, I can't recommend MP to anyone. If you need TV tuner support, I believe there are some experimental XBMC builds that offer this function. If you like to use specific codecs, I would go the external player route in XBMC. The speed and look of XBMC outweigh the drawback of using an external player.

 

[marv]

AW: Is mediaportal going to survive the new xbmc

xbmc uses directx for more than a year now i guess. i am using teamviewer to access my htpc, but only when i need to download things or configure something in windows 7 itself. for xbmc i don't need a remote access, because everything within xbmc i can access with my remote. what's your purpose to display xbmc over vnc?

 

[ihaterich]

Sorry, you're right, it uses directx.

I generally don't need to display XBMC over VNC. There's some rare occasions where I want to check something without going into the other room, but for the most part I only use VNC like you, to do other Windows related things on the PC. But when I start VNC with XBMC running, I only get a black screen. I have to go into the other room and close XBMC before I can start using VNC.

It's not a big deal for me, just a minor annoyance.

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

My media PC is rather old, a 2.4 ghz P4 with 1 gig of ram on Windows XP. For the 6 months I ran MP, I mostly attributed its slowness to the age of the PC. However XBMC provides a much faster and more fluid experience on the same machine.

Would suspect RAM would be inadequate, 1gb goes nowhere even on xp, also with those machine spec's I would not recommend running MP, even with a reasonable graphics card.

Regarding accessing server taking 20 minutes, think there was some considerable misconfiguration going on there, as MP should connect as quickly as windows explorer.

And by the way, with 3 posts, you really must have asked for a lot of help trying to sort this out

Regards

 

[Holzi]

AW: Is mediaportal going to survive the new xbmc

MediaPortal all the way! =)
People who don't wanna configure anything should stick with XBMC tho...

 

[ihaterich]

Yes it is an older machine. All my videos are SD tho, so I can't justify upgrading it at the moment. I will say once it started playing a movie or show, I had no issues. Rewind, fast forward, etc worked as they should. My problems were all with navigation.

I can honestly say I put alot of time and effort into fixing the problems I had with MP. I was pretty excited about having a media pc, and wanted it to be perfect. When it comes to boards I'm usually more of a lurker, but I did alot of research on this forum. I found several threads by users with many of my same problems, but usually wasn't able to find a solution. For the long loading times, I eventually divided the movies folder into sub-directories organized by letter, which decreased loading times considerably, but made navigation more cumbersome. I don't think the network settings were misconfigured, or if they were, I could never figure out how. I'd read pointing MP directly at the share was faster than mapping the drive, so I always used that method.

Despite my problems, I will definitely give MP 2 a shot when it's released. Maybe I'll even have a new PC by then.

 

[mm1352000]

ihaterich: I think you'd already find that MP 1.2.0 is much snappier in navigating. Anyhow, enjoy XBMC.

 

[xetic]

AW: Is mediaportal going to survive the new xbmc

2. Mediaportal takes forever to open large shared folders. My movies folder is located on my server and has over 800 files in it. Without exaggeration, MP would take 10 to 15 minutes to open this directory....

15 minutes???

I have on my server 800 files, too... but it takes max. 10 sec. to open my directory. I think your config are not correctly!