Linux Media Centre Edition was released on the 15th of March. There's a video comparison between LinuxMCE and WindowsMCE, and while it may be fairly biased (since it's made by the LMCE guy - he sounds pretty damned smug in the video), LMCE still looked to be all over WMCE as far as ease of use, intelligence and among other things, looks go.

For a free, open source solution to your home entertainment/spare media PC needs, it certainly looks pretty decent. The install process might seem a bit convoluted (there's a whole three parts to it!).

It needs Ubuntu 6.10 installed first which you can get from official mirrors here. Then there's LMCE itself which you can find on the list of mirrors here. And then (strangley enough) you'll need the installer, which you can find here (or also on some of the mirror sites).

Now all we need is someone local to give it a crack and let us know what it's really like. Any volunteers?

I've been bumbling around trying to get MythTV working on my Ubuntu box for the last few weeks. To be fair, I only invest like 30 mins here and there, and it's only partially working. Would be interested in giving this a shot.

Edit: Having a quick look on the site, it seems that some of it is actually built on MythTV, so I'm sold. I'll grab it tonight.

last edited by N-Dude at 21:41:26 26/Mar/07

Or you could just use windows and Media Portal which is also open source, looks kind of like windows MCE and has a variety of pugins to grab EPG guides, and do all sorts of crap. It also uses the FFDShow library (needs installing, not built in) so MediaPortal + FFDShow = media box that plays pretty much everything on an OS familiar to people not willing to install linux just to get a free media box.

The guy should have had someone else do the video for him. How about that overreactive "wooooahhhhhhhh where did all my media go???" when he's bagging WindowsMCE.

With a tone like his, he should have just presented the facts and kept his pasty white boring comments to himself.

damn - that's some nice work...

gonna give this a go. would be good to see some kind of knoppix/geexbox/erm live cd version for techies to test hardware with :)

With a tone like his, he should have just presented the facts and kept his pasty white boring comments to himself.

Yes, focus on the presentation rather than the content. That's a good way to look at things.

haha, only 5years behind ms - and it looks so pants! vista mce owns

haha, only 5years behind ms - and it looks so pants! vista mce owns

What's pants, good or bad?

your pants or mine?

Um, MythTV was busting up the home media scene long before MCE was a thought. XBMC+MythTV is *THE* pants (possibly denim ones).

Until MCE embraces modern media formats other than MS-proprietary ones it will continue to be s***. They need to re-evaluate the priority they put on protecting content, and let users actually use it - afterall that's what a media centre is meant to be all about.

vista mce owns

And how much is that license setting you back, for a mere media box?

last edited by parabol at 00:28:07 28/Mar/07

not as much as a ps3 lol