What HPTCsoftware do you run?

Tony Williams · 30 Nov 2013 at 23:11

On your main box, what config do you have installes? XBMC, Media Portal, Myth?

Windows 8
XBMC (gotta config navx,etc)
and either Media Portal or something as I plan on adding a TBS DVB-S2 card.

I want summit for game launcing as I game on this. I wanna configure my main screen on XBMC to include Games PC, Games Emu. Playing with themes

I have tv shows and movies locally stored.

used to be a fan of meedio

enigma27 · 1 Dec 2013 at 00:27

I have used both XBMC and Media portal and currently stick with Media portal purely for Blu ray playback..

Use it for the following

TV Shows ( Tv Series )
Movies ( Moving Pictures )
Online videos ( Online Videos )
Emulators ( My Emulators 2 )

My emulators 2 allows you to launch emulators but also stand alone PC Games.. only trouble you have sometimes with this is when you have games installed in Steam and they have popups before the game launches.

lurkio · 1 Dec 2013 at 01:28

Mediaportal

enigma27 , I have never tried blu ray on media portal , is there anything else that needs to be installed to make it work
and what version of MP are you using ?

Tony Williams · 1 Dec 2013 at 19:19

Thanks soo much. Mp.seems good but i did not like the skin look compared. To how. Xbmc looked. Alhoguh i may be. Able to use the skin frok xbmc

hawker1986 · 1 Dec 2013 at 21:50

I'm running windows 7

I use windows media centre for music, picture and TV.
Media browser for movie playback from my server
Total media theatre 5 for Hddvd and blu ray

All works very nicely via remote control.

Hawker

enigma27 · 2 Dec 2013 at 09:37

lurkio said:
Mediaportal

enigma27 , I have never tried blu ray on media portal , is there anything else that needs to be installed to make it work
and what version of MP are you using ?

Mediaportal has an inbuilt player but wont handle encrypted Blu ray discs..

for that to work you need a decrypter that runs in the background, not sure i can link here due to the nature of the software but if you google medipaortal blu ray playback from disc im sure you will find it.

im running 1.5

LizardKing · 2 Dec 2013 at 11:21

Mediaportal on my dedicated htpc that runs all the TV watching, the fact its wife friendly is what makes it so good.

Though it does has a habit of corrupting a DB from time to time!

GSXRMovistar · 3 Dec 2013 at 13:27

Like Hawker I’m running windows 7, WMC for Live/Recorded TV and then Media browser 3 (Classic) for movie/tv series playback from my server.

Really liking the new version of Media Browser and the newer Media Browser Theatre which is a more feature enriched standalone solution is looking fantastic, if they can sort out the Live TV integration I can finally dump the dependency on WMC.

For those that are using MediaPortal how does the Live TV functionality compare to WMC? With its new skin I may have to consider it as an alternative to WMC/MB3.

Thanks.

Scottland · 3 Dec 2013 at 13:36

XBMC here, with Argus as the PVR backend. Works flawlessly (for me), and is much easier to setup out of the box than MP (in my opinion at least). There are a few plugins knocking around for launching external applications, and there are some ROM browser plugins for emulation too.

limoslight · 3 Dec 2013 at 18:56

OS Win 7 64
Frontend XBMC Frodo
Backend (PVR) NPVR Analog + DVB-T (soon to be upgraded to DVB-T2)
Preferred video encoder (shrink to store in hdd) Handbrake ^^

Django x2 · 4 Dec 2013 at 09:04

I've been tempted by JRIVER but it is paid for. Trial seems to have improved exponentially over XBMC

nails666 · 4 Dec 2013 at 10:05

I only have a pretty basic setup running WHS2011 on my N54 Microserver. I just use XMBC for playback of ripped movies, TV shows and music. No optical drive or TV tuner so don't have to worry about blu-ray playback or TV recording, I use a PS3 and Tivo for those. I've not really looked at other programs as XBMC was free, easy to setup and easy for my wife to use

Cycrow · 4 Dec 2013 at 14:38

I run MythTV for mine. I have a backend server that has a decent amount of hard drive space (~12TB) and an array of TV tuners (10). Then several front ends connected to the TV.

The front ends have the advantage of being completely silent

Confused · 4 Dec 2013 at 15:01

XBMC on the front end, with a backend of WHS2011, ArgusTV, 8TB of storage and twin DVB-T2 tuners.

Baboonanza · 4 Dec 2013 at 15:51

What's the ArgusTV integration like in XBMC these days? Last time I tried it you couldn't do any decent recording / scheduling from within XBMC which makes it fail the Wife Test and therefor unusable. I wasn't really happy with the playback quality either.

I use MediaPortal with the ArgusTV back-end and Titan skin. I have yet to see anything that is as good for TV integration as MP and the Series and Movies management is also at least as good as XBMC. I also dislike the way scraping works in XBMC. Besides the need to manually run imports while MP picks up changes automatically it seems like a pain in the butt to resolve conflicts (though I'm a novice there so I could be wrong).

On the other hand MP is pretty resource heavy and can be a pain to set up. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anyone but once you've got the knowledge it's extremely powerful.

Confused · 4 Dec 2013 at 16:08

Basic recording (ie record this show at this time) works, but no advanced scheduling - the PVR API in XBMC hasn't been extended to include this functionality yet.

However, when a browser or a phone does it easier than with a remote, I don't find that too much of an issue (and I've only got about a dozen schedules set up anyway, the GF watches very little broadcast TV, mainly stuff like X-Factor and I'm A Celebrity that aren't easily accessible elsewhere)

Yes, XBMC won't (by default) scan the filesystem for changes, but there's an add-in that does (XBMC Library Watchdog) - and yes, it does rely on having a sensible naming structure for video files - but all of mine have always been sensibly named anyway!

GSXRMovistar · 4 Dec 2013 at 18:27

Cycrow said:
I run MythTV for mine. I have a backend server that has a decent amount of hard drive space (~12TB) and an array of TV tuners (10). Then several front ends connected to the TV.

The front ends have the advantage of being completely silent

Out of interest what's the reasoning behind so many tuners?

Django x2 · 4 Dec 2013 at 18:32

Multiroom freeview watch / record, I would guess

strumpusplunket · 4 Dec 2013 at 20:18

Media Portal with StreamedMP skin to my eyes looks every bit as good as XBMC. Been my preferred front-end for my HTPC for a few years now. Tried XBMC, but found MP more customisable, handled title scraping better, handled subs better, handled external app launching better too in my experience.

fireisdangerous · 4 Dec 2013 at 21:24

Plex all the way its amazing