New Project
December 5th, 2005 by Ian
Yesterday morning I stumbled across a link for MediaPortal. It is open source software for turning a PC into a multi-media center for your living room. It is for playing music, watching videos, displaying pictures, watching/recording tv, and so much more. I want it mainly for it’s music and picture capabilities. We currently have an Audiotron in our living room for listening to mp3’s through the home stereo. I’ve been very happy with the Audiotron. The major drawback of it is that it can not use your tv to display the menu and song information. Instead it has a small LCD on the front of the unit. Even with that drawback, the Audiotron was still better than all the media players out on the market right now. So many of them require that all your files be stored on the media player. This doesn’t work for me since I keep all my files on a file server and I want to keep them there. Other players I’ve seen have had issues communicating over a network or require that software be running a “host” pc. Nothing met all my requirements until now.
MediaPortal appears to be a great piece of software. I downloaded yesterday on my pc to play around it with it. It has an amazing interface (very surprising for open source software) that is skinnable. It can pull music from anywhere on your network. And to improve performance it keeps an internal database of id3 tag info (something the Audiotron does and I love). It can browse by Genre, Album, Artist, Title, or any other attribute. You can even create your own search lists based off any id3 attribute.
The photo module is great. You can browse your photos and view slideshows. You can even play music while you are doing this. This will make showing our vacation pictures to friends and family much easier since everyone won’t be forced to squeeze around a computer screen.
MediaPortal also plays video files. This will be nice but nothing I will use often. I do have some music videos on my pc so it will be nice to watch those. But I won’t do it often. MediaPortal can also act as a DVR. I won’t be using the capability at all since we already have Tivo. I haven’t found anything to top Tivo 
Of course, one major plus is that it is open source. This means the software is totally free. Plus, anyone can create plugins for it. There are already a number of them out there. A couple of cool ones I saw - one to hook into iTunes (I’m hoping it lets you rate songs you are listening to) and one for grabbing weather info from the web and displaying it.
I say all of this, to tell you that my current project is to build a pc with MediaPortal and install it in our den. I bought the pc last night for $200 (so damn cheap!) and installed the software. I still need to get a high end video card and sound card. Probably the video card first since I need the s-out port. I can’t wait to get it all going!! I’ll let you know how it turns out…..
Hrmm…I foresee a parallel project happening over at EGB. I am frustrated with the lack of reliability of our little device. It would satisfy me - if it worked all the time. Lately, it has not worked at all. I had always hoped that Turtle Beach would come out with something that was wireless and a bit less expensive but now they have discontinued it. The idea of looking at vacation photos in the living room is good, too.
So another trip to Micro Center is in the planning? Woo hoo!!!