XMBC, Boxee or Media Portal

Stoly

Supreme [H]ardness
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I'm building a HTPC mainly for playing movies. No Internet video streaming required.

Its Windows XP based, won't install Win7.

So which would you recommend of the three, or maybe another option.
 
windows 7 is something you should consider as it has so many codecs built. And media center in it is great.

Personally I use media browser in media center along with MPC-HC. Keeps my movies organized, gives me cover art, launches MPC-HC seamlessly and plays everything. Quick and easy and good quality. I have over 300 bluray rips working great.
 
windows 7 is something you should consider as it has so many codecs built. And media center in it is great.

Personally I use media browser in media center along with MPC-HC. Keeps my movies organized, gives me cover art, launches MPC-HC seamlessly and plays everything. Quick and easy and good quality. I have over 300 bluray rips working great.

Let me elaborate.

I'm building more a media player than a HTPC. I'm building it for my son's room, as I'm sick of cleaning DVDs + I want to play bluray rips. It needs an easy interface, something that my wife and kid can use. (and when I say wife and kid I really mean JUST THE WIFE)

Unfortuntately it seems there is no perfect solution. Media center + media browser comes close but if I use subtitles I loose hardware decoding. I think media portal is better if only because of hw decoding.

I tried MB+MPC-HC but when I play video I have to close MPC to get back to MB.
 
Go with Media Portal and a different skin for it if you can't go Win7.
 
I personally prefer XBMC anymore. I have had no issues running it on a Windows XP MCE PC. You really will just have to try and see what you like though. They all have their pros and cons.
 
Let me elaborate.

I'm building more a media player than a HTPC. I'm building it for my son's room, as I'm sick of cleaning DVDs + I want to play bluray rips. It needs an easy interface, something that my wife and kid can use. (and when I say wife and kid I really mean JUST THE WIFE)

Unfortuntately it seems there is no perfect solution. Media center + media browser comes close but if I use subtitles I loose hardware decoding. I think media portal is better if only because of hw decoding.

I tried MB+MPC-HC but when I play video I have to close MPC to get back to MB.

I have 2 HTPC's and one of them is for my kids and that's the software I use. 300+ bluray rips and counting. I have it setup to where MPC-HC closes automatically when playback ends or you press stop and it returns you to media browser.
This will help:
http://www.mediasmartserver.net/201...hc-as-your-video-player-in-wmc-media-browser/

And with MPC-HC you will get HA with subs.
Or if you re-encode as I do you can just build the subs directly in the image and not have to worry about losing HA.
 
Go with Mediaportal regardless of what OS you use. I'm using Windows 7 and prefer it way more than W7MC + Mediabrowser, which I tried using for about 6 months. Install Mediaportal, install the StreamedMP skin (which also installs plugins for managing movies/tv series w/ info + coverart) and you're set.
 
I use MediaPortal myself, but if it's only for video playback I'd recommend XBMC. The latest versions of XBMC include DirectShow support, and will use the codecs you have installed on your machine, although as I understand it it may need a bit of configuring. I think it's preconfigured for ffdshow-tryouts.

An alternative would be to use XBMCLive if it's not intended to be used for anything except playback. This is the simplest setup, and with a recentish nVidia card (or some Intel graphics) will require minimal CPU usage.
 
im currently using Boxee but fyi it does NOT work with BR rips if your rips are ISO's... just crashes the machine lol
 
I'll try MP, XBMC and Boxee this weekend. I've already used MP before so probably settle for it.
 
IIRC, neither XBMC or Boxee support hardware decoding in Windows XP. You have to use Vista, 7, or LInux for that. I use Boxee and its pretty easy to use.

Daniel
 
Since you are just playing stuff you already have ripped I think XBMC would be your best option. You can customize the menus to take out everything they wont use. You get your subtitles as well. You didn't specify the spec's of the system. Is this an atom powered box where you need DX hardware decoding?
 
im a boxee fan, i have over 200 blu ray rips I play through boxee and quality/performance is great, only quirks I have are the naming convention for some files but the newer updates its even easier to fix.
 
Since you are just playing stuff you already have ripped I think XBMC would be your best option. You can customize the menus to take out everything they wont use. You get your subtitles as well. You didn't specify the spec's of the system. Is this an atom powered box where you need DX hardware decoding?

Because of this thread I installed XBMC, but I can't for the life of me get my MCE remote working. Solution seems to be to custom code some XML configuration? Seems like something that should work out of the box no?

I also don't know how to get all the album art and DVD covers to display, can't seem to find the correct documentation to get the whole thing working.

I like the UI so it's a shame that I don't know how to get the rest of it working properly.
 
An MCE remote should just work out of the box I believe. It's been a while since I set mine up, but that seems to be the case.

Try the command 'dmesg | grep lirc'. You should see something like this if your IR receiver is detected and working:
Code:
[   24.542684] lirc_dev: IR Remote Control driver registered, major 61
[   24.544295] lirc_mceusb: Windows Media Center Edition USB IR Transceiver driver for LIRC 1.90
[   24.544297] lirc_mceusb: Daniel Melander <[email protected]>, Martin Blatter <[email protected]>, Dan Conti <[email protected]>
[   24.998728] lirc_dev: lirc_register_driver: sample_rate: 0
[   25.003733] lirc_mceusb[2]: Topseed Technology Corp. eHome Infrared Transceiver on usb4:2
[   25.003797] usbcore: registered new interface driver lirc_mceusb

If that looks okay, post the contents of the file '/etc/lirc/lircd.conf'.
 
An MCE remote should just work out of the box I believe. It's been a while since I set mine up, but that seems to be the case.

Try the command 'dmesg | grep lirc'. You should see something like this if your IR receiver is detected and working:
Code:
[   24.542684] lirc_dev: IR Remote Control driver registered, major 61
[   24.544295] lirc_mceusb: Windows Media Center Edition USB IR Transceiver driver for LIRC 1.90
[   24.544297] lirc_mceusb: Daniel Melander <[email protected]>, Martin Blatter <[email protected]>, Dan Conti <[email protected]>
[   24.998728] lirc_dev: lirc_register_driver: sample_rate: 0
[   25.003733] lirc_mceusb[2]: Topseed Technology Corp. eHome Infrared Transceiver on usb4:2
[   25.003797] usbcore: registered new interface driver lirc_mceusb

If that looks okay, post the contents of the file '/etc/lirc/lircd.conf'.

Grep? I'm running this on windows 7 :p

Anyways, the remote kind of works, except for the back button etc, Can't really navigate around the app correctly since I can't go backwards through the menues, I forget what other buttons do not work, but for example something like pause might not work etc. Theres nothing wrong with the remote, it works ine in Win7 Media center. I'll take a look at the conf when I find a chance, I don't have hours on end to spend configuring things though. I'd rather be relaxing and watching tv.
 
Because of this thread I installed XBMC, but I can't for the life of me get my MCE remote working. Solution seems to be to custom code some XML configuration? Seems like something that should work out of the box no?

I also don't know how to get all the album art and DVD covers to display, can't seem to find the correct documentation to get the whole thing working.

I like the UI so it's a shame that I don't know how to get the rest of it working properly.

XBMC, in yet another of it's moronic failings, doesn't support the MCE remote fully. It's only halfed assed which mean it's a total PITA to get working using something like EventGhost which is one of the many reason I tell people not to use it. It's a crappy app.

Oddly enough an MCE remotes is fully supported in XBMC under Linux.
 
I would go the route of XMBC for the sheer awesomeness of the UI and customization.

But others are easier.
 
XBMC, in yet another of it's moronic failings

It really wasn't designed to work well on Windows, and surely gets far less attention on that platform. I wouldn't call this a 'moronic failing', I'd call it using a less-suitable platform and having to live with the consequences.
 
XBMC, in yet another of it's moronic failings, doesn't support the MCE remote fully. It's only halfed assed which mean it's a total PITA to get working using something like EventGhost which is one of the many reason I tell people not to use it. It's a crappy app.

Oddly enough an MCE remotes is fully supported in XBMC under Linux.

So what would you recommend over win 7 media player? I'm tired of trying to get win7 media player to work with different audio codecs. If it works on WMP, you would think it would work in win7 media center but it does not.

When using XBMC it works for the most part, until I go into setting and then can't exit the screen unless I have a keyboard. It's super annoying but other than that it seems to work well. But having to use the keyboard is certainly a deal breaker.
 
I've had good luck with media browser and windows 7 personally... takes all of 3-5 minutes to setup hardware decoding and I've built 4-5 machines that use the same setup and access the same files off my server and none of the computers have issues with playback.

That and things like Netflix and Hulu integrated with WMC are nice too.
 
For movies, XBMC is simple. Install, choose your theme, tell it the folder your movies are in, set content to get the cover art. Enjoy movie. You can configure it to what ever you want but its default configuration works well.
 
If you're tired of W7MC and XBMC, use Mediaportal, better UI than XBMC and just as easy to setup as W7MC w/ more options.
 
Ok so XBMC just does not have a usable interface with an Microsft brand name remote. There seems to be allot of misinformation on getting it to work, hacking the registry etc. I have given up since I have wasted days and continue to get up to use the media player which kind of defeats the purpose. Some buttons on the remote work, but eventually I end up in a windows where I have to get up and hit the backspace key on the keyboard.

I installed mediaportal but it also does not seem to have the nice visualizations XBMC has out of the box. I also can not get it to open .iso files. I have added the extension and they show up in the list, however I get a failed to mount error when trying to play them.

So it does not seem like either of these will work for me and windows media center itself (Other than the poor interface) refuses to playback videos recorded in DTS, since I am not using SPDIF. I can seem to force it to use ffdshow.

So I still have not found a media center that works.
 
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Sucks for you. DTS plays just fine on mine with FFDShow (I don't use SDPIF) and ISOs are perfectly playable in both WMC and MP. You're doing it wrong is all I can tell. Do you even have daemon tools installed?
 
I installed mediaportal but it also does not seem to have the nice visualizations XBMC has out of the box. I also can not get it to open .iso files. I have added the extension and they show up in the list, however I get a failed to mount error when trying to play them.

Are you talking visualizations like for playing music, or the UI? If it's the latter, download StreamedMP, if it's the former, can't help you there as I don't play music on my HTPC. For playing ISOs, make sure you have Daemon Tools Lite installed, go into your Mediaportal Configuration and there should be a setting for mounting virtual drives and specifying where your DToolsLite.exe is, just point it to where you've install Daemon Tools and everything should work fine.
 
Are you talking visualizations like for playing music, or the UI? If it's the latter, download StreamedMP, if it's the former, can't help you there as I don't play music on my HTPC. For playing ISOs, make sure you have Daemon Tools Lite installed, go into your Mediaportal Configuration and there should be a setting for mounting virtual drives and specifying where your DToolsLite.exe is, just point it to where you've install Daemon Tools and everything should work fine.
I was referring to visualizations for playing music. I find the MovingPictures UI in Media-portal to be much better than XBMC's covers and fanart, with the exception of not being able to use any sort of folder organization. For example, not being able to keep ISO's in a seperate folder from MKV rips, or keeping non TV series types of content like comedy series in a sub-folder so as not to show a listing of the series mixed in with the rest of the movies.

I have deamon tools pro installed with the automount option selected, I also turned on automounting of DVD images in the media portal configuration. I am still getting the error "Sorry, failed to mount DVD image".

As far as I'm doing it wrong for Windows Medica Center, what exactly is there to do wrong? I simply do no get sound in some videos. Can you please specify how to override the default codecs and filters so that I can force it to play through ffdshow?

edit: The deamon Tools pro needed to point to a different exe than the lite version so I have it auto mounting ISO's now. I found a way to disable the TV, although I'm curious about getting media portal to work with an HDHR. I installed the HDHR (nothing connected to it yet) but I can't seem to figure out a way to configure the TV server. I only see an option to uninstall it. Also I seem to have a problem with media portal freezing up on me. Yet I'm not sure I want to switch back to XBMC because it can't do client server setups.
 
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I was referring to visualizations for playing music. I find the MovingPictures UI in Media-portal to be much better than XBMC's covers and fanart, with the exception of not being able to use any sort of folder organization. For example, not being able to keep ISO's in a seperate folder from MKV rips, or keeping non TV series types of content like comedy series in a sub-folder so as not to show a listing of the series mixed in with the rest of the movies.

I'm not quite sure I follow, I have everything in my collection organized just fine and Mediaportal recognizes everything. I've got a folder called Movies, with each movie having it's own subfolder, and I've got a folder called TV w/ each Series having it's own subfolder, with season subfolders inside that. You do know to use TVSeries to organize/pull data for the tv shows right? MovingPictures is for movies only. Both are installed with StreamedMP. You can set folder paths in both plugins, so I don't see why you couldn't have a folder for MKV rips and a folder for ISO's and have it work, unless you're talking about having all the ISO's (TV + Movies) grouped together and same for MKVs, in which case, I'd suggest a better form of organization.
 
I'm not quite sure I follow, I have everything in my collection organized just fine and Mediaportal recognizes everything. I've got a folder called Movies, with each movie having it's own subfolder, and I've got a folder called TV w/ each Series having it's own subfolder, with season subfolders inside that. You do know to use TVSeries to organize/pull data for the tv shows right? MovingPictures is for movies only. Both are installed with StreamedMP. You can set folder paths in both plugins, so I don't see why you couldn't have a folder for MKV rips and a folder for ISO's and have it work, unless you're talking about having all the ISO's (TV + Movies) grouped together and same for MKVs, in which case, I'd suggest a better form of organization.

I did not look into StreamedMP yet, I'm using a skin + those 2 plugins installed independently. I might check this out though since it may be a more tested/stable build than using the latest and greatest version of each.

I was talking about having a subfolder for ISO, MKV's and even older DIVX rips (for Older Movies). I like this form of organization, although it is certainly not going to work with Moving Pictures. That is ok though, since the UI makes up for it. I am finding Media Portal to be my favorite so far. XBMC would certainly be the easiest to setup but I'm not fond of hacking my registry to make the remote work, even if there is a script to automate this, it breaks it's use for all other apps. Especially not wile trying out various media centers that all support my MCE remote out of the box. XBMC does seem to be a bit superior for Music though, but I'm sure a nice plugin will come around for media portal eventually.
 
is there a way for media portal to default into moving pictures? if there's a way to disable the home screen even better.
 
IIRC, neither XBMC or Boxee support hardware decoding in Windows XP. You have to use Vista, 7, or LInux for that. I use Boxee and its pretty easy to use.

Daniel

Theres a XBMC fork which does include hardware decoding in Windows XP.
 
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