Mediaportal Vs MCE (1 Viewer)

[Darrin2101]

I was just wondering how many of you guys had systems running MCE 2005 but used Media portal in preferance. If that's the case with you what made you switch? What feature in MP made you turn your back on M$?

 

[Jake m]

I planned to use mce2005 with my haupauge hvr1300. but it didnt work at all. mce kept on reporting that it could detect a tuner. Hauppauge blamed my drivers for my graphics and sound. long story short nothing i tried could get the card to work under mce 2005.
So apart from great hardware support i really like the fact this project is actually alive and gets upated with new features all the time

 

[een_mq]

Where do I start...
Many people were lured by the look of MCE, sure it looked sleek out of the box, and integration into windows surely means that it should work very well?
But no:

1. Hardware support, MCE only support the digital side of my hybrid card, while MP supports everything.

2. MCE hides too much stuff from you, if something goes wrong all you can do is reboot and hope for the best... While in MP you have an army of MP users and developers who are very eager to help you...

3. It's opensource, which means that MP's bug is worked on all the time rather than swept under the rug like MS. And the enthusiasm of people who actually look after MP because they want to not because they are paid to do so... It really shows in the final product...

4. The attitude, in MCE, if some hardware is not supported, you are stuffed. people constantly buy and replace their hardware to make it work in MCE. While in MP, the developers constantly added support for newer cards all the time based on users' request...

5. The great community... When I started MP, my MP setup was only 50% working, now it's 90% there...
Staying with MCE in one year did not really give me anything...

And lots more...

 

[Efros]

Used MCE for a couple of weeks, wasn't a very satisfying experience, was very nervous about the access MCE had to my non drmed audio, to the point that I kept my music on a network drive that was read only. The video side of things was about equal to MP I hated the tvguide, all in all I wasn't happy with it so I dumped it when I found MP, been using MP for over 6 months now. Neither works out of the box, MP probably requires a bit more setup and interaction with other users but it can be tailored to an indivdual users needs and preferences. I use the music and video more than anything but I also use myprograms for listening to BBC radio streams. I have webcams setup in myweather in place of some of the weather images. I use the Mytorrents plugin to monitor my azureus box from the comfort of my sofa. My current want is for someone to automate the Graphedit process I have to go through to get dvr-ms files into mpeg2 format, although the New tv engine may take care of that when it appears.

I feel that if I want to do something within MP I can usually achieve it either with existing plugins or with ones that are in development. MCE, well it loses on a knockout in the first round.

 

[GagReflex]

I used MCE for many months.. I had been playing with MP on and off since it's first release, but I was a little wary of it's stability.

I finally bit the bullet and jumped over when I discovered I could use a DVB-S card and watch pay tv (Using Cam and Smartcard) as well as my usual DVB-T cards. Everything neatly integrated into one package makes for a nice easy to use system, with extremely high wife acceptance factor.
Stability is pretty damn high even though I use the latest SVN releases..

 

[charger2000]

Although MCE lacks in many aspects, it wins hands down in usability and easiness of configuration of many features.
I was a bit shocked about how many things I had to do to run MP properly, when MCE needs just a couple of clicks.
But obviously the horizon of MP is much more attractive...

 

[ziphnor]

I completely disagree on the usability of MCE, its terrible! The wizards try to forcefully hold your hand through everything, even when the wizards cant do the setup your are trying to do, after 5 minutes i was desperate for a regular setup progra like MPs configuration. The usability of MCE is completely hit or miss, if your setup matches the wizards it will probably be easy(but still a pain, the MCE interface is not the nicest place to be when doing setup), otherwise its a complete nightmare.

In addition I had the following reasons to give up on MCE:
1. MCE wont index my Ogg Vorbis music files
2. MCE will not support DVB subtitles in the near future
3. If you have 3+ tuners in MCE you need to go hacking to set up the registry.
4. If you want to watch pay TV or DVB-C or DVB-S youll find it isnt supported and you need to use all kinds of strange hacks and drivers to get it working.
5. The EPG was of very poor quality(read: wrong), and was a nightmare to set up (i never managed to get it working, and my gf asked me to change back to MP). You can use external source, but i failed to get it working.
6. Its closed source, and its microsoft closed source...

MCE had the following which i find lacking in MP:
1. Stability

 

[Marcusb]

I have been using MP for ages. A long time ago it went through a period of some instability (around 0.1.3 era) and I got pressure on the wAF front to use MCE. I installed it under protest and tried it for about a week when I was told to switch back to MP.
There are some really annoying things in MCE (as well as the total lack of any ability to customise).
1) the skip function. In MP you get 15,30,1,3 etc, all customisable whereas in MCE when you press skip it only gives you 30 seconds. If you press it for slightly longer it jumps to the end of the program and then asks if you want to either delete it or watch from the beginning again. It was almost impossible to skip somewhere between 30 seconds and the end of the program.
2) the way you select the locations for your videos. No browsing to the location in setup like MP. You have to map each location to a drive letter on your HTPC and then choose that in the MCE setup.

Lots of other things were annoying too. Like if the TV guide changed too much you then had to reconfigure all your channels.

Basically MCE seemed like most MS products. It looked nice to hide the fact that there wasn't much to it. Vista seems to be heading the same way. All we hear about now is the very cool but very hardware intensive new GUI.

This ends my rant The MP devs really seem to be the best around...

 

[wishywashy]

I used MCE for a while, until I tried to set up a recording of a show on HBO. MCE told me the content provider won't let me record it. Ummm... I needed a new solution. Played with Meedio for a while, but the wife said, "find something you don't have to mess with everyday to work." Then I stumbled on Media Portal and have been happily useing it for well over a year now. I have a pretty basic system and everything just works.

 

[Darrin2101]

It would seem that it can be summed up in one word then, flexibility. If your setup or requirements deviate from what m$ think you should have, then you're pretty much screwed.
Would that be a fair summary?