Ever since I built a PC to connect to the living room TV, I have been looking for a simple way to use it for traditional home entertainment. Although I can stream MP3s, videos and photos across our home network to this PC, it’s just a little bit too complicated for the rest of my family to use. Whilst reading the Tivo forum recently, I found a reference to an open source project called Mediaportal.
Mediaport is a port of XBMC to the Windows desktop platform. It runs on Windows 2000 and XP and enables you to play music, view pictures, play videos and DVDs, control a realtime TV capture card and check your local weather forecast all from a really simple to use interface. The interface is so simple it can be controlled from a remote control.
It is very early days for this project; software updates appear to be released almost daily, but the system is remarkably stable and provides most of the functionality I need plus a few things I hadn’t really considered before. Being open source and hosted on Sourceforce anyone can download and recompile the source code. It is apparently written in C# and .Net.
Features and functions : 8
The essential things for me were music (MP3s), images (jpg) and videos (mpg, divx, xvid). The built-in player in Mediaportal is Windows Media Player 9, which thanks to downloadable codecs can be set up to play practically any format you like. If I had a TV capture card I could watch TV in real time through Mediaportal with the benefit of a full electronic program guide and Tivo-like PVR functions. The TV and PVR feature is a bonus and I’m now seriously considering buying a capture card to take advantage of this feature (watch this space!). The weather feature is a bit of a gimmick but it’s very nicely presented and I can imagine it’s something my wife would use all time. The only things it doesn’t do which are things that I do use that PC for are email and web browsing. But to be honest the they wouldn’t make much sense in Mediaportal’s simplified UI and I’m happy to fire up Explorer or Mozilla Thunderbird directly from Windows when I want these applications. Overall, the features that are in Mediaportal today cover all the basics that I need very well. Some more advanced features I’d really like (being able to play my whole music collection on random shuffle) are missing, however I think this is simply because the project is in it’s early stages. If the project carries on like this I fully expect it will score a 10 in 6 months time !
Ease of use : 9
Installation was relatively straight forward once I had downloaded and installed DirectX 9 and the .Net Framework from Microsoft’s web site. Once running it was very simple to configure Mediaportal to pull files across the network from my main PC upstairs. Operation is very simple, with very clear menus and nice big buttons. I’m sure my wife could work it. At the moment I’m still using it with my wireless querty keyboard with built-in mouse, I am definitely going to work on having it controllable by a regular remote control then I’m sure even my Mother could use it !
Looks and style : 9
Although you can download and additional skins, the default Mediaportal skin is perfectly adequate and will do me fine. The colours and graphics are easy on the eye and the buttons and controls easy to operate.
Build quality : 9
Considering this is a very new project it is remarkably stable. The only time I managed to crash it was when I tried to run it using an unprivileged Windows XP user account.
Value for money : 10
So far it’s free – you can’t get better value for money than that !
Day-to-day impact : 9
When ever I use my PC-under-the-TV, this is the interface I use.
Overall Rating : 90%
This project has me so excited I am seriously considering learning C# and offering to help with the project!
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