dinsdag 13 januari 2009

Proper Media Center

I've been watching TV on my pc for over 5 years now. First analogue, for the last couple years digital DVB-C. I've been looking since for an application to watch digital TV on my computer which actually lived up to the challenge. I've used several programs, some even failing to even detect my hardware (which has a 'universal' dba-driver installed) and among them not the smallest. Most of them managed though but felt short in features like time shifting or kept crashing regularly.

Even the Windows Media Center in my Vista Ultimate (for which I paid extra) fails to detect my card. It even fails to play any of my movies. In fact, it can only playback some mp3's and show some pictures so I wasn't using MC at all. At least until I acquired me a fancy Gyration remote, which has no configuration options at all but supports MC perfectly out of the box.

In my search I managed to get my video's working in MC using VistaCodecs but that broke a bunch of other stuff on my pc among which my previous TV app DVBViewer. It started looking for a replacement furiously and stumbled upon a marvelous open source application called MediaPortal.

MediaPortal supported both my TV card and my remote out of the box. It has a beautiful functional interface and plays all my media content properly. It has a nice EPG which is easily controllable using keyboard, mouse or remote. Timeshifting is nicely implemented and when recording it is even possible to watch a different channel at the same time (as long as it is on the same frequency, your tuner obviously can't tune two frequencies at a time).

It does has some minor drawbacks like switching to fullscreen or display which could be smoother, and I haven't got my HD channels working yet (probably because the VistaCodecs I installed messed up my config). But it is currently still in active development by over 60 people if I have to believe the sourgeforge stats. It also act as a tv-server out of the box, so you can watch from several clients on your network.

If anyone should be looking how to implement the full functionality of their Gyration or other remote, I've found a nice thread on the forum to do so, using EventGhost and other means to map keys. It is a very nice application to play your media content, especially if you have a remote. It is even opensource, so give it a try.