Is mediaportal going to survive the new xbmc (4 Viewers)

[BravoDelta]

I tried XBMC on Windows before I tried MediaPortal. Although it looked nice it was the single most frustrating piece of software I have ever tried to use (I'm a software developer by trade). The help on the forums was incomplete and fragmented, and I just wasn't able to get it doing the things I needed it to do. The plugins were a nightmare to figure out how to install or configure. It was just a truly frustrating experience.

Then I tried mediaportal. Now it's by no means perfect, but it was much easier to set up, and an hour or so spent on the forums pointed me to the essential plugins that I would need. Once I added the StreamedMP skin, it looked pretty much XBMC, but worked. Yes its slower, Yes it has it's annoyances (You would not believe the issues I'm still having just with the music section) but I'm up and running much quicker.

The common headache between the two seem to be remotes, but I *think* I have solved that issue.

Edit:
The scrapers in XBMC were junk. I had loads of trouble finding artists. The scapers in MP are way better. Although most of my album art is still missing even though it's all embedded!!

 

[JoeSmith]

AW: Is mediaportal going to survive the new xbmc

I've been an xbmc user on the original xbox for some years till i finally got a htpc and moved to mediaportal because of tv.
Every now and then i install a new version of xbmc and i'm really impressed how good it looks and feels BUT when i try to add movies or series i always get to realize how damn good mptvseries and moving pictures are.
All my movies are named by the imdb names and with mp i get a 100% correct list of my movies. XBMC something like 95% and it's always a struggle to find and correct the errors.
For people who don't need tv and don't have a lot of movies / series xbmc is by far the easiest step into the world of htpcs, but if you really want to get the real $h|t, mp is the choice right now.
Without it's excellent plugins the situation would be different and i would prefer xbmc, but mptvseries, ForTheRecord, movingpictures, onlinevideos, ... really make mp shine.


Joe

 

[kiwijunglist]

I was just really impressed to a youtube demo of alaska, and also thought the ability to look at actors and play trailers seemed pretty amazing.. and the xbmc android remote looks f**king fantastic. Anyway these features will no doubt eventually be part of MP / MP2.

 

[costi]

scrapers are little add-ons from different authors. change the scraper and try again, you could have used a bad/broken one.
if you want to change them manually, there are ways inside of xbmc...but you can also try a third party app: Supplemental Tools for XBMC - XBMC Community Forum ("xbmc web media manager" for example is a cross-plattform program).
haven't tried one of these by myself, because scraping works fine for me.

searching the xbmc forums would help a lot...

Well, out of 4 TV series I have on my HDD, MP correctly scraped all episodes for each series (excluding the BSG miniseries from 2003), while XBMC not only mixed up the old BSG with the 2003 edition, but also failed to scrape even one episode! After some menu clicking, I managed to get Firefly scraped. However, Space: ABove and Beyond, which uses the same naming convention as Firefly, still has 0 episodes. Both use thetvdb.com as source. I even added some moer regular expressions to advancedsettings.xml as per instructions found on XBMC forum, but that didn't help anything.
So for me this is a major fail in the most basic functionality I expect from a media center.

On the other hand, the music section of MP is a major PITA, requiring all tag fields to be filled and refusing to add incomplete entries to its library.

 

[kiwijunglist]

costi: i think the music section of MP is good, especially with the addition of one button random music plugin and the audioscrobber auto playlist extension. If you don't tag your music properly then you have to use it in shares mode.

 

[costi]

I know that, you might say I learned it the hard way However, XBMC builds its music library based on what it has, if not all fields are filled, you'll get some Unknown Artist or Unknown Album folders. I'd like to see that functionality in MP.

 

[pilehave]

At the moment I have 250 recordings (355 GB) stored in MP for myself and my children to watch, this is what I mainly use MP for = TV. Secondarily I use both Moving Pictures and TV-Series to watch my ~ 300 movies/series collection + ripped DVDs (226 GB).

But...recently I have set up a secondary 7" USB-screen and I now use this to run MP on, to listen to music. This way I don't have to power up my hungry plasma to listen to ripped music.

And yes, the music database view is so much faster than shares view. With my ~ 11.000 songs the share view is utterly useless. Takes like 90 seconds to go into it at the first place

Tag your music correctly. Then MP can be a pretty good music experience.

Alaska is a real piece of art, but I think it is lacking one thing; usability. Lack of contrast and way to small fonts is one reason to stay away for daily use on a TV.

 

[akwaba]

HI.

MP or XBMC is a good question and finally , the two aren't the ultimate solution. I say that because i have try the two of them and really didn't use 100 % from each.

> xbmc is really beautiful and speed... but no TV integration or i have a dvbs card : i have no time to spend for try mythtv etc etc, too long, too unperfect, you understand what i mean... and in such situation...beautiful look isn't so important.

> I installed MP + streamed MP, with an objectiv : MP have to do all i want (with TV). And finally you know what ? I use MP only for the TV server. Watching movie isn't easy, even with movingpictures (we have waiting sub classification for a while), get movie fanart need manual job in french, read an mkv movie need some special HDplayer etc etc etc works well finally, but always something to do for a final good use. Idon't speak about the poor pictures player, the weather didn't work in french west indies, the plugin to regularely change to be up to date, but with new problems...

I confirm this situation, because actually, when i get a download movie, is more easy for me to show it in vista with VLC player in 2 seconds, without codec, play it now and at the end, delete the file. If i want to play music ? really more simple to go to deezer with my store playlist and let's go...really easy. Reading a blueray ? powerDVD open it immediatly without any click...
ONly the tv server is more valuable than the dvbviewer, because of the kazer epg witch is really great.
At this time (after 3 years meciacenter with MP), i have the "sensation", that MP permit to classify my mp3, my best movies... but never use it day to day, as you never see your old VHS or travel album pics (or rarely).

Be careful, i don't say MP is bad, but it's not the best in each part, even if it's the best in general terms. I have no solution, it seems impossible to imagine MP be extremly simple in terms of day to day use !! for that, you have to recognize that one man in the family (me^^) is behind to maintain a perfect MP solution for my wife and kids : it need time, it's not perfect, it's not the ideal solution for me.

And now, i'm in 1.02 and would like to up to 1.1.0...but really afraid, the 1.02 work's well...with lot of time

Do you understand what i mean ?

 

[bpell]

I'm new to MediaPortal but I'm already hooked for a few reasons.

1.) Super easy setup, no hassle.
2.) It's running really well on a 1.2 Ghz laptop with 512MB of Ram.
3.) I'm a .Net developer, and the Plugin system they've created along with the tutorials are amazing. I created my first plugin 10 minutes. I'm writing one now (in Visual Basic) to search my music catalog the way I want to search it... then I may try to write some that I've seen requested just to do it (recording through the input device and integration with Hulu Desktop being the first two I'd tackle).

I started writing my own media program in WPF when I found this. I was so impressed by this software, I stopped what I was doing and I'm hooked. I've got it running on both Windows XP SP3 and Windows 7 so I doubt I'll be changing to another package anytime soon.

 

[kiwijunglist]

Fresh format Win 7
Install ATI Driver
Install MP 1.1 Final
Install SAF 5.0 beta

-> No further setup, I can play any video file. If you can't play video files it's because you've messed up your codecs with codec packs etc, if you uninstall or your codecs, then install SAF and you still can't get it to work then you need to format your htpc, simple as that.