Some new kid questions (1 Viewer)

[foxbenw]

Hello
I was new to SageTV a few months ago. I bought one of their awesome extenders and got most of the software running how i wanted... then, literally about a week after I had most of it working and was delighted with my new set up, they were bought by Google and stopped selling those extenders. So I have decided to move on and find an alternative, given the likely lack of future support and no new extenders. Very frustrating. I am quite new to the htpc world, having never had a good place to put a server alongside a tv aerial until recently - although have always wanted to.
Having done a bit of research, my first stop for where to try next has been MediaPortal. (I am not particularly interested in MCE due to its lack of pc based extenders, although it does seem to have a great GUI and the money behind it will presumably ensure that it gets all the good IPTV providers). XBMC looks nice but no built in TV.
MediaPortal seems pretty cool so far to be honest. But I have a couple of things to clarify if that is ok. I hope someone can help.

1) There is no transcoding from the server side? So any extenders/clients I use need to have decent graphics performance and I need a good network connection. (I tend to use AV500 homeplugs). The new Zotac nanos look pretty cool for this. Particularly as it sounds like they will be doing an E-450 version too.

2) From the TV Series plugin forum it looks like there is no easy way to support box sets of tv series? I got MyMovies working well on SageTV - when i clicked on 'series 1' for a particular show, instead of showing all the different epsiodes at once it would show the different discs in a context menu. Each of the discs would have info on the episodes included on it but only one play option, which is to play the disc.

Thanks for any help! I don't want to go too far if I am not going to get what I want from the software.
Ben

 

[porky996t]

Hi Ben,

Just as a brief outline, I have been using MP for about two years now in the living room and attached to the main TV. It enabled me to get rid of all the other boxes. I have 6 tuners in it and just use Freeview (DVB-T) and Freesat (DVB-S/S2). From this I run two clients, one in the bedroom and one in the kitchen. These are Zotac ZBox ID41's with SSD's in them. I run the Zotacs from AV200 Homeplugs and they run just fine - I did measure the bandwidth that full HD streaming takes (ITV1 HD @ 1920 x 1080) and it was max 36Mbps or thereabouts. They run really well. I use StreamedMP skin on all units for consistency and I use a generic MCE Remote control (RC6 type) on all units, again for consistency, and for a high WAF. Even the GF uses it without any hassle now, and tends to moan when she can't find a film listed on the bedroom unit.

I use My TVSeries and find this plugin superb for any TV Series. Now, I copied over any DVD boxsets onto the HDD and MyTVSeries lists these by season, and then each episode under that particular season. For example with 'Porridge', this is listed alphabetically amongst other TV Series and when you click on this, it shows all the Seasons listed with info. When you go into each season, it then shows the episode, again with summary of the episode. I have never used it with DVD's, so I don't know if works the same. It may help to ask this question on the MyTVSeries thread.

I have over 100 TV series on HDD and over 500 films which use the MovingPictures plugin and this enables both clients to watch any DVD rips as the Zotac clients do not have a DVD drive - and they are fixed behind the wall mounted TV's and are difficult to reach.

HTH,


M.

 

[foxbenw]

Thanks for that. I will ask on the forum regarding the DVD folder structures
Best
Ben