Your favorite media front end?

D

dexx

Limp Gawd
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Apr 12, 2002
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I'll soon have a HTPC up and running. It wont be used to capture video or watch TV. It wont be used to encode or transcode video. It wont be burning disks. What i will be using it for is watching DVDs, watching Divx movies (both locally stored and via network share), and listening to MP3s. I'd like a slick menu app to run at startup and be controllable via a remote control. The app would organise my media into a user friendly library.

What would you recommend to use as the media app?
 
Whichever one you like the best :p

It depends on what you expect, how you like organizing your media, how much tweaking you want to be able to do, how much configuration flexibility you want, etc. Any of them will support remotes. A majority of the options out there are either free of have fully functional trial periods, so have at them.

I like Meedio. Lots of others like MCE. Mediaportal is free. So is Myth.
 
I'm using Xlobby but prepare to feel lost if you try it out. It takes some getting use too, figuring out what does what and how to do this, etc.
 
Kinda of off topic, but i love Xbox Media Center for this task, i had an HTPC that i was using for a short while, which i ended up just turning into a media server instead and replaced it with and xbox with XBMC as media extenders on all my TV's in the house. If all you are doing is media playback this is a great way to go and is very easy to set up with either the xbox IR remote or many universial remotes. Obviously you are not going to be burning disks or doing upconversion or re-encoding with this setup, but it sounds like you were just looking for playback anyways
 
CrimandEvil said:
I'm using Xlobby but prepare to feel lost if you try it out. It takes some getting use too, figuring out what does what and how to do this, etc.
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I have *SO* wanted to use XLobby but, as you say, it's easy to get lost. Do you know of any good guides/tutorials for how to properly configure it. I've hit the Big G and not found anything.
 
Big fan of Meedio. It is pretty customizeable, but still very easy to use. Most of the work is done by the community in the form of plugins which are generally very easy to setup.

I just got a laptop that has MCE on it, but I haven't had too much time to play with it. Recently I have been looking for a way to streamline all of my emulators and games withing a frontend like Meedio or MCE. I think Gameex might work for me.
 
Recently I have been looking for a way to streamline all of my emulators and games withing a frontend like Meedio or MCE
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Search for posts by my username on the Meedio boards, I've written about how to do it within Meedio for Mame, Fusion, VisualBoy, Nesticle, Project64, and others. It's a pretty easy process to create Meedio libraries for the games, and pointing a library item to a specific emulator isn't that hard either. All you need for console emus is MyGames to create a library, and the GameMee plugin to find info (MyGames does it too, just not as well). For Mame, you need the mame importer plugin, XML2Mee, and whatever .dat files and screenshots you have for Mame. PM me here or there if you can't find anything.
 
From using MCE, mediaportal, and mythtv, i like meedio the best. It's simple enough to set up once and not really worry about again, and there're some great plug-ins out there.
 
Yet another vote for Meedio. I personally like SageTV for a PVR but as for it's "frontend" features, it pretty much blows. I haven't had a chance to play with MCE, but once I added Meedio to the HTPC the WAF (wife acceptance factor) went way up just because I could configure it to easily get to what she wanted. For example, she wanted movies seperated from TV episodes that we downloaded, so by setting up another library and organizing the file locations she can either select movies to pull up our small DVD collection, or TV Shows and get her Gilmore Girls fix.

The music library is what makes me really happy. I can't stand SageTV as a music player (and most SageTV users agree).

I will say that I have tried XLobby a little, but I just don't have a lot of time to work on figuring it all out. I will probably check out the link above sometime to see if I can get it work well since I am setting up a HPTC for work that they don't want to spend a lot of money on software for.
 
I like MCE a lot but you have to buy a whole OS but it works very well...

Free stuff I've tried. I like Mediaportal but it never seems stable and no tv guide build in. I'm currently using gbpvr and I like it a lot so far. Very stable and plenty of options with a option for tvguide set up.
 
the only one ive tried using was mce 2005, and i dont like it. its 2 slow and seems to be too picky on what it'll play. the front end is nice, but a nice frontend that doesnt do what u want is pretty useless. since so many have recommened meedio, i think ill give it a try.
 
I've been using Beyond TV and it's been pretty decent. Coupled with a firefly remote, it's a pretty competetive deal.
 
I have XP Pro installed, so I decided to try a few of the different ones. It came down to Meedio or XLobby. I really liked XLobby but for whatever reason, it crashes in my new build. Can't figure it out so I went with Meedio. I am almost done setting everything up, I like the ease of use of Meedio (compared to XLobby, which is very n00b-unfriendly, like me).
 
I would have to go with Mythtv, you can not go wrong with open source. It runs on low-end machine, I run mine on a old AMD Atholon 1ghz with 384MB ram let me see MCE do that! then to top it all off.... WEB INTERFACE! No matter where I am long as I can find the internet I can tell my myth to record a show.
 
I dont know if I need that with myth, but what does that do? And thats what I am running now, not going to run.
 
Xlobby is fricking sweet, their music setup can't be beat and its easy to use too. I use Sage for everything else because I can't get nvidia decoder and zoomplayer to work nicely.
 
I've been using Media Portal for a week or so now, and I think I'm going to stick with it permanently. Does everything I need it to do, and it looks very slick.
 
Currently playing around with Media Portal, not too bad but it's pretty buggy. I might consider switching over to it for less important things like music/video playback/Mame gaming/odd ball things but the included video player is a joke so bring your own (using Zoomplayer Pro).
 
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