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HTPC Software advice sought

D

dommer

Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 16, 2004
Messages
81
I can't seem to find an all-around solution for HTPC software which will work well for me without an insane amount of manual labor. I'm looking for suggestions on how you would proceed. What I have:

1)A large collection of mp3's garnered from ripping my own music, purchasing on iTunes and Amazon, copied from friends, and downloaded from a million other sources with no coherent naming scheme.

2)A large collection of movies and TV shows, some downloaded, some ripped from disc, some recorded live, once again, a million naming schemes, a dozen formats, all intermingled.

3)A single tv tuner, and I want to be able to view it along with netflix streaming and hulu, etc.

4)Homemade HTPC with windows 7 installed on it.

It seems like nothing beats Media Monkey for showing a music collection, but it stinks out loud on a TV 10 feet away. Windows Media Center with MediaBrowser does a decent job with the movies, but it's hampered by it not being good with many video formats and the music browser doesn't pick up on a lot of the metadata that MediaMonkey seems good about. The available metadata search systems look like they aren't very good for Media Center. XBMC seems to work well for the movie end of things especially, but not for music, at least what I can tell. I want a slick jukebox-like interface for music as well.

I know, I know, I want it all. Does anyone have any advice?
 
This is interesting, I'm building a HTPC so I just wanted to sub this thread to see what comes up.. what remote are you using? Is it necessary to have a keyboard/mouse?
 
I don't know about it picking up metadata, but I still really like mediabrowser for all my media. All my music is already tagged and organized, so I don't really worry about needing it to download stuff to organize all that. Plus, for movies it really can't be beat, especially when combined with media center master for automatic metadata fetching
 
Sounds like, perhaps not what you want to hear, but the best option may very well be sitting down one weekend (or a couple weekends) and moving movies into specifically named folders, organizing MP3s, adding meta data, etc. There are tools out there to help with batch renaming, and I used a feature in FooBar 2000 in conjunction with one of the open source music database to help add appropriate meta data to my MP3s a few years back. Yeah, it's a lot of work, but with a better organized media library, you may have better software solutions. I don't think there is really one solution that would work with your conditions. So change the condition of your library, and your options open up. Just my 2 cents.
 
xrintrahx said:
Sounds like, perhaps not what you want to hear, but the best option may very well be sitting down one weekend (or a couple weekends) and moving movies into specifically named folders, organizing MP3s, adding meta data, etc. There are tools out there to help with batch renaming, and I used a feature in FooBar 2000 in conjunction with one of the open source music database to help add appropriate meta data to my MP3s a few years back. Yeah, it's a lot of work, but with a better organized media library, you may have better software solutions. I don't think there is really one solution that would work with your conditions. So change the condition of your library, and your options open up. Just my 2 cents.
Click to expand...
I actually could use a new technique for manual renaming and stuff. Whats the best way?
 
I like mediaportal but it's really complicated and was a giant pain in the butt to set up and get working properly.
 
cant believe it hastn been said......XBMC would work great....mass codec support, have yet to come accross meta data it cannot read
 
InternationalHat said:
I like mediaportal but it's really complicated and was a giant pain in the butt to set up and get working properly.
Click to expand...

How so? I find it pretty simple and straight forward to get running. It definitely used to be a pain in the ass to setup, but not so much anymore.

I second the idea of sitting down and organizing everything, you'll thank yourself later. Use something like Ember Media Manager to help pull metadata, rename, resort, etc. to get everything organized. Then download and install Mediaportal and StreamedMP Plugin. I haven't really used Mediaportal for music, but I know that it works.
 
W.Feather said:
cant believe it hastn been said......XBMC would work great....mass codec support, have yet to come accross meta data it cannot read
Click to expand...
OP already said he tried XMBC and didn't like it.

As for codec support in WMC, just use Media Browswer and set MPC-HC as an external player for all formats that WMC doesn't do well itself. That takes care of all the video problems. With ffdshow you can even use it to bitstream dts-ma and trueHD streams (if you're into that kind of thing). Plus, you get the tuner support and guide of WMC, which I find to be very good.
 
_cashel said:
How so? I find it pretty simple and straight forward to get running. It definitely used to be a pain in the ass to setup, but not so much anymore.

I second the idea of sitting down and organizing everything, you'll thank yourself later. Use something like Ember Media Manager to help pull metadata, rename, resort, etc. to get everything organized. Then download and install Mediaportal and StreamedMP Plugin. I haven't really used Mediaportal for music, but I know that it works.
Click to expand...


The music setup is somewhat difficult and ugly compared to everything else in StreamedMP(which I use too), I had trouble with the remote setup since I'm using XP, and sleep states tend to play havoc on your output devices if you're using different ones for different things. Some of this is less MediaPortal and more HTPC use in general, but it's still not "easy" to get it to just work for normal people.
 
I have tried a lot of options with my HTPC from linux to windows, etc... and the best solution I have found so far is Boxee.

It's free, I can stream music pictures and video off my network, it categorizes everything and adds cover art on its own, I can stream from websites, it works with netflix and pandora, and the interface is beautiful and simple to use.

You might have to use something else for watching live TV, but if you load up Boxee and another software for TV on top of windows 7 you would have a great setup.
 
I skipped to the bottom, so I apologize if this has already been posted...

WMC with "My Movies" will take care of all this minus the metadata for mp3's.
 
Well, if you have a little patience... I am working on a program that will do everything you suggested and more.

These are two very old screen grabs of an extreme alpha stage. I am in beta for many of the plugins and it is about to be released. The movies, weather, netflix, facebook, and tv shows plugins are almost ready. All of the plugins have been designed specifically to be used from the couch. Also, the program (MMC) has been developed so that any developer can easily create extra plugins for it.

For your movies, the program will automatically download the info (EVERYTHING including dvd cover) from the imdb.

As I said, if you can be patient. It is coming. Here's a preview!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgISEeajajE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DaNyG3EUjs

Anyone interested in beta testing or development?
 
InternationalHat said:
The music setup is somewhat difficult and ugly compared to everything else in StreamedMP(which I use too), I had trouble with the remote setup since I'm using XP, and sleep states tend to play havoc on your output devices if you're using different ones for different things. Some of this is less MediaPortal and more HTPC use in general, but it's still not "easy" to get it to just work for normal people.
Click to expand...

That's a shame about the music, the rest of the plugin is so beautiful and easy to use. I agree with the XP + Remote bit though, I never could get that working reliably. It just works in Windows 7 though.
 
Haven't started on a recording plugin yet. Trying to get the basics first and then continue from there. : )
 
I'm currently looking into rebuilding my HTPC's interface. I've been using Windows 7 MCE and it's been great. But when you've got 900 movies HD/DVD digital copies WMCE tends to lag quite a bit while browsing those media files over the network (Gigabit network). So each time I want to go watch a movie, it refreshes the list, which of course takes a bit. So I've heard MediaPortal is a bit better at managing media for future browsing.

XMBC is highly reviewed by people, but the biggest setback is that they don't support TV yet. Otherwise it seems to get rave reviews.

I've used MyMovies, and fine it to be frustrating from time to time because it will get a lot of movies wrong and change the meta data and cover art. So it takes some time to sit down and alter those movies. Especially when I've already grabbed cover art for almost every single movie.

Lastly, I like MCEBuddy for commercial skipping/deleting. It's a nice little app that you can set to run at specific times that you aren't using your HTPC to convert/cut your TV show recordings, then move them to a specific folder and delete the original.

But right now I'm spending a lot of time digging into MediaPortal
 
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