Back in the hight of my WOW addiction I did a budget upgrade on my PC - upgraded to amd64 3000, new socket 939 motherboard, nvidia 6600GT. I’ve kept this box with XP on it sitting around just in case I need windows for something which turns out to be just about never.
I’d temporarily retired my old VIA MythTV box (its bad when the power supply makes a god-awful noise right?) so I’ve been relying on BitTorrent lately for my TV viewing needs. Why not repurpose my perfectly good windows box and see what the state-of-the-art in open source windows PVR software is like?
Media Portal is an open source .NET based PVR solution hosted over on sourceforge. It has all the standard features and then some- timeshifted TV viewing, DVD/Video/Music playback, image gallery, even tetris.
I have to say, the interface looks nice in my opinion. I also noticed that video looked better under windows using my WinTV PVR-250 than under Linux. Setting up XMLTV was a little problematic since after I followed all the instructions I ended up with listings that were 8 hours off, but its not too hard to fix that in the set up. I wasn’t too happy with the scheduling interface - browsing the guide data alphabetically is really slow and its missing some of the recording / storage options I’m used to in MythTV.
I have to say after using it for a couple of days I think I prefer MythTV’s mature usability over MediaPortal’s slick work-in-progress interface but I find it usable enough that I will continue to use it as my PVR for a while. Give it a bit more time and I’m sure some of what I think are rough edges will be ironed out.