VMware and MediaPortal (oh and BluRay) (1 Viewer)

[MikeBracknell]

Hi all,

After a long search for the right HTPC, it seems the MediaPortal team have their head screwed on correctly in terms of what I needed - which was a replacement for my SkyHD box that didn't cost the earth and could do multi-room sensibly and was a proper client-server TV serving experience. It's not as though I have a huge amount of downloaded media either - my broadband isn't good enough to start with, and I also feel it's immoral to download films for free. However, I do have a huge amount of DVDs and BluRay, and wanted to get rid of the furniture round the TV I have to hold all these discs!

Anyway, I digress.

What i'd like to do is host the TV server portion of MP on VMware ESX, so that I can have it as part of my home server setup. Could anyone tell me whether they've successfully done this? I'd also want to do it with a BlackGold DVB-S2 card (3595) so any experiences of running hardware passthru under VMware would be useful to me.

Secondly, how long do I have to wait before I can get MP to play BluRay films the same way as DVDs (i.e. through the MP interface, not invoking a 3rd-party program)

Cheers,
Mike.
(oh and hi everyone - first post here!)

 

[wonkyd]

Hi Mike,

I can't help you with running MP TV Server in VMware ESX, but I'm fairly sure people have done it.

The BluRay I can help with, check this out https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/mediaportal-plugins-47/bluray-handler-0-9-7-beta-81068/. It won't play any of the menus and you'll need something like AnyDVDHD unless you copy the discs to your HD but it will play the main feature inside MP. Either that or you could use ArcSofts BluRay software with it's 10-foot interface, you can launch that directly from MP using https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...7/blu-ray-hd-dvd-plugin-arcsoft-player-49357/. No need to use AnyDVDHD in that case.

 

[MikeBracknell]

I had a look at BluRay Handler, and the last couple of posts point at it being superceded. It also looks like a not-very-straightforward install. I did start to have a go at installing it, but I got stuck (and i've been supporting computers for the past 20 years!). Someone needs to have a decent installation wrapper for it!

 

[wonkyd]

I had a look at BluRay Handler, and the last couple of posts point at it being superceded. It also looks like a not-very-straightforward install. I did start to have a go at installing it, but I got stuck (and i've been supporting computers for the past 20 years!). Someone needs to have a decent installation wrapper for it!

The download on the first page should be enough for Mediaportal 1.1.3, not sure on 1.2beta. If it's a zip file (can't remember) then it needs copying to the relevant plugins directory in the Mediaportal install folder.