MediaPortal: A Free PVR for Windows

This article is an opinion piece on what a home entertainment PC should be, and also suggests an easy to implement software solution for Windows called MediaPortal. This free application is still under development. Read this article, download the app, and contribute if you feel inclined. Please leave comments on what PVR/DVR you use and why you like it.

Technology should be enabling, not disabling

Like most people reading this, I keep all of my music on my hard drive and my best speakers are computer speakers designed to be used with a sound card. In order to listen to my gigabytes of music, I need them available in more than one place, namely my bedroom and the living room. The music also needs to be accessible via a remote, everything else is too much overhead. TV has been around for decades, everyone knows how to use one. A digital video recorder (DVR) should have that same ease-of-use if it is going to achieve the same widespread adoption. TiVo has done an exceptional job at simplifying the process of “recording” content to a hard drive, but doesn’t have the feature set of a home-brew DVR and charges a monthly fee. For the tech savvy, there are mature software applications that allow you to do what TiVo does and much more. Windows has a product called Windows Media Center (MCE) that is available as a standalone application for around 130 USD (at the time of this writing). There are a number of other applications (BeyondTV, SageTV) for Windows that offer ease-of-use and ease-of-installation, but these tend to do well at recording television content, but perform poorly as interfaces to music and other media content. For the even more tech savvy, MythTV, an open-source Linux application has received a lot of praise for good television recording capability and good media manipulation. Countless people have reviewed and documented the product, and there are many developers contributing to this free application. There are guides that show how the product can be installed on a number of different distributions of Linux.

MediaPortal is a free open source alternative to MythTV that runs on Linux. While being less mature and containing less features than MythTV, it is easier to implement because it is built for Windows.

Why not MythTV then?

Despite however easy MythTV might be to install and maintain itself, installing and maintaining a Linux distribution as a “casual Linux user” on an unconventional, seldom-used computer in the living room requires a lot of time and energy. For me personally, I had Fedora Core 3 installed, hooked up to an HDTV via a DVI to HDMI cable, but could not get the correct resolution to output to the TV, meaning I had no way to access the computer other than to haul it into another room. I was fully prepared to labor through the installation, but I thought I would take a look at another product since this was supposed to be a pleasurable experience and not a painful one.

There is an open-source PVR app for Windows

After some googling, I discovered MediaPortal. This is exactly what I was looking for: a free, lightweight application that works as a music player OOTB and gives me room to grow with more features. One feature I was always impressed with from MCE was the fading and panning photo transitions, a.k.a. the Ken Burns effect. MediaPortal has this feature OOTB.

Reclaim your free time

I downloaded MediaPortal and installed in 20 minutes. I probably spent another 20 minutes doing basic setup and configuration. I setup MediaPortal to launch when Windows starts and removed any of the TV recording capability since I am not using that at this time.

The “back-end to front-end ratio”

I don’t want to spend more time configuring the software or hardware than I do enjoying what the software or hardware does for me. This is not always true, but in this case, I am talking about entertainment, so that is what this box should do: entertain me, not frustrate me. My pleasure increases the more I interface with the front-end, my frustration increases the more I interface with the back-end configuration. Remember people: we are talking about an entertainment device here, something that should be shared with friends, and something that is worthless unless it is used. And in order for it to be used, it must be simple to use.

Why do I need a remote?

A remote is simple. Wireless keyboards and mice take up much more room and are out of place on a coffee table. I would still like to find a high-quality black wireless keyboard that does not include a number pad, has an integrated pointing stick, and programmable media buttons. This has been difficult to do. Until I find that, MediaPortal supports the Windows MCE remote OOTB. This has been available for at least a year from NewEgg, and is probably available from other vendors as well. For around 40 bucks, I bought something (pictured above) that worked without drivers from the moment I plugged it into a spare USB port. That is what I call an enabling piece of technology! I was looking for a simple, enabling piece of software that would let me play my music with a remote in the living room. Photos, videos, TV recording—these are extra features that are nice to have, but are not what I use most frequently. I also didn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on new hardware when a Pentium 3 box would do what I wanted.

If you have some spare hardware and a few hours, give MediaPortal a try. Your living room might never be the same.