Firstly, great application. Really well put together. I know it's a little rough around the edges when it comes to reliability, but that's just the nature of the beast with such a small dev team - albiet with an extremely enthusiastic user base.
What amuses me most about Media Portal is how much more polished and advanced it is than the 'free' bundled software that comes with the average TV cards. I wouldn't be surprised if Hauppauge et al gave up and just started sticking MP on the driver disk. It would save a lot of time.
I also think that it holds up extemely well against commercial products. I have been using Showshifter for about 18 months - despite the company sadly going out of business. I looked at MP about 9 months ago as an option because I was having diffculty with the reliability of Showshifter. At that time it was too intimidating to get up and running - much like a lot of open source software. However, the documentation has now vasty improved (still no configuration wiki for MySQL though) and the how-to videos are excellent work.
My stand out favourite feature for the software is the control over aspect ratios. An incorrect aspect ration is a pet hate of mine, and I can often be fouind fiddling for hours trying to get the display right. I was therefore delighted to find in the calibration setup of MP an option to configure the aspect ratio. This was entirely missing from SS. I couldn't find it while testing Cyberlink's PowerCinema. This means that instead of viewing TV through the S-video out of my graphics card I can attach my LCD TV through the standard VGA cable, getting excellent image quality with perfect aspect ratios.
Now, I do have one question, which I don't think is a bug - hence me posting in this forum. How do you tune into a recording that has already started? Example - I had scheduled a recording but was watching a video file when the TV Server started the recording. (Great feature by the way. On SS because XP only has one sound channel if you wanted to record something you couldn't watch anything else at the time). I finished watching the video file and tried to activate the TV. It wouldn't let me get into it. It refused to let me access the Stream. As far as I know if I have been watching the TV signal when it started recording I would have been able to continue - so why couldn't I join half way through?
Have I missed something here, or can it just not be done?
Thanks
I don't have a sig.
What amuses me most about Media Portal is how much more polished and advanced it is than the 'free' bundled software that comes with the average TV cards. I wouldn't be surprised if Hauppauge et al gave up and just started sticking MP on the driver disk. It would save a lot of time.
I also think that it holds up extemely well against commercial products. I have been using Showshifter for about 18 months - despite the company sadly going out of business. I looked at MP about 9 months ago as an option because I was having diffculty with the reliability of Showshifter. At that time it was too intimidating to get up and running - much like a lot of open source software. However, the documentation has now vasty improved (still no configuration wiki for MySQL though) and the how-to videos are excellent work.
My stand out favourite feature for the software is the control over aspect ratios. An incorrect aspect ration is a pet hate of mine, and I can often be fouind fiddling for hours trying to get the display right. I was therefore delighted to find in the calibration setup of MP an option to configure the aspect ratio. This was entirely missing from SS. I couldn't find it while testing Cyberlink's PowerCinema. This means that instead of viewing TV through the S-video out of my graphics card I can attach my LCD TV through the standard VGA cable, getting excellent image quality with perfect aspect ratios.
Now, I do have one question, which I don't think is a bug - hence me posting in this forum. How do you tune into a recording that has already started? Example - I had scheduled a recording but was watching a video file when the TV Server started the recording. (Great feature by the way. On SS because XP only has one sound channel if you wanted to record something you couldn't watch anything else at the time). I finished watching the video file and tried to activate the TV. It wouldn't let me get into it. It refused to let me access the Stream. As far as I know if I have been watching the TV signal when it started recording I would have been able to continue - so why couldn't I join half way through?
Have I missed something here, or can it just not be done?
Thanks
I don't have a sig.