MediaPortal

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MediaPortal
Juice icon
Screenshot of MediaPortal
MediaPortal running on Windows XP MCE
Developed by Team-MediaPortal
Latest release 0.2.3.0 / November 15, 2007
Preview release 1.0 RC1 / April 17, 2008
OS Microsoft Windows
Genre Media center
Licence GNU General Public License
Website www.team-mediaportal.com

MediaPortal is an open source media center software that acts as front-end for Personal Video Recorder (PVR), video, pictures, music and many more functionalities. MediaPortal runs under Microsoft Windows unlike most other open source media center programs, such as MythTV, Freevo, VDR, GeeXboX, which run on Linux.

MediaPortal allows a computer to perform many entertainment-related tasks, such as recording, pausing, and rewinding live television, much like a PVR box such as TiVo. Other functionality includes watching video, listening to music with dynamic playlist building based on the social music network Last.fm, launching and playing games, recording live radio and browsing picture collections. MediaPortal supports a plugin system and a skin engine allowing users to extend the base software.

Contents

[edit] Features

  • Direct X GUI
  • Video Mixing Renderer 9
  • Enhanced Video Render (EVR) on Vista
  • Advanced Digital Video Broadcasting support (Common Interface, DVB radio, DVB EPG etc..)
  • Built-in Weather, RSS reader, and Wikipedia, ...
  • Plugins

[edit] Requirements

[edit] Minimum hardware requirements

The minimum hardware requirements listed here are for standard definition resolution playback and recording with MPEG-2 video compression using a single TV-tuner. Multiple tuners, or MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) playback carries higher system requirements, see 1080i/1080p HDTV minimum hardware requirements.

  • 1.4 GHz Intel Pentium III (or equivalent) processor
  • 256 MB (256 MiB) of System RAM
  • DirectX 9.0 hardware-accelerated GPU with at least 64MB of video memory
    • Graphics chips which support this and are compatible with MediaPortal:
      • ATI Radeon series 9600 (or above)
      • NVIDIA GeForce 6600 (or above), GeForce FX 5200 (or above) and nForce 6100 series (or above)
      • Intel Extreme Graphics 2 (integrated i865G)
      • Matrox Parhelia
      • SiS Xabre series
  • 200 MB (200 million bytes) free harddisk-drive space for the MediaPortal software
  • 12 GB or more free harddisk-drive space for Hardware Encoding or Digital TV based TV cards for timeshifting purposes

[edit] HDTV minimum hardware requirements

HDTV (720p/1080i/1080p) playback/recording, and also recording from multiple tuners, and playback of MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) video, carries higher system requirements.

  • 2.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4 (or equivalent) processor
  • 512 MB of System RAM
  • DirectX 9.0 hardware-accelerated GPU with at least 128MB of video memory
    • Graphics chips which support this and are compatible with MediaPortal:
      • ATI Radeon series 9600 (or above)
      • NVIDIA GeForce 6600 (or above), GeForce FX 5200 (or above) and nForce 6100 series (or above)
      • Intel Extreme Graphics 2 (integrated i865G)
      • Matrox Parhelia
      • SiS Xabre series
      • XGI Volari V Series and XP Series
  • 200 MB free harddisk-drive space for the MediaPortal software
  • 12 GB or more free harddisk-drive space for Hardware Encoding or Digital TV based TV cards for timeshifting purposes

[edit] Operating System and Software requirements

  • Windows XP or Windows MCE 2005 RU2
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 with Service Pack 1 or Microsoft .NET Framework 2
  • DirectX 9.0c

[edit] See also

Free software Portal

[edit] External links