Shoutcast Plugin

Today I installed the shoutcast plugin. This plugin uses the shoutcast directory at http://www.shoutcast.com/ to find internet radio stations from within MediaPortal. For install it requires only unpacking in the MediaPortal directory and there are no configuration settings. The plugin is easy to use and within a couple of minutes I created a favourites list of the stations I'd like to listen to.

But that's about all the plugin has to offer. If I were frequently in search of new radio stations to listen to, I'd use the plugin more often. But once you found your station, it doesn't offer anything that My Radio doesn't do. So I'll write down the station names and add them to My Radio.

As an obvious improvement, the plugin could provide a list of the most popular stations, as shoutcast does on their homepage. An annoyance is how the selector for minimum bitrate resets itself over and over again. This is by design, as the author wrote on the forum.

My conclusion: this shoutcast directory search is great if it was integrated with the My Radio section of MediaPortal. As a stand alone plugin, I won't be using it a lot.