XBMC

My first MediaPortal was in 2005. My first post in the forum was about version 0.2.0.0, but I've used versions before that.
After eight years it's quite a step, but today I've installed XBMC on the HTPC. XBMC seems to be the bigger platform. A few people in my environment are using XBMC, none of them are using MediaPortal. A major disturbance with MediaPortal has been that I couldn't get remote control through my Android phone to work properly. Another reason is that I'd like to get to know XBMC is that I'm considering a build project for a car mediaplayer based on Raspberry Pi and RaspBMC.

MediaPortal 1.1.0 final

Last week I upgraded the MediaPortal installation from 1.04 to 1.1.0 final. I decided to take the easy route and leave out the live tv functionality. At this moment my server is located out of reach of the analog tv cable, the whole tv-server setup has always been troublesome, and I've come to peace with the idea of not using the HTPC for live tv anymore. Most of what I watch is downloaded content anyway.

Using Windows Home Server I went back to a fresh Windows 7 install. This took some troubleshooting, because the restore CD required motherboard drivers. The version of the restore CD I used was based on Vista, while earlier versions were based on Windows Server 2003. After some search in help forums and a couple of tries I found the proper Vista drivers.

Installation of MP itself went smooth. I installed the following plugins:

- My TV Series

- Moving Pictures

- Last.fm scrobbler

- Last.fm player

- RadioTime

The last one is new for me, needed because webradio is not included if you install MP without tv. RadioTime lets you make a list of favourite radio stations online, from a very comprehensive directory of webradio streams. My TV Series and Moving Pictures are as awesome as in previous versions. The user interface for configuring My TV Series has improved big time as well.

One thing not working is the VFD. I can get the VFD to work, but it doesn't resume after the HTPC went into standby. This problem can't be fixed without a driver update, but it's unlikely that the case manufacturer or SoundGraph will still provide this support. I'm wondering if I can replace the VFD with something with something more robust.

Another problem is that MediaPortal resumes in a 800x600 screensize when the tv switches on. As a containment MediaPortal uses a delay at startup. This works if the HTPC resumes from standby at the same time as the tv is switched on. But it doesn't help when I switch from "Listen to music" mode (HTPC on, receiver on, tv off) back to "Watch TV" mode (HTPC on, receiver on, tv on). It seems the MP community is a bit stuck on getting the rootcause fixed.

Stuff that I still want to look into:

- Get BlueRay movies playing.

- Troubleshoot why some of the RadioTime stations are not working properly

- Try the X-factor skin again (new version released August 6th)

MP TV series (2)

A little over a year ago I reported about the MP TV series plugin and how it blew me away. Last week a new version was released and it's even better. It still makes extensive use of the TV series database at http://www.thetvdb.com/. Not only the series banners, screenshots and episode guides are used, but also the fanart graphics are used in the background. The user interface for configuration has been improved.

By now my TV series folders are standardized to the extent that I don't need to tweak the regular expressions for filename parsing anymore.

The first screenshot on this page shows the opening screen where you can select which series you want to watch. The second secreen shows the different season posters. The last one has the individual episodes for a particular series and season, including a screenshot and an episode guide.

Interestingly, this plugin project is hosted on Google Code, not on Sourceforge.

My weather in MediaPortal

Since a transfer to MediaPortal 1.0 requires a fresh new install, I'm revisiting a lot of settings that I haven't touched in a while. Among which the maps for My Weather. With many websites using unsupported formats for their weather maps, finding images that My Weather can display is a challenge. For instance, the .png files that are used by the dutch KNMI website and many other weather sites are not supported. But I found a number of close matches:

Satellite: http://www.sat24.com/images.php?country=nl
Temperature: http://www.teleweer.nl/common/data/nl_middag2.gif
UV Index: http://www.knmi.nl/waarschuwingen_en_verwachtingen/images/zonkracht/zonkracht_kaartje_dag0.gif
Winds: http://db.eurad.uni-koeln.de/prognose/data/aktuell/sto_cen_1h_movd0.gif
Humidity: http://icons-pe.wunderground.com/data/640x480/2xeu_rh.gif
Precipitation: http://www3.buienradar.nl/images.aspx?jaar=-3&soort=sp-loop

This also gave me an opportunity to make my first ever contribution to the MediaPortal wiki.

Last.fm

In the battle between the music communities Last.fm and Pandora, the choice is obvious in Europe: Since Pandora had to block service to anyone outside the Land of the Free in May 2007, the prize went to Last.fm.

Wikipedia gives a decent explanation of what Last.fm is and what it does, so I won't repeat that here. This month, Last.fm released a new web layout with a number of improvements. The Last.fm blog visitors are raising hell about the layout, but it has actually improved. With so many links and information, the pages used to have a tendency to get cluttered up. The new interface does a better job at that.

Now, about the auto-dj capabilities. I like to play my local music and not be dependent on the quality of the streams that Last.fm provides. The plugin available for MediaMonkey is trash. It's based completely off of Last.fm's recommendations. Typically, the recommendations are songs that the user hasn't played, so there's a big chance the recommendations aren't present in the local collection. The plugin fails to find a hit and defaults back to a favorite.

The MediaPortal plugin seems to do a better job. It really looks for songs similar to the songs played. Just playing "Hunting high and low" by A-ha results in a true 80s playlist, while "Ruby" by the Kaiser Chiefs gets me a playlist with recent Brit pop. Unfortunately, after a while some artists are played more and more often.

Part of the problem is that the auto-dj's use queries from last fm, but Last.fm doesn't really support the auto dj plugins. With all the data gathered by Last.fm, it should be possible to make a better guess of what song I want to hear next. I'd expect a setup page for configuring auto dj preferences integrated in Last.fm.

What I end up doing is just go to Last.fm, pick an artist and play the Music like... stream. Great fun, but anyone can do that, even if you don't have a profile at all. And then, what's the point in uploading data about every song I play?

Album Artist View

I've been blogging before about the Album Artist view in My Music. I found out that not all of my album artists were displaying correctly, so I had to sink some extra calories in it.

In general, I like to play music by album. And I want to select an album from a list of artists. The trick is in here: I don't like to have artists in that list that don't have full albums on my harddrive. Hence the definition of album artist. Every album on my harddrive has a single album artist. If the album is a compilation album, the album artist is "Various". If the album contains guest artists or duets, the artist of the particular song can be "Santana featuring Rob Thomas", the album artist is still just "Santana".

The problem is that "album artist" was never formally defined in the ID3 tag definition. So different programs use different solutions. I use MediaMonkey to organize and tag my music, which I would definitely recommend to anyone with more than two mp3's on his pc. MediaMonkey does work with an Album Artist field, and using a plugin called MagicNodes it's even possible to view the database by Album Artist. By meticulously tagging and renaming all the music on my harddrive, I should have my mp3's set up for correct display in MediaPortal.

The configuration screen in MediaPortal that's applicable here is the one for Music Database. The top box indicates where the music shares are that need to be scanned into the database. The first tick box will ensure artists like The Beatles will be listed under B not T. It's important that the tick box for "Treat tracks in an individual folder as an album" is checked, this eliminates the compilation album artists from the album artists list. For folders with mp3's by multiple artists the album artist will show as "various artists"
The two boxes below only affect the generation of thumbnails. I don't like the automatically generated thumbs for artists, so I switched that off. Then, for the database updating you can select to do a full update or only incremental. I found out that even the full update does not overwrite all of the database. If you really want a fresh start, you need to delete the databasefile itself. It's called MusicDatabaseV10.db3 and is located in the MediaPortal\database folder.

So far there's a couple of things I don't understand: I found out that there's still a couple of album artists that don't show up as such in MediaPortal. Nor can I find those albums back under various artists. And how does mediaportal distinguish between an album from B. B. King plus guests and a true compilation album? Does it use an album artist tag or rules to convert artist to album artist? The fact that the database scan uses folder locations seems to suggest the last. Also, I haven't found out when the Auto-update on changes in share comes into action.

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.

MP TV series

One of my favorite features in mediaportal is the tv-series support. Enjoying the tv-series you like, all you want, when you want, is absolutely great. But MediaPortal just adds a little user's joy to the excercise. The developers found out that somewhere on the internet, there's a community of tv enthusiasts collecting heaps of banners, episode guides and what not for every imaginable tv series. The community can be found at http://www.thetvdb.com/ and there is some beautiful stuff from dedicated fans out there. All of which is now neatly displayed through the MediaPortal TV Series plugin. The banners, episode guides and screenshots make picking the right episode a breeze. And MediaPortal remembers what episode you watched. It even hides episode guides of unwatched episode to prevent "spoilers".


Now, under MediaPortal 0.2.3 RC 3 there were some issues with the database and I never took the time to fix that, so I reinstalled the plugin when I had the final 0.2.3 release installed.

I downloaded the plugin v1.2.9 build 34660. It comes as a RAR and requires unzipping in the MediaPortal program folder. In the MediaPortal configuration tool an icon appears under plugins. After enabling the plugin, you can enter its configuration.

First you enter the location of the tv-series files. But then comes the tricky part. The filenames have to be parsed into the data base according to parsing rules. These rules extract properties like series and episode number from the filenames on the hard disk. This requires some level of organization in the tv series on your hard disk. The pre-programmed parsing rules work on most naming conventions, but not all on my harddisk. So, the choice was to do a lot of renaming, or edit the parsing rules.

The parsing rules come in two shapes: simple and regular expression. The simple expression proved too simple for my chaoticly named series collection. I basically had to make a rule for each series and each season and there were too many expressions to uniquely parse the filenames. So, I had to get familiar with regular expressions.

The overview and the tester on regexlib.com proved very helpful here, as well as wikipedia and this page. Eventually I found out that this parsing rule works best for me:

Apart from the parsing rule I also used string replacements, so that the characters _, [ and ] are removed from the filenames. When the parsing test shows your files are parsed correctly, it's time to hit "Start Import". The actual downloads may take a while. In the details tab you can check the data that's currently in the database. After closing the configuration and starting MediaPortal, the same data will be displayed through the My TV Series screen.

One more screenshot below to prove my point: The MP TV Series plugin looks neat!

Installing MediaPortal

Since the final, stable MediaPortal 0.2.3 release is out, I decided to do a fresh install and blog a couple of tips and tricks.

Installing or updating is pretty straightforward. I always check the instructions on the wiki, I noticed these change every now and then. I renamed the mediaportal folder and uninstalled MediaPortal with Control Panel -> Add/remove Programs.
Running the Setup exe-file, the installer first requires agreement to the GNU license under which MediaPortal is distributed. Then it asks to install the bundled MPEG-2 decoder filters, DScaler and Gabest MPA/MPV. I do, even though I installed these on previous installs as well. The next screens are to identify the installation folder and the start menu folder. Once that's complete, the actual install takes well under a minute. Finally, the closing screen has a checkbox for entering the Configuration tool. I unchecked this, because I first want to copy the old database files to the new installation.

Per the wiki instructions, I copied the following files to the new installation:
- The thumbs-folder. Although I deleted the folder with tv-series banners.
- The input-device mappings folder. Because I made some tweaks in how MediaPortal responds to the remote.
- The database-folder. Here I also deleted the TVSeries database.
- All XML-files in the main folder, except for a couple that I thought were used only with older plugins.

Skipping any configuration, I started MediaPortal. Somehow the configuration of the tv-card was lost, so in the configuration I re-added it and assigned all tv channels to it again. Yes, I still use the built-in tv stuff, I haven't tried the separate tv server yet. I also had to run the WebEPG grabber configuration again, as described in the previous post.

That's it, ready to rock and roll!

MediaPortal 2.3.0 RC3

A couple of weeks behind schedule, I've installed release candidate 3 of MediaPortal 0.2.3.0. The changes with respect to 0.2.2.0, build 13411, that I was using before, the changes are not that apparent. But there are some!

A long time annoyance with MediaPortal was how to best browse through my music. My music collection is arranged by album. So when looking for some tunes to play, I want to first pick an artist, then one of that artist's albums. Now in that list of artists, I only want to see the artists that actually have albums in my collection, not the artists that only appear in compilations. I found that in this version you can actually build a "view" that does this. See screenshot below for how it's done. Now, next on my wishlist is to have the albums sorted by year of release...

Another change is in the TV series plugin. It's supposed to look real nice, but I'm having some issues because the database is not compatible with the previous version.

I had to re-configure the Web EPG tv guide grabber. If you use digital tv, the tvguide information comes with the signal. If you uses analogue cable tv, like myself, the tvguide has to come from the internet. This grabber pulls the tv guide information from a website, like http://www.tvgids.nl/ for dutch users. It creates a personalized xml file with tv guide data that MediaPortal uses. Since version 0.2.2.0, the grabber that comes with the standard MediaPortal package is excellent. Previously, separate grabbers had to be downloaded to give satisfactory results. Most annoyingly, the station names in the grabber had to exactly match the station names in MediaPortal.

Now, all you have to do is run the Web EPG configuration tool. With the push of a button it gets all your channel names from the MediaPortal channel configuration. Each channel can easily be assigned to a channel in the program guide that the grabber downloads. You can even use different grabbers for each channel.

Once configured, all that's needed is to set the plugin configuration. The plugin is called WebEPG Grabber and in the configuration you can set the days that you want the grabber to run, as well as the time. The Web EPG configuration that's included in the actual MP configuration remains untouched.

The problem with the web based guide, is that the information is only as good as the information on the website.

Of course, by the time I'm done installing release candidate 3, the final 2.3.0 version was released.

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.