Moving Mediaportal to Mac OSX... (1 Viewer)

[jcee]

I do not want to mess up with people here.

But I have rich experience with building almost three HTPC with lost of hardware software options.
But I experienced soo many problems. First of all, thanks to all the people here trying to help me..

When reading the topics here there was always one question left at the end of the day.

Is it not Windows and the big variation of hardware componente, software versions and drivers, codecs giving us almost all of the problems!?

Most answers here in the forum say: "It is a driver issue.. it is a problem of the codec... flash your bios,.. install patch xyz ... there is a problem in DX, replace DLL by earlier version..."

And when my system does not hibernate it is the fault of a tuner card or driver of that gfx card manufacture..

It does not help me.. The problems do never end...


So isnt a more closed setup more reasonable ?! I have seen and experienced the Apple systems and though they have less ressources and less power they perform smoother... and responsive...

My personal explanation is, because it is a integrated well designed system ... Wouldnt it make sense to build something on top of this?!

A colleague has experienced MP and TVcentral over the last two years and has recently quit in advance to Eyetv... (which has less features), but he was tired of always working on the issues mentioned above..
He now is very(!) pleased and said that he did not had to reboot for over a month now.. and channel switching is still fast and responsive..

Maybe he and I am just too stupid for Windows (though I am working professionally with it at work)..But it cannot all be the users fault..

Wouldnt it make sense to port MP to such a plattform?! Or at least define a reference design!?
I would immediatly by me all hardwware/software and follow all rules that would guarrantee me an uptime of >99%!!!



By the way:
We have a similar situation at work, where we run a highly availabe process control network 365/24 and we run big industrial plants with windows computers..
The only way our software vendors gurantee >99,8% availability is by defining every(!) aspect of the hardware of software with zero tolerance.
They even tell us which software is only allowed on that computer.. they even define on which PCI slot the network card has to placed.. no other!!

I can understand this now..! This makes sense!
With a Windows computer in the living room I have not reached 99% and the WAF is down!!

 

[Willith]

As a Mac/Windows/Linux user i can see your point. I love OS X and prefer it myself to windows. But unfortuneatly Media Portal appears to utilize Direct X which is a Microsoft Product. I think that is what is mostly stopping them from porting it to other OS's as well as the time needed. Mac OS X can use OpenGL as far as i know. That said i would love to be able to hook up my G4 Powermac to the TV server and use it in that way. Some kind of simple lite TV client for other operating systems (and maybe even a version for windows). As for now i can watch streams in VLC but its annoying having to manually control the server. Windows on Mac hardware is as close as you'll get for now (and ruling out all powerpc users like me!!)

 

[jcee]

I now spend some time looking at the MAC media center applications (xhub, centerstage, mediacentral..)..

I have to says they are not that feature-rich as Mediaportal. I love many of MP features and the speed it is improved and enhanced.

However the Mac mediacenters all ran quite well out of a box and they integrate tighly with the music, podcast and videos collection... And it ran just out of the box, not that much tweaking necessary...

I will investigate further and I guess I will not sell my FireDTV (for Windows), so I will run MP on the Mac via Bootcamp.


I understand that the majority if PC and there is much more stuff available. I understand that porting is not possible, but at least a client application would be lovely (maybe I should start coding one?! ;-) )
This OSX stuff is so beautifull and elegant .. all the animations and the workflow is that smooth. Ideal for the living room..

Hmm...

 

[zag2me]

This is why I think media portal should recommend a Tuner card, Graphics card, minimum CPU, minimum memory, remote control. It's why the xbox media center was so good and popular because it just worked.

 

[revs]

There are hardly enough developers for the PC version of MP, let alone a Mac OS version.
For a Mac version, I dont think a port would be feasable, it would most likely be a Mac OS application that could intergrate with the MP TVServer running on a PC somewhere...

Anyone tried running MP on a Mac using WINE? ;-)

OT: MediaCetral on the Mac seems to have huge potential, but I have read from reviews that it is very unstable...

 

[lhcomputer]

Mediaportal auf dem Mac

Use Mediaportal TV Server 1 and Macbook AIR with VLC Player + MPclient (Streaming vom Mediaportal Server to VLC Player via 300Mbit Wlan) . On Macbook 1 Use vmware fusion 1.1. It´s work

 

[diehard2]

Unfortunately, we can't move it to the MAC. The entire guts of MP are rooted in DirectX. Not even taking into account that we use C#. If you want a perfectly stable setup, buy a card that most people have, a high quality graphics card that is not bleeding edge (so that the drivers are mature), and use XP SP2/3 with nothing else on the computer except for all of the latest patches. If you do this, you will have a very stable MP

 

[revs]

There's xbmc being ported to the mac, maybe a tv client could be made for that?

Or, its more likely that the TVClient (https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/mp-tv-client-262/announce-mptvclient-v1-2-5-20-12-2007-ii-22027/index11.html#post259259) would work on OS X - SOmeone got it working on Linux using Mono, I cant see why it wouldn't work on OS X using Mono?

I am a mac/linux/win user, and I spent close to a year looking at all the possible HTPC options, and nothing beats windows (unless you dont use TV).

Regarding stability, since the RC1 build of Mediaportal my system has been rock solid! I have a couple of TV cards, all sorts of media (HD/SD). I have the bare minimum on the HTPC -Just windows all patched up, a few codecs, and uTorrent

 

[JackTramiel]

There is a "client" for XBMC - shall work fine already as far as i read. Dont know how good it works
on the wip versions of linux/os x xbmc.