Evolution

The first mediacenter that entered my living room - October 2003 - was merely intended as an MP3 player. I had heard of this new invention called "time shifting" so I bought a Hauppauge TV card as well. The PVR-350 came with hardware encoding and a remote. Another use that I could think of was digitizing my LPs, so that's why I got a Soundblaster Audigy Platinum.

All of this was mounted in a Lian-Li desktop case. It fitted full size PCI cards and two 5.25" front slots. It was a full size desktop model, not a sleek small little gadget. I never really understood why people care so much for ultra small barebone cases for their media centers. Small means less options for heat dissipation, more heat means more noise. My advice if you're on a budget: buy a big ugly case and put it away in a cabinet. You only look at the case when you put a DVD in anyway.

For watching tv, the PVR-350 was delivered with the WinTV2000 application. It was pretty decent and, as advertised, it could pause and resume live tv! Not before long I discovered that the remote could be tweaked by editing a remote.ini text file. I spent hours mapping shortcut keys of many applications to keys on the remote.

I also developed a couple of HTML pages that could launch these applications, again using shortcut keys. The Hauppauge remote itself was very basic, so I exchanged that for a universal remote by Sony. So far, I'd been using three separate remotes for tv, receiver an mediacenter. Obviously that makes watching TV quite an operation. But the Sony remote had a nice option to direct the volume signals to the receiver, even while the other buttons still operated the mediacenter. So at least I could get by with one remote most of the time.

From the start, I used a Zalman CPU cooler. Over time, I changed the cheap case fans with more state-of-the-art Pabst fans. And, although the power supply was advertised as "low noise" it was rattling disturbingly through my music. So I took the fan out and replaced it as well. And when the harddrive was up for expansion, I switched from a Maxtor Diamond Plus to the Samsung Spinpoint. It does make a difference!

Another nuissance from the early days was that the analog audio out created a big burst of noise at every change of channel. It was so bad I used to swap channels with the receiver on mute. That only stopped when I changed my good old Pioneer stereo receiver to a digital Marantz AV receiver. The Marantz receiver also marked the entry of surround sound in my living room. Now, sound from every corner of the room is nice, and some special effects in dvd's work really well. But what makes 5.1 sound worthwhile is the center speaker. Having the actors or the news reader talk from a place near the tv makes speach much easier to understand. I watch tv in the Circle Surround II mode, but I still prefer my music in plain and simple stereo.

The last major change was the case. I ran into this GreenPower case that would look really nice with the receiver, plus it has a VFD display and would fit a more silent power supply. And voilà, that's the setup at the time I started this weblog.

What else?

So, I'm a MediaPortal user. But what competition is MediaPortal up against?

First and foremost, Microsoft. While Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 was still a separate package, the media center support has been integrated in Windows Vista. You'll have to get the Premium edition though. With the performance requirements that it imposes on your hardware, Vista is not the most cost effective choice for a Media Center PC. In general, MCE only works with certain MCE certified hardware.

Even though MediaPortal is free, Microsoft obviously blows MediaPortal away from a marketing standpoint. I think it's a wise choice for many people as it doesn't require specific installation or tweaking of settings. In fact, it doesn't have a whole lot of settings, you'll just have to put up with the way Microsoft set it up for you.

Meedio is another option. This program was formally known as myHTPC and development was stopped in 2006, after the software was sold to Yahoo! Yahoo! then turned it into Go TV which is only available to the US market. Meedio still has some advantages over MediaPortal, most notably the way you can manipulate how lists from its database are displayed in the user interface. Meedio used to be available for a modest price.

Worth mentioning also is xLobby. According to the website and the reviews it's very customizable and supports all kind of networking features. It's ahead of MediaPortal with features like multizone audio, pocket pc support and multi client support, but less user friendly. xLobby has never been open source, but the website always featured a "Free Forever" claim. However, xLobby went commercial in March 2007. A new paid version is coming out this year.

In the US the market for commercial Media Center packages is really taking off. Options include SageTV Media Center, Snapstream Beyond TV and CyberLink PowerCinema. Some of these packages are really marketed only for the US and Canada. That means that the standard TV guide is not supporting tv channels for potential users outside North America. Optionally, the package includes TV tuner hardware, a remote, etc.

And there's lots more! MythTV is another open source project, but less developed than MediaPortal and running on Linux. The latest version 0.2 dates back to September 2006 and the site doesn't show a lot of activity since.
GB-PVR is a project developed in the UK. Plugins are supported but the core engine code is not publicly available. Some of the screen shots on the site look an awful lot like MediaPortals BlueTwo skin, Would that apply to the source code as well?
France has several projects. Sesam-TV is freeware. Domotix is also a French project, free. Another French project is DomaxCenter. There's a paid and a free version. The focus is on home automation and there's no live TV support. And while we're at it, here's a nice review comparing 6 projects, also in French. Another example of a home automation package is MainLobby. Tvoon is a German project, but the latest release dates back to 2005. Got All Media is another open source project.

For Linux users and next to MythTV, there's Geexbox and Freevo. And for Mac users, Apple has developed Front Row. However, Front Row is so far without support for live TV.

Update: Of course, there's a much more complete list of HTPC frontend software available on internet. See Eirikso's blog.

MediaPortal

The front-end software of choice for my mediacenter pc is MediaPortal. MediaPortal is an open source project hosted at sourceforge.com, meaning that it's absolutely free. But most of all, it's developed by people who do this for fun. And that shows. The MediaPortal community is very active in developing new features, plugins and skins. There's a wiki support site and an active forum with help for if you run into any issues with the software.

The program neatly combines whatever content you have on the harddrive with additional information from the internet. The tv guide is downloaded from internet, so you won't need the newspaper for that anymore. It also takes the hassle out of programming a normal VCR. Cd covers are downloaded with the music you play, as well as additional information on the artist and a review of the album. Similarly, for movies the cover, the actors and further movie infomation is downloaded. One of the things I like best ist that it also supports tv series with episode guides. And then it gives you access to all kinds of internet content: News feeds, weather updates, webradio, movie trailers and more.

The software can be quite picky in the drivers and supporting software it uses, so make sure you update videocard drivers etc. all to the latest rev. MediaPortal has a reputation of being "buggy" compared to its competition.