Media Centre Solution

[Acid0]

All the media centre gurus here I need some help.

I am currently using media portal and it catered for all my needs up until now.

My only gripe I have is that media portal cant use multiple drives i.e. C:\ and D:\ and E:\
because my collection is growing and my one hard drive does not support it anymore

Currently you can only setup it for one drive and thats it.
They have a plugin called Mving Pictures and that issuppose to work for multiple drives but as far as I know it will then not organise your media but just pool it together.

What I need is the following.
1. A media centre that works with a IR remote.
2. Will change fonts or colours to notify me that the current episode or
movie have been watched
3. Support multiple drives but still keep catagories together i.e. Tv shows in one folder under their respected folders and movies separately under their own folders.

Is there something out there that I can have a look

 

[Happy Camper]

Mythtv, linux based though.

 

[s0lar]

i am happy with XBMC. You can "stripe" content across drives.

 

[Hemps]

XBMC.org fir windows, linux etc

http://xbmc.org/skins/

Check it out, have not seen anything that comes close to as many functions and skin arrangement.

 

[erasma]

Windows Media Center & mediabrowser plug in!

this stuff is still so mix & match to get it to work as one wants!

I am on PC 3 & many Video & sound cards!! one does this & the other does not then there are players which play some of this & not some of that!! I real nightmare!

 

[erasma]

XBMC does not support some cool hardware features of our graphics & sound cards!

it's okay if you just want to watch a movie don't expect to be able to stream HD audio using it

 

[Hemps]

The guys over at xbmc are integrating hd streaming into it, just at alpha stage, I tried Star Trek mkv dts 8.6GBS and it struggled to play it but normal HD tv Rips, it's the business.
Have to use VLC for very large files over 6GB.

 

[Hemps]

Nice thing with xbmc is you can program it to use external software like other players vlc etc.
In those players you can change settings for video cards etc.
I'll have not set it up yet, like xbmc interface better than vlc etc and definately better than windows media centre

 

[werner]

content removed

 

[mjwitter]

Yeah, mounting drives to a folder is how you do it in linux anyway...

 

[nephelyn]

Windows Media Center & mediabrowser plug in!

I second MB, easy enough to setup, uses virtual (pooled) folders, works with std remote and all actually, has play state, even resume. But like all it has its problems.

 

[Acid0]

Thanks alot for all the help
I will investigate the folder mapping first then let you know if that worked.

 

[Acid0]

Okay just a headsup

Mounting a drive into a folder works perfectly with Media portal.
Thus if you need more hdd just map it into the current media folder you have for Media Portal

 

[werner]

content removed

 

[d0b33]

Mythtv is stable and free tv tuner and media center linux solution, the latest mythbuntu is easy to setup, Moovida is another linux solution(windows version too), no tv tuner support though.

7 media center performs poorly with my tv tuner card but it's not that bad, not sure about other windows solutions.

I'm going to be setting up eyetv and frontrow on my macbook, I think this is going to be a nice solution for me.