mediaportal vs Windows MCE - opinions? (1 Viewer)

[etheesdad]

Ive just spent a month trying to get mythtv set up on a newly built HTPC. Problem after problem came up which was all very frustrating. I finally spat the dummy yesterday, reformatted the machine and put a copy of MCE 2005 onto the it. I had it set up in one day, vowing never to return to linux (which I probably will do because I like it, but I wont be using it for an HTPC again in the near future). --probably more of an indication of my skill with it than the quality of the OS but there you go.

Over the last few months Ive read lots of forum posts about different HTPC software, and Mediaportal comes up regularly in discussion.

Im not necessarily settled on MCE, and before putting the machine into the lounge room and throwing out the old set-top-box, I thought Id look into other HTPC software options. I thought I might make a disk image from what ive done so far, then have a go with something else to see whats best. If it all goes pear-shaped I can just put the image back. I like MCE, but it seems to have some limitations too.

Im interested to hear from people who use Mediaportal.

Is it better than Windows MCE?

If so, in what way(s) is it better?

Also, very interested to hear about how difficult/easy it was to set up. Did you encounter mythic hassles? - or was it a reasonably smooth process?

Thanks for any thoughts offered...

 

[geov]

Welcome..... there are many posts that discuss this in detail, just search the forums...

But in short, here is my opinion...

MP is better in many aspects, its better looking, is very configurable with many skins and plugins, all plugins are free and there are no content restrictions, it does exactly what Vista can an much more.

On the bad side, MP can be very challenging to set-up with tweaking required in some cases, you might find bugs depending on your setup and which functionality you use, it does not always work with all TV-cards but this has been improved with the new TV-server functionality.

 

[userjan]

Hi etheesdad, welcome

Im coming form Windows Mediacenter 2005, i have no experience with the Mediacenter in Vista.

I went from MCE2005 to MP couse my coverart didnt show up anymore in MCE, I was going nuts, runned trough all settings and found myself retaging all my music, not able to get it right.
The couse of this i found out later, updating from IE6 to IE7 destroyed the coverart function, MS software making other MS software to fail, aaaghh, end of MCE for me

I would say the choice depends on how you use computers, if you like to play around with them and customize it to your needs go for Mediaportal, it's not that hard, it's made pretty user frendly and here in the forum theres always a smart ass to slap you in the right direction

If your the more lazy one, not caring to much about extra options above the basics, then Windows MCE might be a better option for ya o)

Mediaportal with the basic options, works pretty much out of the box, just run trough the Mediaportal configuration afther installation to guide the program to your media folders and make it act the way you want.
You just gotta play around with the configuration a bit to understand what it all is, dont start with overloading your MP setup with plugins yet, first make the basics work before you jump into the plugins.

When you go for the plugins i would advice you to install them one by one, see what it does and configurate it before you try the next.

Just give it a try....

Greetz Jan