Software Santa
FREE and/or Open Source Desktop Software! => Audio / Video / Media Creators / Editors / Players and Utilities => A/V Media applications for Windows => Topic started by: Software Santa on March 20, 2008, 09:43:48 PM
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MediaPortal is a FREE application for turning your PC / TV into a Media Center!
(http://www.team-mediaportal.com/images/zoom/Aqua/06.jpg)
MediaPortal 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)
* On Screen Display (OSD) for: Pause, Rewind, FastForward, Stop, Mute, Bookmarks, Switching Audio Streams/Subtitle languages...
* Resume from playback on next play
My Pictures
* Watch your pictures/photos
* Slideshow support with nice transitions
* 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!
This only a small list of plugins & features that MediaPortal offers.
MediaPortal will run fine on most PC's. However make sure you installed the software components needed as described in the following list
Software components
Operating System:
* Windows XP SP2: With WindowsXP you are able to use MediaPortal with one DVB TVCard or multiple Analog TVCards.
* Windows MCE 2005 RU2: With Windows MCE you are able to use MediaPortal with more than 1 DVB TV Card!
* Install SP2 and all WindowsUpdates
* Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 with SP1 and Microsoft .NET Framework 2
* DirectX 9.0c
* Windows Media Player 10
* WindowsXP SP2 Hotfix for DVB
* Windows SP2 Hotfix for 1394 (Firewire)
Drivers and Codecs:
* Always use latest drivers for your chipset, video and audio card
* To be able to view QuickTime movies you should install QuickTime Alternative
* For more playback codec's and filters see here and here
* VobSub for subtitle playback
Hardware components
Minimum System Requirements:
* CPU: 1.4 GHz or higher / 2.8 Ghz for analog software tv-cards
* Memory: 256MB RAM
* Harddisk: ~200 MB for MediaPortal
* VGA: DX9 compatible videocard with at least 64MB of video memory
* TV-Cards: See the following page for the latest supported TV cards
* Notes: Media Portal currently records live Tv to a DVR-MS file which generates a file size of approximately 3GB (3072MB) per hour. So a typical 2 hour movie will create a file which is about 6GB (6144MB) in size. For that reason, a 100GB Hard Disk would give you enough space to record multiple shows over 2 weeks without having to delete or compress them. See this page for an accurate supported TV card listing
Recommended System Requirements:
* CPU: 2.0 Ghz or higher / 2.8 Ghz for analog software tv-cards
* Memory: 768-1024 MB RAM
* Harddisk: ~200 MB for MediaPortal and ~12 GB for Hardware Encoding or Digital TV based TV cards for timeshifting purposes.
* DirectX 9 capable graphics card with at least 128MB of video memory
* An Internet connection is highly recommended for full functionality of some features
* TV-Cards: See the following page for the latest supported TV cards
* Notes: Media Portal currently records live Tv to a DVR-MS file which generates a file size of approximately 3GB (3072MB) per hour. So a typical 2 hour movie will create a file which is about 6GB (6144MB) in size. For that reason, a 100GB Hard Disk would give you enough space to record multiple shows over 2 weeks without having to delete or compress them. See this page for an accurate supported TV card listing
1080i HDTV Minimum Hardware Requirements:
* CPU: 2.8 GHz
* Memory: 512 MB
* DirectX9 capable graphics card with at least 128MB of video memory
* HDTV capable playback codecs
* Notes: Before you go head long into buying a HDTV tuner card and expecting your PC to play is without fault, navigate to this Microsoft media page and download some 1080p and 720p files and see if your Video card can handle it. A 100Mb download may save you some disappointment. If you still have any issues getting MP to work, please post them on the forum .
http://www.team-mediaportal.com/