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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RogueLegend" data-source="post: 260875" data-attributes="member: 47751">Just wanted to throw my 2 cents in...I've been using Media Portal since 0.2.2. I started out in the early days just settling with bundled ATi software that came with my TV card- that worked well for a while except for the frequent bits of glitchyness. The interface could have been designed better, but the biggest headache was always the EPG software that never got updated. It's integration between programs was very disconnected and made little to no sense.I then moved to Snapstream. BeyondTV (I went through several revisions of version 4) but found that while it was well designed, the TV functionality had no good integration with Video/DVD/Music applications- Beyond Media was treated more like a thirdparty addon than a true integrated portion of the program. On top of that, it would frequently playback and record video only with no sound, and sound would not be restored until I restarted the system although I could get sound out of other TV apps. I could never get any kind of real support- besides preformatted emails, and the emails from people suggesting the same set of solutions from the preformatted email. It was the most frustrating $70 I ever spent (although I did get a free firefly remote out of the deal).It wasn't until I gave up completely with BeyondTV that I found MP. Had I found MP first, Snapstream would have never gotten my money. I was impressed by the fit of MP, and the very fact that it does try to be all things to all people was one of the things that drew me to it. Though I didn't get the same kind of file format/conversion control settings I got with BeyondTV, I was more than willing to trade diskspace for the fact that it did not spontaneously drop audio from TV playback and recordings. I became less focused on tuning the system to provide maximum TV playback performance with maximum diskspace and instead found myself customizing the software to do what I needed. And although there are a few bugs with various features, the integration between the various parts is well done, and it doesn't feel like I'm exiting one program to get to another. The best part is that I can massage it into working just how I want. Between being able to reprogram remote buttons, to adding plugins, to custom views, it can be prodded to work the way I need it.I learned that this program has a huge time investment by the people developing it, and given the great job they've done getting it this far, I can spend a little extra time of my own massaging it to work, even if it means a little frustration comes with the setup, my patience has always paid off in the end. It would be nice for the setup to do everything for me like BeyondTV's, but considering I didn't have to pay anything for it, and it seems much more stable, I can deal with the idiosyncrosies like having to set up a TV server and a SQL database (although a TV server doesn't make sense to me for a single seat install, I'm very impressed with MP's performance w/ MySQL) in order to playback TV.I'm not a big fan of the cost of admission or the limitations when it comes to MCE, along with Microsofts propensity for instability and high resource usage, and every other software has proven to be a bit of a dissapointment whether paid or free. MP is excellent given its nature, and the extensibility via plugins makes this software worth gold in my eyes.</blockquote>

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