MediaPortal: Free Replacement for Windows Media Center

MediaPortal is a free and open source software that is an effective replacement for Windows Media Center. If you have a Windows edition that does not comes with Media Center, you can use MediaPortal to add Media Center functionality. MediaPortal  allows you to listen to your favorite music and radio stations; watch and store your videos and DVDs; view, schedule and record live TV as a digital video recorder; and much, much more.  On top of that, MediaPortal looks so beautiful that it is hard to believe that it is completely free.

Sponsored Links

Earlier I had a laptop with Windows XP Media Center edition. However, my other laptop does not have that, and I really miss that feature. So, I tried to see if there is some other free software that can add Media Center like functionality to my Windows PC. I was reading Carol’s blog, and found that she had reviewed MediaPortal. This seems like the solution I was looking for. However, as I started reading features of MediaPortal, I was quite surprised with breadth of the functionality that MediaPortal provides.

MediaPortal provides a one stop solution for all your media needs. This free and open source software integrates all the features that you might need to have a fully media capable PC.

Here are some of the features of MediaPortal

(these features have been quoted from MediaPortal website):

MediaPortal MY TV Features:

• Supports analog TV, DVB-C, DVB-T, DVB-S and ATSC
• Support for multiple tuners
• HDTV and AC3 support
• Record, watch, and timeshift Live TV
• TV Channel grouping
• Supports over > 10000 channels
• Timeshifting,Watch, Pause, Rewind, FF, RW Live TV
• Advanced recording scheduler:
  • Record once
  • Record now
  • Daily o Weekly
  • Weekdays (Mon-Fri)
  • Every time a program appears on this TV channel
• 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
• 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
• Internal DVD player with menu’s (you can also use an external DVD player)
• On Screen Display (OSD) for: Pause, Rewind, FastForward, Stop, Mute, Bookmarks, Switching Audio Streams/Subtitle languages…
• Automatically retrieves video art & info from IMDB
• Stacking/unstacking if your movie consists of multiple files
• View your movies by actors, genres, year, title
• Sort your movies by actors, genres, year, rating
• Resume from playback on next play

MY PICTURES

• Watch your pictures/photos
• Zoom in/out, rotate pictures
• Pause, previous/next picture
• Slideshow support with nice transitions
• Delete picture(s)
• Auto thumbnail generation
• Sort in Name, Date, Size
• Background music, either songs from my music, or radio from my radio
• Ken Burns effect slideshow
• Filmstrip view
• View in List, Icon or Big Icon display

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
• Shuffle, repeat, FF, RW, pause,…
• Music ratings
• Automaticlly gets artist art & info for all your artists
• View by list, icons, and big icons
• Party shuffle mode
• Search music for specific songs

MY RADIO

• Listen to your favorite radio stations (FM, DVB or internet stream)
• Auto tuning (FM)
• Supply a friendly name for each radio station
• Internet radio station streaming (ASX or Shoutcast)
• Logo’s for each radio station (manual process)
• Auto start listening to your selected radio station when MediaPortal starts
• Support for external radio tuner applications

MY WEATHER

• Show the latest weather information
• Support for multiple cities
• Current temperature, 3 Day Forecast

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
• 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!
• Create your own skins, or choose one of the available skins!
• Internal support for several remote control (streamzap, MCE, redeye, winlirc, hauppauge, FireDTV)
• Windowed and fullscreen support

As you would have noticed, feature list of MediaPortal is quite long, and broad. MediaPortal is plugin based, so new features are constantly being made available and you can easily add them to your MediaPortal. If you do not have Media Center in your PC, you need to try MediaPortal. This will replace all the media players that you might have in your PC. If you do not want this MediaPortal, you can try RealPlayer, or MediaMonkey.

Link to This Page: