This is kind of a follow up from yesterday’s Pinnacle HDTV USB device. I know Pinnacle includes some free PVR software, but those kind of bundled PVR software packages don’t usually measure up. I’ve mentioned the commercial PVR software BeyondTV before - and I am a fan. But I thought I would mention another PVR software project that’s open source. MediaPortal looks like a promising app that I intend to review at some point in the near future. But MediaPortal is much more than just PVR software, it functions as, well, a media portal. It’s intended to allow you to peruse your entire media collection.
Let’s run down on the features:
General
Create your own skins, or choose one of the available skins!
MediaPortal can easily be extended with extra plugins
You decide which keys you want to use for which actions
Internal support for several remote control (streamzap, MCE, redeye, winlirc, hauppauge, FireDTV)
Windowed and fullscreen support
My TV
Supports analog TV, DVB-C, DVB-T, DVB-S and ATSC
HDTV and AC3 support
Support for multiple tuners
Record, watch, and timeshift Live TV
Advanced recording scheduler:
- Record once
- Record now
- Daily o Weekly
- Weekdays (Mon-Fri)
- Every time a program appears on this TV channel
Timeshifting,Watch, Pause, Rewind, FF, RW Live TV
Advanced recording management:
- Handle conflicts
- Set recording priorities
- Quality settings / recording
- Transcode to WMD, XVID or MPG
- Diskmanagement auto deletes old and/or watched recordings
TVGuide:
- Grab DVB-EPG & MHW-EPG directly for DVB
- Supports XMLTV
- Colors for genres
TV Guide search
TV Channel grouping
Supports over > 10000 channels
Auto channel tuning
Normal OSD (On Screen Display during movies/tv)
Special ZAP OSD (Shows description of what is playing currently on TV)
Support for Teletext
Standby control to put your HTPC sleeping. It will awake when there a recording needs to start
My Video / MyDVD
Play any movie your PC has a codec for (divx, mpeg, matroska,…)
All your movies will be stored in MediaPortal’s video database
View your movies by actors, genres, year, title
Sort your movies by actors, genres, year, rating
Automatically retrieves video art & info from IMDB
Stacking/unstacking if your movie consists of multiple files
Internal DVD player with menu’s (you can also use an external DVD player)
Zoom in/out, rotate pictures (rotation is remembered next time)
Pause, previous/next picture
Delete picture(s)
Background music, either songs from my music, or radio from my radio
Auto thumbnail generation
Sort in Name, Date, Size
View in List, Icon or Big Icon display
Ken Burns effect slideshow
Filmstrip view
My Music
View your music by artists, albums, genres, top100 or plain songs
Sort your music in many ways like tracks, genre, filesize, artists, album,…
Use visualisations from Windows ?Media Player 10
Load, create & save playlists (.m3u, .pls, .b4u)
Automaticlly gets album art & info for all your albums
Automaticlly gets artist art & info for all your artists
View by list, icons, and big icons
Shuffle, repeat, FF, RW, pause,…
Music ratings
Favorites
Party shuffle mode
Search music for specific songs
Display all your favorite songs in one screen
Utilize Winamp, Foobar or iTunes plugins for music playback
My Radio
Listen to your favorite radio stations (FM, DVB or internet stream)
Auto tuning (FM)
Logo’s for each radio station (manual process)
Supply a friendly name for each radio station
Internet radio station streaming (ASX or Shoutcast)
Support for external radio tuner applications
Auto start listening to your selected radio station when MediaPortal starts
My weather
Show the latest weather information
Support for multiple cities
Current temperature, 3 Day Forecast
Temperature (in degrees C/F)
UV Index, Humity (%), Wind (mph/kph), etc
Support for live images from internet, like:
- Satellite images
- Temperature images
- UV Index images
- Winds images
- Humidity images
- Precipitation images
More features!
Launching external programs like:
- Games
- Emulators
- Email application
- Internet Browser
- IRC client
Burner let’s you burn all type of files and folders directly to CD/DVD from within the MediaPortal interface
Showing RSS news feeds
Read and send mail within MediaPortal
Monitor computer hardware:
- CPU temperature
- Motherboard Temperature
- Hard disk Temperature
- Used Memory
- Used Virtual Memory
- etc
Allow the PC automatically go to standby/hibernation and wakes it when there is a scheduled recording! Just like a real VCR!
Has different alarm features
You can even play included games like Tetris or Sudoku!
And it doesn’t stop there. There are various plugins, extensions, skins, etc to add to the MediaPortal. And because it’s open source, you can expect software improvements and additions in the future.
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my only knock is that it appears to only run on windows. be nice if it had linux support.