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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CyberSimian" data-source="post: 1098042" data-attributes="member: 141969">Yes, I made the move from WMC to MP last weekend, but not on impulse; it was carefully considered.  Let me speak about generalities first.GeneralitiesI think it unlikely that you would ever find a piece of complex software that was exactly what you wanted.  Every complex application is going to be a mixture of things that you like, and things that you don't like; and that applies both to WMC and to MP.  So the question is: taking everything in account, which media center application offers a better match to your particular requirements.  Everyone is different, and will assign different degrees of importance to features and, err, "infelicities".As you may remember, I use Vista, and tried on two separate occasions to migrate from Vista MC to Win7 MC, but on both occasions I backed off after a couple of days, not liking the differences between Vista and Win7.  Media Portal is sufficiently different that I would always recommend running it in parallel with your existing media center application, to be quite sure that MP will give you a better match for your media-center requirements.The best way is to have a separate PC running only MP, but if that is not possible, you can (I think) run MP and WMC on the same machine. BUT: you must assign different tuners to each (so that they don't compete for the same tuner), and (for WMC) that means setting up the tuners again, and that will destroy the association between existing recordings and series-record requests.  So running MP and WMC in parallel on your existing hardware has quite an impact on your WMC setup.  If you want to run them in parallel, the best way would be to use temporarily a new tuner (e.g. a USB tuner), and assign that to MP.  That way you can get real-life experience of using MP, but without perturbing your WMC installation.Another point that I would make is the temptation to "like what you know", and to dislike something merely because it does things differently.  Criticising an application because it is "more cumbersome to use" is a valid criticism, but criticising it because it is different is not (I am not implying that MP is more cumbersome, I am merely stating generalities).  Remember that the reason that the human race populates this planet from equator to pole is because we are supremely adaptable.  If MP does something differently from WMC, but not in a way that is more cumbersome, don't worry about it!  After three months of using MP you will have adapted, and no longer be concerned that MP does things differently from WMC.DetailsNow to some specifics (not in any particular order):(1) I use only DVB-T/T2, so I have no experience of how MP handles satellite tuners (but they are supported).  I also don't have any desire to stream <s>crap</s> astonishingly entertaining videos from the internet, run the BBC i-Player, or stream video around the house, so I cannot comment on how well those work.  And finally, I don't use my HTPC for music or pictures.(2) MP uses only one tuner per DVB-T/T2 MUX, whereas WMC requires one tuner per channel. Because of this, MP does not need to drop the pre-padding or post-padding for consecutive recordings on the same channel.  If you have enough tuners, MP won't drop the padding for consecutive recordings on different MUXes.  For example, with a quad tuner card, you could record 2 consecutive programmes on each of 4 different MUXes simultaneously, and all with padding!(3) MP receives the EPG broadcast with DVB-T/T2, including the EPG for the HD channels (something that WMC cannot do).  So you no longer need to have holes in your EPG which persist indefinitely for new channels.  The broadcast EPG is not as detailed as the Microsoft downloaded EPG (e.g. no actor/director info).  Of greater importance is the fact that it does not contain a "repeat" flag (so cannot be used to control which episodes of a series are recorded).Sadly, although the UK EPG does contain unique programme ids and series ids, these are not used by MP, so the series link facility offered by off-the-shelf PVRs (such as my Humax HDR-Fox-T2) is not available with MP.  As a result, series recording is more cumbersome.  There are 8 different flavours of series recording, but it seems so far that none of them quite matches what I usually want.  So this means that MP is likely to record episodes that have already been recorded, and you will need either to spot them in the recording schedule and mark them not to record, or allow them to record and delete them afterwards.The flavour of series recording that I am mostly using at the moment is "weekly on this channel" (selection 8).  This fixes the day of the week, but does not fix the time, so the programme is free to move around in the schedule and MP will still record it.  But when there are multiple broadcasts on that day, MP will record them all. "Click" on "BBC News" is an example when this would occur: the first broadcast of each week is at 01.30 on Saturdays, with multiple repeats on that day and later days.  There is nothing like the "record at this time, plus or minus two hours" facility that there is with Vista.It is possible to use other sources of EPG information, including (I think) the WMC source.  But bear in mind that MP will still not use any additional info that might be contained in that EPG (such as the "repeat" flag).(3) MP understands both DVR-MS and WTV files, and plays them without problem from the "Video" folder.  But MP does not understand how to get the metadata from these files, so no programme info is displayed.  I tried mocking-up an XML file for one of my DVR-MS files, but MP did not use it.  So unless there is some setting that I have missed, I think that you would need to convert your DVR-MS  and WTV files to TS, and create XML files from the metadata.  I have not tried this yet, so cannot confirm that it will definitely work.  And even if it does, I am not sure that I want to spend the time converting my entire library of DVR-MS files to TS format!  So I may just put up with no info.(4) MP supports MCE-compatible remote controls, but not all of the buttons have the same meanings.  For example, the SKIP_FORWARD and SKIP_BACK buttons don't skip forward or backward in the video that is playing.  But MP offers an more-flexible skip facility using the LEFT/RIGHT/UP/DOWN buttons when a video is playing.  Also, you can enter "hhmm" on the numeric keypad to skip to that time from the start (but I don't think that relative skips are supported).The remote control can also be used to navigate the EPG.  MP allows the amount of time on view to be varied in one hour increments, from 1 hour to 4 hours, but annoyingly when you scroll the EPG left or right it always scrolls by 3 hours (I never liked this about WMC).  You can also scroll by 24 hours (different from WMC's 12 hours).  There is currently an irritating bug in scrolling by 3 hours when video is playing in the thumbnail; I have tried all sorts of variations in the setup for the remote control, so far without success.  The customisation of the remote control is very flexible, with many functions that you can assign to buttons of your choice, and in circumstances of your choice (i.e. the same button can do different actions when in different panels).(5) MP supports "skins" that provide a variety of look-and-feel.  Although there is an overall similarity between skins (because the underlying application is the same -- MP), skins can vary panel flow, in addition to panel appearance.  For example, the aMPed skin (whose forum you are in at the moment) requires just two button presses to exit from the "Home" panel to the Windows desktop.  In contrast, the built-in "DefaultWide" skin requires 10 button presses to do the same thing (crikey!).  A skin that is (I think) based on the WMC look-and-feel is the "Maya HD" skin (a new release was issued recently).  I did install it in my test partition, but be aware that it installs a lot of other things too, things that you may (or may not) want.Concluding RemarksAm I going to stay with MP?  The answer is "yes".  The arrangement of the panels is different from WMC, but I will get used to that.  Being the nit-picker that I am, there are some aspects of the panel layouts and panel flow that I would design differently if I were designing it.  But I am not designing it, and what the MP Developers have provided is a very usable solution for my media-center needs.MP has the advantage that it is still being developed.  But the other side of the coin is that it is freeware, and that the Developers do all this in their own time, on their own schedule.  That means that you cannot expect bug fixes or enhancements to made on any particular schedule, or indeed ever.  So you should trial MP and assess its performance as it exists today, complete with "infelicities".  If it is acceptable, use it (and just maybe those infelicities will be fixed in the future).-- from CyberSimian in the UK</blockquote>

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