Best Front End for HTPC?

M

mjn

Weaksauce
Joined
May 8, 2007
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Using Vista 64-Bit at the moment, and plan to rip all my DVD's, HD-DVD's and Blu-Ray to HDD.

What is everybody using as their frontend?

Will be using this with a 40" LCD.
 
I have no use for TV tuners (as it sounds like you do not either) so I cannot comment on that.

I've used:
-Original WMC
-Media Portal
-Meedios
-XBMC

I didn't like how WMC looked or functioned... though supposedly the new one is a lot better.

I was very happy with Media Portal, only reason I stopped using it is because it refuses to load on my new system after installing SP3 (even though it gave errors because I DIDN'T have SP3...). Very easy to use and manage.

Meedios is slick looking and very powerful... but IMO a complete nightmare to get setup. By far the most obtuse and unintelligible system for importing media. Once it is running I'm sure it works great, but I didn't feel like redoing my entire file system to make importing easy.

Currently using XBMC and love it. Very fast, stable, looks great, easy to customize, easy to import, etc. Very intuitive. Supports virtually all filetypes for playback. Downside is the lack of hardware acceleration so you have to use an external player (like MPC-HC) or have a computer fast enough to not need it. I also don't *think* it can play actual bluray discs (like, for example, Media Portal which can load up PDVD9). I rip them to the hard drive anyway, but sometimes nice to just toss a new movie in and watch without having to go through the wait.

So IMO I'd start with Media Portal or XBMC and go from there.

Edit: I use my HTPC to manage about 31,000 songs, 270+ movies (DVD/HDDVD/Bluray), and a variety of TV shows. So part of my criteria is something robust that can process large file quantities, is easy to enter/update entries, and easy to sort/search through to find what I'm looking for.
 
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Since you have vista i HIGHLY suggest mymovies
If you arent that dedicated or dont have a large library mediabrowser works great too

but thats just for local content, for internet based i go with boxee (windows beta currently)

Also the movie browser is 7MC rather surprised me and works great!
Keep in mind you will need powerDVD or TMC to playback bluray, i hope your using anydvd?
 
XBMC is a nice front end, the only problem I had with it is that it was slow on my computer.

I'm using a
AMD 4850e processor
GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H AM2+/AM2 AMD 780G
and 4 gigs of Ram

I currently use Mediabrowser and I love it. I have about 50 movies as of now and about 20 different TV series (with hundreds of episodes) and I have no problem with it. I haven't heard about any problems with it with more movies, but I don't know anything outside of what I use.

MediaBrowser is great where it will gather pictures and info for each movie and TV series by it's self. Personally I don't use that feature of it as I like to pick my pictures for each movies/shows.
 
Vista MC + MediaBrowser is awesome. I have about 100 movies and 15 TV series and it's very slick looking. I used VMC for my digital cable tuners so the single package approach works best for me. I heard really good things about XBMC as well, though.
 
Yeah, i've got AnyDVDHD, and about 300 DVD's, 50 HD movies and around 200 CD's.

My CD's are already ripped into FLAC, and use Ultimate Jukebox currently for that. currently using PowerDVD HD for Blu-ray and HD-DVD, and TheatreTek for DVD.

MyMovies does look exactly what i'm looking for.

I have a tuner installed, but i have SkyHD for watching TV.

Thanks for the input so far :)
 
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Yes with that large of a collection, mymovies is really the only thing that is going to be able to index and sort them logically.
If you have a webcam you can scan the barcode on the back of each movie and it will import all the data, otherwise you just have to type it in.
If you are doing a distributed video server it can take a few seconds over wireless to load all ~400 movies, but its very easy to use on the back and front end.
 
Another Vista MC with mediabrowser fan here but looking to go with boxee when it's fully released for windows. About 750 movies and a number of full TV series. Mediabrowser works very well for me although there are a percentage of movies that stubbornly refuse to pull down the posters (so those I get from the net and just name folder.jpg) and movie information. Haven;t tried XMBC but that's also got a nice look to it. Am also thinking of playing with SageTV client/server as am working on the home networking.

Only thing that's bothering me with is that Vista MC w/TVPack records tv shows in ms proprietary format which sucks if one wants to burn to disc for playing on a standalone dvd player.
 
XBMC is only useful if you have no need for hardware (GPU) acceleration.

That being said, XBMC with the MediaStream skin is downright sexy.
 
criccio said:
XBMC is only useful if you have no need for hardware (GPU) acceleration.

That being said, XBMC with the MediaStream skin is downright sexy.
Click to expand...

If you are running Linux, OpenSolaris or FreeBSD you can do experimental h264 gpu acceleration with vdpau and the latest nvidia drivers. Last I looked it had no soft sub support yet but its getting there. What I'd really like to see is good multicore decoding since pretty much everything is dual core these days.

Personally I prefer the Aeon skin. :)
 
Ankle said:
If you are running Linux, OpenSolaris or FreeBSD you can do experimental h264 gpu acceleration with vdpau and the latest nvidia drivers. Last I looked it had no soft sub support yet but its getting there. What I'd really like to see is good multicore decoding since pretty much everything is dual core these days.

Personally I prefer the Aeon skin. :)
Click to expand...

Yea, but what kind of person wants to run Linux as a HTPC...?
 
talley said:
Cheap, flexible, and stable; why wouldn't you want to run linux if you know how?
Click to expand...

Ahh there is the catch...

Needlessly complicated and confusing. There are far easier options that take little to zero configuration. But hey, if tooling around in the command line gets you off... :p
 
XBMC has support for external players so it can easily just open MPC-HC and close it when the movie is done for those movies that need hardware acceleration. Certainly not as slick as MP or other options that have it integrated but I wouldn't consider it an automatic dealbreaker by any means. :)
 
criccio said:
Ahh there is the catch...

Needlessly complicated and confusing. There are far easier options that take little to zero configuration. But hey, if tooling around in the command line gets you off... :p
Click to expand...

Seriously. I love Linux but there's no way in Hell I'm running it on my HTPC. I already get enough "how do you do XXXXX?" with the VMC based HTPC (which is actually now 7MC based, fuck you Vista!! I can play my damn AAC music collection now and 7MC doesn't crash all the time like you did!!).

That said, I'm currently running Win 7 32 bit on my HTPC and totally love it. :)

I just need to spend some time and get my tuner working.... or finish my server and drop it in there...

Also, Screw XBMC. Media Portal with MediaStream is nothing but pure sex and actually full functional (and doesn't require editing config files manually to support external players). :D
 
Does XMBC work with TV Tuners? I had heard it didn't. I've only glanced at it and it looks pretty nice.
 
The current plan for tuning and XBMC is to use mythtv as a backend. Work is being done, but its still not quite there yet.

You can see some of the work that is (slowly) being done here. I still just use mythrename (or whatever its called these days) to build up symlinks and serve them over smb to xbmc.
 
Well, i installed the MyMovies plug-in on my Windows server and started sorting all my films....this could take a while :)

Need to install the frontend on my HTPC to test it out, and get everything working as it should.

So far, so good.
 
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