Media Portal - Anyone use it?

[No Limit]

I found media portal a couple months back and I am absolutely in love with this program. It's a HTPC program that takes all your movies, all your TV series, all your music, all your pictures, and many other goodies and groups it all similar to windows media center but a lot more flexible. It will do things like download covers, information from IMDB, fan art, as well as other information for all your media automatically.

A good video showing off StreamMP (my favorite skin by far):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzi1veB9Vn8&feature=related

Check it out:

http://www.team-mediaportal.com/

The plugins I recommend with it:

My Series (for grouping TV shows)
Moving Pictures (for grouping movies)

If you have a HTPC this program is an absolute must.

 

[VirusType2]

Looks great. So if I transfer all of my ripped CDs to the library, I can use it to download the cover art?

What kind of other information is downloaded and what is accessed from the internet every time? I'd rather it downloaded information instead of looking online every time.

 

[No Limit]

It downloads fan art automatically and it will download cover art but you will only see it in media portal, it doesn't embed it in the ID3 tags. You do need to the have fan art plugin installed. You also need to have a last.fm account.

However, you can use an outside ID3 tag editor that can retreive cover art from amazon.com and other sources. They will embed the information in the MP3 which will also be readable in media portal.

The fan art is always being looked up online by default but you can disable that in the settings. If you will just be doing this for music I'm not sure this is the way to go (unless you're doing it on a home theater pc setup). But if you have a lot of movies and tv shows on your computer this is a great program to have.

I'll have to see if I can make a video of my set up and get it posted, I'm really proud of it and took quite a bit of time to perfect.

 

[VirusType2]

Yeah, I was thinking it might not be the best option for music. I haven't researched the program at all, I've only watched the video, but I'm not sure there will be a lot of options for music - things like an equalizer or support for FLAC. I would like to get a digital stand alone EQ for my stereo system, and then I wouldn't care. (want one with customizable presets) I have one, but its old and lowers the sound quality a little, even when defeated (turned off), so I don't use it.

Anyway, I will have to look into this software. It simply looks like a cool way to set up a multimedia system.

 

[Hazar]

tried it out a lot tonight, seemed to have some serious issues which I haven't figured out yet:

1) no idea how to install skins, I put the skin I downloaded in the skins folder but it doesn't detect it and I didn't see anyway to add it
2) couldn't find a way to customize the main menu, so I could add the stuff I want (the my series and moving pictures plugins) to the main menu
3) controls seem to be terrible, mouse is hard to use in the main menu with the way it scrolls, difficult and unexplained keyboard controls while watching something with no mouse controls to pause/skim the movie

 

[No Limit]

Their site isn't very good, you will want to download all your plugins and skins from the forums:

http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/mediaportal-1-forums/

All the latest up to date information is there. Also, are you using the latest beta release 1.1? I would recommend it.

1. Try streamedMP, it comes with an exe installer and many goodies. The configuration is a bit complicated but you will see a steamedmp configuration icon on your desktop, that will let you add or delete anything you want from the home menu:

http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/s...able-31-mar-2010-supports-mp-1-1-0-rc1-79351/

Once you have the skin installed you do have to enable it under the Media Portal configuration (although with steamedMP I think it enables it by default for you).

2. Like I said the steamedMP skin has a configuarion to let you do that. For other skins including the main one you can choose what shows up in your home screen under the plugin configuration.

3. This is not meant to be used with a mouse. Your best bet is a media center remote but if you don't want to shell out $20-$30 for one you should use your keyboard. Keyboard shortcuts can be found here:

http://wiki.team-mediaportal.com/KeyboardShortcuts

Are you setting this up on a computer hooked up to a TV?

 

[Hazar]

Yeah, we have one of these:

I'll give your suggestions a try sometime today

Is there a way to rebind some of the keys? With the controller we have it makes much more sense to use backspace to go back rather than esc for example.

 

[No Limit]

I haven't done much on rebinding keys since I use a remote but I would assume you can. Look through the configuration, I can check it out when I get home later.