Microsoft Media Centre Edition 2005 ... or not?

[SteveCliff]

Ok, I'm in the final stages of building my 1st ever Home Theatre PC and have looked (and liked!) Microsoft's Media Centre Edition 2005.

I have heard though that there are a number of other alternatives.

Andbody got any links, or even better any real-life experience of the others that they'd care to voice an opinion on?

Thanks!!!

[5lab]

i like it, but it can be a bit slow and clunky at times. ya need a remote for it, but thats not much of a problem.. scan wi' yesen..

[Lee H]

I'll be the devils advocate here and say I actually like Media Centre from MS.

It just works - thats the reason why... I updated the drivers from hauppauge to support more tuners and now my rig ( in system specs ) spends 1/2 the time playing games and then is used to record from digital TV.

Many people complain about the MS format it records in, but it doesn't really bother me as they're all on a spare RAID 0 array gathering digital dust so to speak for when I need to watch them over again.

MCE is great with the new Xbox 360 and all other media extenders. It's just a shame DivX and XVid are not supported out of the box.

Im sure the other options out there are just as good, but rather than spend time researching and looking at them I took the easy route out and got the MCE2005 kit

[5lab]

i'd just add to that - the m$ mce keyboard is, in my opinion, a bit pap. could try harder..

[harlequin]

If you are willing to look at linux systems

Geexbox ..... http://www.geexbox.org/en/index.html
MythTv ....... http://www.mythtv.org/

Running on normal windows ......
ChrisTv ........ http://www.chris-tv.com/

[nichomach]

i'd just add to that - the m$ mce keyboard is, in my opinion, a bit pap. could try harder..

Agreed; we bought 4 and regretted it. The keyboard's OK enough if you like that hind of thing, but the stickpoint thingummajig for controlling the mouse pointer is AWFUL. You need King Kong-like strength to get the bugger to move at all, and when it does, it's hugely jerky.

If I might pimp for a moment, the Ceratech Saturn RF Wireless keyboard c/w built in optical trackball from MediaPC.tv works rather well; OK, it doesn't have the little green button, but the trackball's very usable, you don't need to maintain line of sight, and the range is great.

[jimborae]

....
MCE is great with the new Xbox 360 and all other media extenders. It's just a shame DivX and XVid are not supported out of the box.

Does you mean there is a way round this other than re-encoding the avi files to wmv??? Apologies for the thread hijack.

P.S. I use Mediacentre on my normal desktop machine (purely for hooking up to the 360) and I actually find it faster & less bloated than regular XP.

[nick_1]

I didn't see this mentioned above but GBPVR is quite good these days. I currently have it installed on my main pc to test out a TV card which didn't include any media center software. I actually use Media Center 2005 on my media center as its far easier to use with the media center remote but if you want to spend time configuring gbpvr you should be able to get something rather good. The range of gbpvr plugins are also impressive as well.

I hope that helps.

Nick

[Funkstar]

I've got the latest public beta of MediaPortal (0.20rc3) installed on my desktop. Not had a chance to play with it properly yet, just got my Media Center remote a few days ago. Also not got it tuned in etc.

It seems to recognise my Twinhan DVB-T card fine, and apparently can handle my Nebula DigiTV, but haven't tried it. Looks very good, and the menus are very responsive. Going to try and get it hokked up and working tomorrow. I'll try and remember to let you know how it goes

[bledd]

the only downsides i've found in MCE, is that you can't do a 'Play All' in videos section, and after a video has played, you get the option to delete it!

you can botch it a bit to get these things to work properly, but its far from perfect!

give media portal a try, its supposed to be good and they just released a new version

[johnny02004976]

I've got the latest public beta of MediaPortal (0.20rc3) installed on my desktop. Not had a chance to play with it properly yet, just got my Media Center remote a few days ago. Also not got it tuned in etc.

It seems to recognise my Twinhan DVB-T card fine, and apparently can handle my Nebula DigiTV, but haven't tried it. Looks very good, and the menus are very responsive. Going to try and get it hokked up and working tomorrow. I'll try and remember to let you know how it goes

any luck with getting that remote working with media portal yet - ive got the remote and the keyboard but not tried to configure, and i dont fancy buying MCE 05 just to use them

[Funkstar]

works like a charm.

Plugged it in, XP recognised it straight away without incident. Launched the Media Portal setup app and selected the EU MCE remote and it just worked.

My only problem is that i can't get a TV signal through in my bedroom, so can't get the system up and running properly until i run a cable point from my roof top arial

[johnny02004976]

excellent - i'll be hooking mine up this afternoon

[SteveCliff]

After having a read and a browse, I think I'll try this MediaPortal thing - although to be honest, apart from a couple of things, I quite like MCE2005!

Shame it doesn't allow me to sort out my large AVI collection in a neater way (I.E. some kind of 'watched' functionality and the ability to turn off thumbnails and go to a list view instead). Also want a simple folder view in the audio side - I have all my MP3's neatly arranged in z:/artist/album/track order but as of yet I haven't got all the MP3 tags sorted on them.