Comments on: MythTV vs. Freevo vs. XBMC vs. Mediaportal vs. Elisa vs. Boxee vs. Entertainer

By: Linuxman

Linuxman — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 09:05:06 +0000

In my experience Mythtv is the most powerfull solution there is . Although take it from me I’m a Linux admin Mythtv will take a little effort to set up correctly. But other than that all is well , check out MythUbuntu

By: Satan's little helper

Satan's little helper — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:05:50 +0000

I tryed several Myth linux distros but they didnt really serve me right. Windows mediacenter in win7 is basicly same as in xp wich is old and useless. I had Mediaportal running in vistax64 it worked fine till for some unknown reason at one day radio plugin went broken and i decide to upgrade on win7, bought bigger hd was the main reason. Anyways stable v1.02 mediaportal didnt work pretty well on win7x64 so i tryed version 1.1 alpha wich has so far worked but still going in configuration stage. Bit consern about how long it will last cos alpha is allways alpha. Also havent notice to get any benefit on startup speeds for mediaportal while using really fast usb stick as readyboost in win7. Other apps generally benefits from it pretty well so looking for alternative options. Experiences about win7x64 in htpc would be appreciated.

By: Rob Roy

Rob Roy — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 06:46:40 +0000

I have only tried 2 Media PC Software editions right now (XBMC, and WMC with MyMovies). Right now, I would have to give the edge to WMC with MyMovies, and only because I am a bit anal when it comes to exact replication of the DVD media I am importing. This include high quality cover art, and the ability to directly input the barcode to get the correct movie art. I did not see this with XMBC. I am not like some of these above with 3000+ movies. I do have about 275 DVD’s that I am currently importing into a Media PC.
My questions to anyone above regarding XBMC on Windows (Windows 7) are:
1) Does it have the ability to use Barcode entry from the DVD itself if it cannot locate the exact cover art, and details?
2) Does it only display 1 cover art for the movie if you have multiple discs? (I.E. Wyatt Earp comes in 2 DVD Discs. With WMC & MyMovies, I can configure it to show just 1 picture, not 2 by telling it there are 2 discs in one movie)
The reason I am asking is because I do like the layout of XBMC and it looks like it is pretty low on the CPU resources. The skins it has are pretty nice too.
Any input would be appreciated.

By: XBMC…. — vanutsteen.nl => nerds only

XBMC…. — vanutsteen.nl => nerds only — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:15:54 +0000

[...] reply to my last article about media centers. Well, I installed xbmc this weekend and actually it kinda sucked. Installation was a breeze: kudos [...]

By: SirAry

SirAry — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:29:20 +0000

Give Mythubuntu a try ….

By: Tome

Tome — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:08:19 +0000

I’ve been playing with XBMC for a few months and I love it! My only gripe is the typical Linux issues with AUDIO. It’s a Linux downfall that has plagued the Linux community for years… Because of this, I find it MUCH easier to run XBMC on a Windows box and then run EventGhost to allow the use of an IR/RF remote.

By: mB

mB — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:14:30 +0000

I’m looking for an XBMC alternative as of some annoyances experienced on Vista 64, such as:
- Unknown movies are entered with no name (?!) in the db
- No working subtitles plugin for me
- Filters just won’t accept wildcard (*)
- Audio search keeps getting frozen (lots of 2-3 hours dj mixes I have)
- No proper tv / radio streaming

However I’m feeling bad as XBMC is indeed a great tool

From your comments I sense that Boxee – once arriving to Windows is a real option, I’ll be playing around with Media Portal in the mean time.

Great page, thanks for this!

By: Flook

Flook — Fri, 29 May 2009 20:28:29 +0000

I’ve been using XBMC since the XBOX1 and it was called xbox media player. It’s amazing, works great and looks even better. I have about 4000 movies and tons of TV shows all with library data and all streams to an old xbox. I also built an awesome HTPC and am running XBMC as well. I will try Boxee once it’s out for Windows but don’t see much reason to.

By: Darrell

Darrell — Wed, 27 May 2009 01:00:16 +0000

Hey,
Just thought I’d share my experience. I’ve been waiting to finally set up my HTPC til I had a decent way to control it hopefully with a single remote. Well, found out I could use an Ipod touch with vnc to act as my remote and it works fairly well. Anyways, for my media center software I investigated windows media center, xmbc, elisa, and media portal,(myth looked too complecated to get running under windows. At one point I was leaning towards Elisa, because I was having some issue with Media portal: I didnt like the skin, and it wasn’t working perfectly with the way I had stored my ripped dvds. Well I found a better skin & changed the storage structure, and Now Media Portal is for me, works with my tuner & all my ripped tvds, can record off my satellite dish & do time shifting. They also have another add on project for doing ir blasting to control other components. Im in the early stages of getting the IR blasting perfected : Ive got it where I can control all my av equipment through the test interface, but want to have it work under the virtual remote interface that is in the IR server package. Just got a bit of tweaking to get things finished. Anyways, I liked Elisa, but Media Portal is just a notch better at this point in time.

By: jerry

jerry — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:32:06 +0000

I’m trying out xmbc. I’ve heard nothing but good things about it. I have a ton of DVD’s and other videos and I heard they have awesome library management. I will look into Elisa though, never heard of it.

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 09:38:12 +0000

I tried Elisa and I am really happy with it. It still seems to be in a beta version, but it’s moving really fast. There are new releases every week and plenty of documentation. It’s also available for Windows and Linux, pretty cool

By: text-to-screen

text-to-screen — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 20:00:35 +0000

I’ve spent the last 2 nights reading up on which system to go with and I just found out about XBMC, I was going to buy a refurbished AppleTV and go with Boxee, but I’ll probably just use my fiancee’s old laptop and throw on XBMC… I’m going to miss the HDMI out though… :S

By: Praveen

Praveen — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 18:45:00 +0000

I don’t think Boxee is available for Windows right now. I did see an invite thread for the Windows Alpha. I already have the XBMC setup and it’s just too good. The MediaStream and the Aeon skins just rock. I have installed it on a USB thumb drive (2gb) and it’s a delight to see my HTPC boot up to XBMC directly, in less than 15 secs in fact. The only gripe I have with XBMC right now is that it does not support Netflix or Hulu streaming, which boxee does.

By: LeonB

LeonB — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 19:57:56 +0000

Thanks Narflar. I’ve updated the post!

By: Narflar

Narflar — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 17:18:31 +0000

Just a correction, Boxee is free. It’s in Alpha so you need to sign up to get an invite but it can be installed on just about any platform at this moment, including AppleTV.

By: LeonB

LeonB — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:24:13 +0000

Hi giantjoebot,

Thanks for the nice comment! I’ve not had the time to look into all of them but I must agree with what you wrote about MythTV and XBMC. I’ve MythTV a few times in the past but it was always a pain to get running.

I’m now using XBMC Atlantis on my Xbox and it rocks! I’m sure they will implement tv-recording very soon. XBMC would (for now) be my first choice.

By: giantjoebot

giantjoebot — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:47:16 +0000

MythTV – I don’t like the UI, and its not that easy to work with even if you use one of the precompiled ISO’s. I’m not that well versed in Linux, and if you know Linux then it whould be lot easier to use

Media Portal – great UI with skins, plays everything if you have the codecs installed. One of the problems is they have lots of skins, and plugins, but they are doing a lot of changes which make a lot of the skins and stuff not work. Its not perfect. For example I currently have a problem where since I use Milk Drop Visualizations sometimes media portal crashes when trying to listen to music. It does everything including recording TV, and there is suppose to be a way to get Blue Ray working with it.

XBMC has a great UI, and is generally very stable. Right now it seems to play everything. This wasn’t the case not to long ago. It does not record TV. I actually used this on an XBOX, and loved it. Had t move on to something else due to the XBOX being not powerful enough to play h264. If I didn’t need the TV recording then I would probably go with this over media portal.