Software choice
It’s all very well having this nice hardware, but something was needed to bring it all together. Setting up a keyboard and mouse, and navigating around various windows apps just to watch TV or listen to music is pretty much a no no…
The obvious choice was the media centre built into Vista - I wrote this one off fairly soon on, as it didn’t sound like it supported satellite tv cards too well, EPG options were a bit American biased and it also struggled with HD formats… I did a little research, helped a lot by the list of applications at eirikso.com
I narrowed my choice down to two applications: GBPVR and MediaPortal. Both of these looked good- they were created by enthusiasts, seemed to be fairly regularly updated, had active forums… I installed both onto my existing desktop PC to take a look.
Of the two, GBPVR was initially easiest to get to grips with, it seemed a little simpler to set up. On further investigation I eventually decided to go with MediaPortal. To me, MediaPortal had a few advantages:
- The community (skinning/plugins/forums) seemed more active. This meant I stood a better chance of getting help where needed and also expanding the system.
- It’s open source. I’m not necessarily planning on contributing myself yet but as it’s a .NET C# solution, I can at least get under the skin of it when I want to, whether that’s just for interest or to work out why something doesn’t work!
- The configuration, although more complex looking at first glance, seems to offer more control over how things work.
- The TV Server being separated out into it’s own subsystem should in theory make things easier to work on, plus the possiblility of streaming tv to another room is opened up and so on.
So, MediaPortal it is. Will this be the right decision? Who knows, that’s half the fun! I downloaded the base release and the latest SVN build (I knew I needed at least one of the more recent SVN’s to fix a problem with the weather plugin, so figured I’d just get the latest one…) and set about the installation.
