i've finally decided to organise my movies tv shows music and photos and i started using xbmc for windows.. but now i have a library problem and i'm wondering if there are other better mcware which will run under windows easily.. ie not mythtv etc

what do you ppl use?

wmp

Tried MediaPortal?

you given any thought to running mythtv

We use mythtv for recordings and play back. Simple file structure works well :)

I'm a big fan of Media Center (especially Win7) so I use media browser withing Media Center. Media Browser is a fairly simple xml based option but it looks very nice in Media Center. Open Media Library is also a good option, it runs an SQL backend so should be more robust than XML.

There's a couple of third party external windows apps designed for grooming your xbmc library.

+1 to MediaPortal

-1 to XBMC <-- dunno what people see in that, pretty ordinary and no TV support = no media centre

my experience with mediaportal was terrible, clunky and slow and to configure it you had to run some other horrible clunky slow piece of software, save the settings (wait for it to lag away for 30-60 seconds or more) and then restart media portal if I recall correctly

for me xbmc wins by far, it's fast, functional and since I couldn't care less if australian fta tv dropped off the face of the earth I don't mind it not supporting tv (?)

Yeh, XBMC's lack of tuner support only matters if you care about FTA.

The out of the box support for TV show, umm, ... Linux ISOs ... is pretty awesome. Also With XBMC Remote I can use my iPhone as a wi-fi remote control, which is 100% the f***ing ducks nuts.

last edited by Hogfather at 08:32:00 30/Sep/09

Yeah MediaPortal does have some stupid s***. The TV Server is just unnecessarily separated for most home setups. And setup is never much fun - always f***ing around to remember how to add a new user to MSSQL Express before remembering, oh, that's right, you need to download ANOTHER bit of management software from Microsoft to do it.

And yeah, closing setup is laggy as all hell in MediaPortal Configuration and the TV Server Configuration.

But once it's sorted it's a good app.

Yeah, I care about FTA. Bundesliga is on OneHD now. Global Village on SBS, RAGE and Good Game on ABC - there are enough good shows on FTA to want to watch/record.

Most of the ABC s*** (the only stuff worth worrying about for FTA) is on iView anyway Pinko.

I don't know what Media Portal is like nowadays but I used to use it back before 1.0 came out it was winrar.

I prefer XBMC over Mediaportal, it used to suck because their internal h264 codec sucked but it's improved alot with each release. It's nice and fast and you can get some nice skins for it too. Only downside is not being able to use your own codecs but it supports and handles anything I've thrown at it so it's no big deal. Never tried Media Center although alot of people seem to like it.

I've used MythTV, XBMC, MediaPortal, GBPVR and SageTV but nothing beats Win7 MCE (with Media Browser). It is the best media software going these days. Easy to setup, easy to use, does it all and looks pretty nice as well.

Plex

you can run it on intel hardware

Could also try boxee a mate of mine (apple-whore) raves about it. Myself its either mythtv or mce2005 mostly because I like the interface for the music library in mce2005

Just plain hate the win7 interface don't know why I just do

well i got xbmc working again..

one last question how can i add my own custome images to the library?

What do people use for a DLNA server on windows ?

Looks like xbmc can act as a server, I'll try that. Thanks me.

last edited by natslovR at 17:27:48 30/Sep/09

iTunes

Boxee is great if you use Linux fairly regularly (enough to have it installed as a secondary boot partition or standalone) It's not much chop from within a VM: needs accelerated drivers on a native install for full eye candy effect.

DLNA server I use the one built into my ns4300 nas