MP1 en TV server removed after disappointing results (1 Viewer)

jame

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December 14, 2008
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Belgium Belgium
Dear,

Ever since my childhood I became fascinated by radio and tv. This fascination resulted in:

- self built receivers and transmitters
- contributions to local radio
- a job in a media company
- my current jub in a telecom company

I've been using all kinds of equipment but about 5yrs ago I started to learn more about HTPC. As HTPC combines traditional computer functions with the power of media hardware, it seemed like a dream come true. For my system I've been using MCE2005 because it was the best alternative at that time. If you manage to setup MCE2005 right, it still looks ok but there is a lot to be improved. Also setting up MCE2005 has been a real nightmare. I still see MCE2005 as a missed opportunity by Microsoft.

I've also been using SageTV and BeyondTV for a while but also here I had too many setup issues, crashes and no good EPG targeted to my country, so I removed all these again from my PC.

Mediaportal also seemed to be very promising. I installed MP1 a couple of weeks ago and I started to set it up for my pc with dual TV-cards, a large media file collection and dual monitor. Let's forget the dual cards & monitors for now.

When I install mediacenter software for 1st use I expect a basic wizard that handles:

- country settings
- TV-cards
- monitor-cards
- audio-cards
- EPG
- location of local or remote mediafiles

Once this wizard is completed, you should have an easy to operate GUI. This will give you sound & picture of all TV/radio channels your hardware can handle and be able to play the majority of your mediafiles. To me this sounds logical.

But after 3wks of testing this is my MP1 & TVserver verdict:

Positive:
- it's free and developed by real enthusiast's
- works with a huge range of TV-cards
- EPG grabbing looks very promissing
- big forum support

Negative:
- Impossible to set up right the 1st time due to lack of complete setup wizard
- Very slow, demanding too much processor power
- Incorrect tuning details (like for Belgium DVB-T)
- EPG not working for several countries (I don't want to grab EPG from Microsoft itself)
- unstable (dozens of crashes even for simple functions like resize window)

The more I've been playing around with HTPC and media software like MP, the more I'm convinced that a PC and multimedia don't mix well. Could it be that many developers, including Microsoft, have large underestimated how difficult it is to build an easy operatable and stable working HTPC?

My attention is now more focused at the latest generation of settop boxes that can handle TV/Radio, media files. More specifically I can surely recommend to have a look at the developments of the twin HD PVR's running on Linux. They offer better sound & picture, stability and plenty of storage functionalities than HTPC's. But, yes this all comes at a price $$$$$$.

Finally, allthough MP doesn't work well for me, I wish to encourage any open source developer out there to go on with this wonderful experiment

Best Regards,

J.Melis
 

Paranoid Delusion

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  • June 13, 2005
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    Impossible to set up right the 1st time due to lack of complete setup wizard

    There is a setup GUI for Mediaportal, but not TVServer, so yes the majority of setting are in the config.exe of both.

    Very slow, demanding too much processor power

    Would of said more GPU as this is a directx 9 application, than cpu intensive, again MP2 has moved away from this, so resizing whilst video playing will be possible.

    Incorrect tuning details (like for Belgium DVB-T)

    Tell us the right frequencies and they will be added :)

    EPG not working for several countries (I don't want to grab EPG from Microsoft itself)

    Again, if using WebEPG, not that hard to add channels\grabbers, if i can do it, then i would expect other people to be able too, and i'm no developer, and as we have no Belguim Dev's this does rely on users.

    unstable (dozens of crashes even for simple functions like resize window)

    You cannot resize MP with Video playing, that is one of our directx limitations, but should not crash, just stop video, which is what happens here if i try to resize on the fly.

    Most crashes regarding Mediaportal are hardware driver\codec related, sometimes a plugin may cause instability, but that is outside our control.

    Hopefully when MP2 is released, this will be much more user friendly, with that magical setup wizard doing all the main configuration :)

    Regards
     

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