HTPC Guide: Part 3, MediaPortal Setup
By Jeffrey | May 23, 2008
Ok, so you’ve decided on whether you’ll be using XP or Vista in your setup, so let’s move on to the real important software you’ll need to watch your movies, listen to your music, and watch and record television.
There are many options to choose from when picking your PVR program, but the one I personally feel is best is MediaPortal. It’s free, open-source (meaning easily modified), supports TV tuning, and plays everything you can throw at it.
Why Not Media Center?
Basically, MediaPortal is far more flexible than Media Center.
It will play any format, and add it to your library, that you have a codec for on your computer whether it be ALAC, FLAC, h.264, xvid, divx, etc. Getting anything other than WMV, MP3, and WMA to integrate into Media Center is far more trouble than its worth.
Media Center shows more preference to pre-built Media PCs over custom built ones, as well, which can make it a pain to work with your particular hardware, particularly TV tuning cards.
Also, MediaPortal supports any possible extension you can think of. You can read Wikipedia, watch movie trailers, read the news, control set top boxes (satellite or cable), and even play Tetris all from within MediaPortal. And that’s just a few of the possible options.
Finally, MediaPortal does not try to push DRM on you, as Vista Media Center will. No commercial motivation here, the MediaPortal team just tries to develop the best product they can for you to play and organize all of your media.
Getting Started
I’ve written this guide oriented toward the 0.2.3 version (with the latest SVN update), as I have found it to be the most reliable and have the most compatibility. I also do not like using the new TV Server Suite of the newest versions, as it requires a bunch of installed junk, and I found the built-in tuning worked just fine. Feel free to choose the latest 1.0 RC1 version if you’d like, though.
What You’ll Need
MediaPortal: You can download the software from its homepage, or you can download my compiled version here that includes the latest SVN update which I based this guide on:
Install the MediaPortal_0.2.3.0_Setup file first, followed by the MediaPortal-svn–04-03-2008–05-05-Rev18530 update.
Monochrome MCE Skin: You’ll also probably want to use a different skin than the default included, so I’ve uploaded my modified version of the Monochrome MCE skin by Psycho Reptile here. I updated text formatting so it fits now, resized the TV preview within the Guide, and created a new background image of higher resolution so it looks smoother.
Download Monochrome MCE (modified).
Or you can download the original here.
Unpack it into the skin folder of your MediaPortal directory.
Here’s the key differences between my modified version and the original:
Original:
K-Lite Codec Pack: This is required if you want to play the vast majority of formats, as it includes every possible codec you’ll need (including ffdshow, which I’ll reference later). You can download it here. Get the 3.9.0 Full package and install it using the Playback only option shown here:
Setting It Up
Open MediaPortal Configuration; your window will look like this:
Click on General (not the plus sign next to it).
This is the general (surprise!) setup of how MediaPortal will work. Do you want it to start automatically when Windows does? Do you want MediaPortal to minimize instead of exiting? You’ll set that all up here.
The two important options you’ll want checked are Start MediaPortal in fullscreen mode and Minimize to tray on GUI exit. The first option is self-explanatory; the second option is valuable because MediaPortal must be running to record scheduled programs, and this allows you to do that while keeping it in the background.
The rest of the options you’ll probably want looking pretty similar to what I have in that image above, but you can play around with each one if you’d like.
Now click the plus sign next to General. Here are some more in-depth general settings for MediaPortal. Most of them you’ll probably want to leave alone, but some we’ll need to tweak.
First click on Skin and select whatever skin you’d like to use, such as the Monochrome MCE skin I provided above. If you use a different skin, make sure it’s compatible with version 0.2.3 of MediaPortal (under Version) or you’ll have plenty of issues.
Now move on Thumbnails. The only thing you’ll need to adjust here is to move the slider all the way up to Quality to have the best looking thumbnails, seen here:
Now, if you want to have MediaPortal automatically load image files of DVD discs and you have Daemon Tools installed, you can set that up under the next option. The settings are pretty self-explanatory, just set up your path to Daemon Tools and point it to the right Virtual Drive and you’ll be good to go. Here’s how mine looks:
If you don’t care about that feature, move on to the next option.
We will skip the DVD section for now, as I will have a full written guide on how to professorially upscale your DVDs later on in this guide.
So click the Movies tab, then Movie Folders and add all your folders you want MediaPortal to look for video files in.
Once you’ve finished there, click on Movie Player to set up which codecs you’d like to play your video files. I prefer ffdshow for both video options (this ties into my DVD upscaling guide coming later) and MPA Decoder for my audio since I use an external receiver, but you can select whatever you’d like. For comparison, here is mine:
You can now move on to Music which is set up in a similar manner, so you should be able to go through it and add your folders. There are some things we will want to change, though, so click on Music.
I have a 5.1 speaker setup, so I like to upscale my music to that, and I also prefer to have gapless playback rather than crossfading. The options here are up to you, though.
The rest of the tabs are self-explanatory, so you can go through and decide if you want to use Visualizations, look up information for your music on the Internet, and so on.
I also like my music files to be displayed cleanly, as I already keep them organized into Artist and Album folders, respectively (using iTunes), so if you’d like to do the same click on Music Sort, change Sorting mode to Name and change your Format options. I like the “Track Number Song Name” setup (ie: 01 Song), so mine is set up like this:
Now you can move on to Pictures and set that up in the same manner, and then on to Radio if you want to use radio streams in MediaPortal.
We will skip the Television option for now, as that requires a guide all its own (coming in Part 4), and the Remote option as well, as we will be using a separate remote plugin than the built-in one.
So click the plus sign next to DirectShow Filter Control so we can set up our codec settings. If you use the same selections as I did above then the only one we’ll be adjusting is MPA Decoder for audio.
If you have your audio going to an external receiver, as I do, then you’ll want to change both the AC3 and DTS audio outputs to S/PDIF. If you are using analog speakers connected directly to your computer then you’ll want to select the Decode to speakers option and your particular speaker setup.
Make sure that Downmix to stereo is not checked at the bottom.
Here are my settings:
Finally, click on Video Renderer Settings. If you are using Windows XP then I recommend using Video Mixing Renderer 9 with the default options checked, or Enhanced Video Renderer if you are using Windows Vista.
If you experience crashes with EVR, though, try reverting to VMR9.
Now you can set up your Weather settings if you’d like, but I’ve discovered that Weather seems to not be working properly due to a change in Weather.com. I prefer quickly checking online manually, anyway, but you can try it out to see if it works for you.
You can find the proper images you’ll need for Satellite, Temperature, etc. at AccuWeather.com.
Finally, click on Plugins. You’ll probably not want to change many of these for right now, but you can at least go through the top plugins and decide whether or not you want to use them. If not, you can right click on them and uncheck Enabled.
For example, I don’t care for Tetris, Radio, and the TopBar (which I find just gets in the way) and some other ones, so I have them disabled.
If you’d like to leave them enabled, but not show them on the home screen, then right click on a plugin and check Listed in My Plugins.
Here’s how my window looks:
Now you can click OK and after a second your configuration will be saved and the window will close. MediaPortal is ready to go!
Tons Of Options
I have just gone through the basics in what I’ve discussed above. There are plenty more things you can change in your configuration, including scanning your movie and music library into the MediaPortal database for easy access.
Feel free to play around with those other options, and if you have any questions drop me a line at:
How It Looks
For now, here is a general idea of how MediaPortal will look:
Continue on to Part 4 where I show you how to set up your TV tuning with MediaPortal (including external set top boxes), followed by Part 5 showing you how to use MediaPortal to professionally upscale your DVDs to high definition.
Topics: Guides |
[...] of which, read on for Part 3 of the guide discussing that very [...]
Posted by: Building A Home Theater PC (HTPC) - Part 2 at SavvyGeek on May 23rd, 2008 at 1:47 pm[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptIf you’d like to leave them enabled, but not show them on the home screen, then right click on a plugin and check Listed in My Plugins. Here’s how my window looks:. Now you can click OK and after a second your configuration will be … [...]
Posted by: Building A Home Theater PC (HTPC) - Part 3 on May 23rd, 2008 at 2:02 pmCan you explain why you prefer MediaPortal to Vista’s Media Center? Also, if you were forced to BUY a HTPC out-of-the-box instead of building one from scratch, have any thoughts on what you’d buy?
Posted by: Zach on May 24th, 2008 at 7:17 amThanks!
Zach,
That’s a good idea, I should have expanded on that, so take a look at the update at the start of the guide.
Also, as far as just buying an HTPC over building it, I would actually not buy a PC sold as a “HTPC” as they are typically just overpriced normal PCs with a tuner card.
If you really want to go that route, I would just buy the best typical PC you can for the best price, and add a tuning card to it. Also, if you plan on using the computer with a receiver for your surround sound, make sure the computer features a digital output for audio, either coaxial or, preferably, optical.
Hope this helps!
Posted by: Jeffrey on May 24th, 2008 at 5:52 pmI’ve wanted to try the Media Portal route, but I seem to be one of those unlucky souls who just can’t get it to work. I can get The skin to load, but then some kind of crazy errors appear the second I try to play a video. This leaves me with Vista Media Center (eh) and the Linux version of XBMC (awesome, but still wildly buggy and prone to video tears. The tears, by the way, are certainly not a result of my cpu. I’ve got an e6600 quad core).
With that said, maybe I’ll try reverting back to VMR9. Haven’t tried that. Might be worth looking into.
Posted by: Nathan on May 24th, 2008 at 11:55 pm[...] that you have MediaPortal up and running - and are probably have become an expert on it - let’s go through how to get one its main [...]
Posted by: Building A Home Theater PC (HTPC): Part 4 at SavvyGeek on June 16th, 2008 at 12:19 pmCan u tell me why you also downloaded MediaPortal-svn–04-03-2008–05-05-Rev18530 this build? I am running just the 0.2.3 version and would like to know if this build is essential.
Also I have MP running on XP in one computer. I just got it working on Vista yesterday and had to disable all the VMS stuff. But when i start MP it does not seem to get focus and listen to my remote till I click somewhere on the screen with my mouse. The get focus option is checked in the configuration tool - FYI.
Any thoughts?
Posted by: Raj on July 25th, 2008 at 10:43 am