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User Rating:
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Very Good (4.0/5)
166 user(s) |
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Softpedia Editor's Review for MediaPortal
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Turn your PC in a very advanced Multi MediaCenter / HTPC
Written by Bogdan Popa on November 23rd, 2011
MediaPortal is a full-featured media center that will let you do basically anything that includes videos, music and watching TV.
Supposed to be loaded in full screen, MediaPortal is quite difficult to install, not only because it takes much time to drop all components, but also because it involves installing some other tools that might get beginners into trouble.
MediaPortal prompts the user to choose straight from setup whether he intends to use the app to watch TV too, providing two different options: a one-click installation or an advanced one that would include more steps and some computer knowledge.
Going for the first one will get you to a detailed list of the files that will be installed on your computer, including plugins and additional software tools to enable all features into MediaPortal.
Although everything sounds difficult, it all changes once you run the app. MediaPortal opens a whole new world on your desktop, providing basically all the things you would ever need to play music, watch TV, open video files or access the weather forecast.
The application might require a faster computer to work properly, but everything went quite smooth during our test, even when opening large video files.
MediaPortal is very similar to Windows Media Center, so you can easily browse through its menus with the mouse, but there are also keyboard shortcuts for instant access to some of the features.
The music playing tools are very advanced and let you not only open a given file, but also to create playlist and even manage songs and folders. Plus, it has music ratings, party shuffle mode, music overlay, background music, Internet radio stations, auto tuning and many, many other goodies.
There are of course tons of settings regarding TV, pictures, videos, DVD and music, so you must have a look in there too.
All in all, MediaPortal is one of the best media centers we’ve ever seen, and as long as it’s free, chances are that it will replace the Windows Media Center altogether.
 Read an in-depth analysis in our professional review for MediaPortal
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MediaPortal description
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Here are some key features of "MediaPortal":
· Flexible XML based skinning engine - Create your own skins, or choose one of the available skins !
· Extendable via plugins. Media Portal can easily extended with extra plugins. Plugins can be overlay windows, modules, tag readers, players,...
· Time, Date
· Dynamic keymapping. You decide which keys you want to use for which actions
· Remote Controller support (using an external program like girder)
· Switch between graphics & LiveTV as background when browsing the menus
· Internal support for several remotes (streamzap, MCE, redeye, winlirc)
· Support for multiple tuners
· Timeshifting, Watch, Pause, Rewind, FF, RW Live TV
· Video Recording
· Advanced TV Guide based on XMLTV
· Scheduler to manage all your recording schedules
· Recorded TV section: Manage all your recorded tv programs. See what has been recorded, delete programs, check which programs you already watched and off course select and play a recorded program
· Full support of DVB-S cards (BDA driver based cards)
· Full support of DVB-C cards (BDA driver based cards)
· Full support of DVB-T cards (BDA driver based cards)
· Full support of Skystar2 cards
· Support for Teletext
· TV Guide: EPG grabber for ss2 & DVB-S/t/c which grabs the TV Guide directly from the signal!
· TV Guide search
· TV Channel grouping
· Supports over > 1000 channels
· Mapping TV channels to specific cards
· Auto channel tuning
· Overlay & VMR9 Renderless playback
· Several advanced zooming/AR modes
· Normal OSD (On Screen Display during movies/tv)
· Special ZAP OSD (Shows description of what is playing currently on TV)
· Listen to your favorite radio stations
· Auto tuning
· Supply nice logo's for each radio station
· Supply a friendly name for each radio station
· Internet radio stations
· Local radio stations using the FM tuner of your capture card
· Support for external radio tuner applications
· Auto start listening to your selected radio station when MediaPortal starts
· All music gets stored in Media Portals music database
· 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 MediaPlayer 9
· 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 overlay : will show what song is playing together with visualisation,albumart, artist,title,album etc on every module in Media Portal
· Music ratings
· Favorites
· Party shuffle mode
· Search music for specific songs
· Display all your favorite songs in one screen
· 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
· 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
· Play any movie your PC has a codec for (divx, mpeg, matroska,...)
· All your movies will be stored in Media Portals video database
· View your movies by actors, genres, year, title,
· Sort your movies by actors, genres, year, rating
· Automatically retrieves video art & info from www.imdb.com
· Stacking/Unstacking if your movie consists of multiple files
· Internal DVD Player with Menus!
· External Player (Zoomplayer/MPlayer/etc) option
· On Screen Display(OSD) for : Pause, Rewind, FastForward, Stop, Mute, Bookmarks, Switching Audio Streams/Subtitle languages...
· Internal DVD player with menu's ( you can also use an external DVD player )
· Internal movie player you can also use an external media player )
· Filmstrip view
· Resume from playback
· Screen Calibration
· UI Calibration
· My Music options
· My Pictures options
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· 3772 - Weather plugin unable to get data. Sadly the Weather Channel disabled the free access to their API. This means that MediaPortal (among many other free applications) is no longer able to get data. Unfortunately there is no quick fix for this problem which we could add into an 1.2.x hotfix. A complete rework of the weather plugin is planned for 1.3.0.
· 3746 - DaemonTools won't unmount an iso file and crash MediaPortal
· 3760 - Playback of Multi File Cue Sheets starts at wrong position
· 3740 - #play.next.duration in wrong format
· 3775 - WindowPluginBase incorrectly sets GuiProperties when it is not the ActiveWindow
· 3752 - Cyberlink PDVD (DXVA/HAM/SW) codec version 10/11 are not available in codec configuration
· 3711 - Watchdog does not restore taskbar after a crash of MediaPortal
· 3684 - Fixed logging which would write the users database connection login details into the error.log in case of an unavailable SQL-Server
· 3713 - TV-Server tries to tune a channel, even if it kn...
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 | |  | | Softpedia guarantees that MediaPortal 1.2.2 is 100% FREE, which means it does not contain any form of malware, including spyware, viruses, trojans and backdoors. [read more >] |
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