MediaPortal is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

media player and

digital video recorder A digital video recorder (DVR), also referred to as a personal video recorder (PVR) particularly in Canadian and British English, is an electronic device that records video in a digital format to a disk drive, USB flash drive, SD memory card, SS ...

software project, often considered an alternative to

Windows Media Center Windows Media Center (WMC) is a discontinued digital video recorder and media player created by Microsoft. Media Center was first introduced to Windows in 2002 on Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE). It was included in Home Premium and U ...

. It provides a

10-foot user interface In computing, 10-foot user interface, 10-foot UI or 3-meter user interface is a graphical user interface designed for televisions. Compared to desktop computer and smartphone user interfaces, it uses text and other interface elements that are ...

for performing typical PVR/

TiVo TiVo ( ) is a digital video recorder (DVR) developed and marketed by Xperi (previously by TiVo Corporation and TiVo Inc.) and introduced in 1999. TiVo provides an on-screen guide of scheduled broadcast programming television programs, whose fea ...

functionality, including playing, pausing, and recording live TV; playing DVDs, videos, and music; viewing pictures; and other functions. Plugins allow it to perform additional tasks, such as watching online video, listening to music from online services such as Last.fm, and launching other applications such as games. It interfaces with the hardware commonly found in HTPCs, such as TV tuners, infrared receivers, and LCD displays. The MediaPortal

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

was initially forked from XBMC (now

Kodi Kodi may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * KODI, a radio station in Cody, Wyoming, USA * Kodi (film), ''Kodi'' (film), India, 2016 * Kodi, a dog in the 2004 film ''Balto III: Wings of Change'' Other uses * Kodi (software), an open sour ...

), though it has been almost completely re-written since then. MediaPortal is designed specifically for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

, unlike most other open-source media center programs such as

MythTV MythTV is a free and open-source home entertainment application with a simplified "10-foot user interface" design for the living room TV. It turns a computer with the necessary hardware into a network streaming digital video recorder, a digital ...

and Kodi, which are usually

cross-platform Within computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several Computing platform, computing platforms. Some ...

Features

DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct" ...

GUI * Video Hardware Acceleration * VMR / EVR on

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

/ 7 * TV / Radio (

DVB-S Digital Video Broadcasting – Satellite (DVB-S) is the original DVB standard for satellite television and dates from 1995, in its first release, while development lasted from 1993 to 1997. The first commercial applications were by Canal+ in ...

DVB-S2 Digital Video Broadcasting - Satellite - Second Generation (DVB-S2) is a digital television broadcast standard that has been designed as a successor for the popular DVB-S system. It was developed in 2003 by the Digital Video Broadcasting Proj ...

DVB-T DVB-T, short for Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial, is the DVB European-based consortium standard for the broadcast transmission of digital terrestrial television that was first published in 1997 and first broadcast in Singapore in Fe ...

DVB-C Digital Video Broadcasting - Cable (DVB-C) is the Digital Video Broadcasting, DVB European consortium standard for the broadcast transmission of digital television over coaxial cable, cable. This system transmits an MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 family digita ...

Analog television Analog television is the original television technology that uses analog signals to transmit video and audio. In an analog television broadcast, the brightness, colors and sound are represented by amplitude, instantaneous phase and frequency, ...

( Common Interface, DVB

radio Radio is the technology of communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 3 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmitter connec ...

, DVB EPG,

Teletext Teletext, or broadcast teletext, is a standard for displaying text and rudimentary graphics on suitably equipped television sets. Teletext sends data in the broadcast signal, hidden in the invisible vertical blanking interval area at the to ...

, etc...) *

IPTV Internet Protocol television (IPTV), also called TV over broadband, is the service delivery of television over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. Usually sold and run by a Telephone company, telecom provider, it consists of broadcast live telev ...

* Recording, pause and

time shifting In broadcasting, time shifting is the recording of programming to a storage medium to be viewed or listened to after the live broadcasting. Typically, this refers to TV programming but it can also refer to radio shows via podcasts. In recent yea ...

of TV and Radio broadcasts * Music player * Video/

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for digital video disc or digital versatile disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any ki ...

player * Picture player * Internet Streams * Integrated Weather Forecasts * Built-in RSS reader * Metadata web scraping from TheTVDB and The Movie Database * Plug ins * Skins Graphical user interfaces

Control

MediaPortal can be controlled by any input device, that is supported by the Windows Operating System. * PC Remote * Keyboard /

Mouse A mouse (: mice) is a small rodent. Characteristically, mice are known to have a pointed snout, small rounded ears, a body-length scaly tail, and a high breeding rate. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (''Mus musculus'' ...

Gamepad A gamepad is a type of video game controller held in two hands, where the fingers (especially thumbs) are used to provide input. They are typically the main input device for video game consoles. Features Some common additions to the standar ...

Kinect Kinect is a discontinued line of motion sensing input devices produced by Microsoft and first released in 2010. The devices generally contain RGB color model, RGB cameras, and Thermographic camera, infrared projectors and detectors that map dep ...

Wii Remote The Wii Remote, colloquially known as the Wiimote, is the primary game controller for Nintendo's Wii home video game console. An essential capability of the Wii Remote is its motion sensing capability, which allows the user to interact with an ...

* Android /

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

WebOS webOS, also known as LG webOS, is a Linux kernel-based multitasking operating system for smart devices, such as smart TVs, that has also been used as a mobile operating system. Initially developed by Palm, Inc. (which was acquired by Hewlett ...

/ S60 handset devices

Television

MediaPortal uses its own TV-Server to allow to set up one central server with one or more TV cards. All TV related tasks are handled by the server and streamed over the network to one or more clients. Clients can then install the MediaPortal Client software and use the TV-Server to watch live or recorded TV, schedule recordings, view and search EPG data over the network. Since version 1.0.1, the client plugin of the TV-Server has replaced the default built-in TV Engine. Even without a network (i.e. a singleseat installation), the TV-Server treats the PC as both the server and the client. The TV-Server supports watching and recording TV at the same time with only one DVB/ATSC TV Card, on the same

transponder In telecommunications, a transponder is a device that, upon receiving a signal, emits a different signal in response. The term is a blend of ''transmitter'' and ''responder''. In air navigation or radio frequency identification, a flight trans ...

(multiplex). Broadcast Driver Architecture is used to support as many TV cards as possible. The major brands of cards, like digital-everywhere, Hauppauge,

Pinnacle A pinnacle is an architectural element originally forming the cap or crown of a buttress or small turret, but afterwards used on parapets at the corners of towers and in many other situations. The pinnacle looks like a small spire. It was main ...

, TechnoTrend and TechniSat, including analog cards, provide BDA drivers for their cards.

Video/DVD player

The video player of MediaPortal is a

DirectShow DirectShow (sometimes abbreviated as DS or DShow), codename Quartz, is a multimedia framework and API produced by Microsoft for software developers to perform various operations with media files or streams. It is the replacement for Microsoft's ea ...

Player, so any codec/filter can be used. MediaPortal uses the

codec A codec is a computer hardware or software component that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder o ...

from LAV Filters by default, but the

can be changed to all installed ones, such like

Ffdshow ffdshow is an open-source unmaintained codec library that is mainly used for decoding of video in the MPEG-4 ASP (e.g. encoded with DivX or Xvid) and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video formats, but it supports numerous other video and audio formats as well. ...

, PowerDVD, CoreAVC, Nvidia PureVideo etc. MediaPortal also support video post-processing, with any installed

. Due to the

player implementation, MediaPortal can play all media files that can be played on Windows.

Music player

The default internal music player uses the BASS Engine with the BASS audio library. The alternative player is the internal

player. With the BASS Engine MediaPortal supports visualizations from Windows Media Visualizations,

Winamp Winamp is a media player (software), media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Rad ...

Visualizations including MilkDrop,

Sonic Sonic or Sonics may refer to: Companies *Sonic Drive-In, an American drive-in, fast-food restaurant chain * Sonic (ISP), an Internet provider CLEC, serving more than 100 California communities * Sonic Foundry, a computer software company whic ...

and Soundspectrum G-Force.

Picture player/organizer

Digital pictures/photos can be browsed, managed and played as

slide show A slide show, or slideshow, is a presentation of a series of still images ( slides) on a projection screen or electronic display device, typically in a prearranged sequence. The changes may be automatic and at regular intervals or they may b ...

s with background music or radio. The picture player uses different transitions or the Ken Burns effect between each picture.

Exif Exchangeable image file format (officially Exif, according to JEIDA/JEITA/CIPA specifications) is a standard that specifies formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras (including smartphones), scanners and other system ...

data are used to rotate the pictures automatically, but the rotation can be done manually too. Zooming of pictures is also possible.

Online videos

OnlineVideos is a plugin for MediaPortal to integrate seamless online video support into MediaPortal. OnlineVideos supports almost 200 sites/channels in a variety of languages and genres such like YouTube, iTunes Movie Trailers, Discovery Channel etc.

Series

MP-TVSeries is a popular TV Series plug-in for MediaPortal. It focuses on managing the user's TV Series library. The MP-TVSeries plugin will scan the hard drive (including network and removable drives) for video files, it then analyzes them by their path structures to determine if they are TV Shows. If the file(s) are recognized then the plugin will go online and retrieve information about them. You can then browse, manage and play your episodes from inside MediaPortal in a nice graphical layout. The information and

fan art Fan art or fanart is artwork created by Fan (person), fans of a work of fiction or celebrity depicting events, Character (arts), character, or other aspect of the work. As fan labor, fan art refers to artworks that are not created, commissione ...

it retrieves is coming from TheTVDB.com which allows any user to add and update information. The extension will automatically update any information when new episodes/files are added.

Movies

Moving Pictures is a plug-in that focuses on ease of use and flexibility. Point it to your movies collection and Moving Pictures will automatically load media rich details about your movies as quickly as possible with as little user interaction as possible. Once imported you can browse your collection via an easy to use but highly customizable interface.

Ambilight

AtmoLight is a plug-in that makes it possible to use all sorts of Ambilight solutions which currently are: * AmbiBox * AtmoOrb * AtmoWin * BobLight * Hue * Hyperion It also allows easy expansion for any future Ambilight solutions.

Hardware

Hardware, SD single tuner

For standard definition resolution playback and recording with

MPEG-2 MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods ...

video compression using a single TV tuner: * 1.4 GHz Intel Pentium III or equivalent processor * 256 MB (256

MiB The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

) of system RAM

Hardware, HDTV

For

HDTV High-definition television (HDTV) describes a television or video system which provides a substantially higher image resolution than the previous generation of technologies. The term has been used since at least 1933; in more recent times, it ref ...

(720p/1080i/1080p) playback/recording, recording from multiple tuners, and playback of MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) video: * 2.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent processor * 512 MB of system RAM

Display and storage, SD and HD

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

Operating system and software

Supported operating systems - version 1.7.1

* Windows Media Center Edition 2005 with Service Pack 3 * Windows Vista 32 and 64-bit with Service Pack 2 or later * Windows 7 32 and 64-bit * Windows 8 32 and 64-bit (as of v1.3.0) * Windows 8.1 32 and 64-bit (as of v1.5.0) As of version 1.7, MediaPortal is not officially supported on Windows XP
It will install, but warn the user of the unsupported status while doing so.

Software prerequisites - version 1.7.1

* Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 - with the .NET 3.5 features enabled, (as of v1.6.0) *

9.0c * Windows Media Player 11 (Only required on XP SP3, Windows Vista comes with WMP11 and Windows 7 comes with WMP12 already)

References

External links

* {{Home theater PC (application software) 2004 software Free television software Video recording software Free video software Television technology Television time shifting technology Software forks Internet television software Windows-only free software