Say adios to the Windows Media Center software

Nikhil Dev | December 22, 2006 | 5:05 pm

So what do people do when microsoft tries to charge you a few extra bucks for the media center software? Well, people make an alternative thenselves and distribute it for free. That is how you kick Microsoft’s ass. As usual I was running through several software that allow all the media center features into one package and above which is free. Hit upon this amazing thing called Media portal which gives it all for free.

official download site: http://www.team-mediaportal.com

MediaPortal Features

General

Create your own skins, or choose one of the available skins!
MediaPortal can easily be extended with extra plugins
You decide which keys you want to use for which actions
Internal support for several remote control (streamzap, MCE, redeye, winlirc, hauppauge, FireDTV)
Windowed and fullscreen support

My TV

Supports analog TV, DVB-C, DVB-T, DVB-S and ATSC
HDTV and AC3 support
Support for multiple tuners
Record, watch, and timeshift Live TV
Advanced recording scheduler:
- Record once
- Record now
- Daily o Weekly
- Weekdays (Mon-Fri)
- Every time a program appears on this TV channel
Timeshifting,Watch, Pause, Rewind, FF, RW Live TV
Advanced recording management:
- Handle conflicts
- Set recording priorities
- Quality settings / recording
- Transcode to WMD, XVID or MPG
- Diskmanagement auto deletes old and/or watched recordings
TVGuide:
- Grab DVB-EPG & MHW-EPG directly for DVB
- Supports XMLTV
- Colors for genres
TV Guide search
TV Channel grouping
Supports over > 10000 channels
Auto channel tuning
Normal OSD (On Screen Display during movies/tv)
Special ZAP OSD (Shows description of what is playing currently on TV)
Support for Teletext
Standby control to put your HTPC sleeping. It will awake when there a recording needs to start

My Video / MyDVD

Play any movie your PC has a codec for (divx, mpeg, matroska,…)
All your movies will be stored in MediaPortal’s video database
View your movies by actors, genres, year, title
Sort your movies by actors, genres, year, rating
Automatically retrieves video art & info from IMDB
Stacking/unstacking if your movie consists of multiple files
Internal DVD player with menu’s (you can also use an external DVD player)
On Screen Display (OSD) for: Pause, Rewind, FastForward, Stop, Mute, Bookmarks, Switching Audio Streams/Subtitle languages…
Resume from playback on next play

My Pictures

Watch your pictures/photos
Slideshow support with nice transitions
Zoom in/out, rotate pictures (rotation is remembered next time)
Pause, previous/next picture
Delete picture(s)
Background music, either songs from my music, or radio from my radio
Auto thumbnail generation
Sort in Name, Date, Size
View in List, Icon or Big Icon display
Ken Burns effect slideshow
Filmstrip view

My Music

View your music by artists, albums, genres, top100 or plain songs
Sort your music in many ways like tracks, genre, filesize, artists, album,…
Use visualisations from Windows ?Media Player 10
Load, create & save playlists (.m3u, .pls, .b4u)
Automaticlly gets album art & info for all your albums
Automaticlly gets artist art & info for all your artists
View by list, icons, and big icons
Shuffle, repeat, FF, RW, pause,…
Music ratings
Favorites
Party shuffle mode
Search music for specific songs
Display all your favorite songs in one screen
Utilize Winamp, Foobar or iTunes plugins for music playback

My Radio

Listen to your favorite radio stations (FM, DVB or internet stream)
Auto tuning (FM)
Logo’s for each radio station (manual process)
Supply a friendly name for each radio station
Internet radio station streaming (ASX or Shoutcast)
Support for external radio tuner applications
Auto start listening to your selected radio station when MediaPortal starts

My weather

Show the latest weather information
Support for multiple cities
Current temperature, 3 Day Forecast
Temperature (in degrees C/F)
UV Index, Humity (%), Wind (mph/kph), etc
Support for live images from internet, like:
- Satellite images
- Temperature images
- UV Index images
- Winds images
- Humidity images
- Precipitation images

More features!

Launching external programs like:
- Games
- Emulators
- Email application
- Internet Browser
- IRC client
Burner let’s you burn all type of files and folders directly to CD/DVD from within the MediaPortal interface
Showing RSS news feeds
Read and send mail within MediaPortal
Monitor computer hardware:
- CPU temperature
- Motherboard Temperature
- Hard disk Temperature
- Used Memory
- Used Virtual Memory
- etc
Allow the PC automatically go to standby/hibernation and wakes it when there is a scheduled recording! Just like a real VCR!
Has different alarm features
You can even play included games like Tetris or Sudoku!