what are the best front-end software options?

Have a look at GB-PVR. With some tweaking/hacking you can achieve most of what you're after, and it's free!

For blu ray playback within GB-PVR, I set up a custom menu option which kills the app, loads up PowerDVD and moves the mouse pointer off the screen. Works pretty well.

Yes, if you have the latest version of PowerDVD. You can also use ARCsoft Total Media Theater to do the same thing, I believe. I know it will play a BD movie folder so you might not even need an iso. I don't know for sure as I don't use TMT, though.

Check out XBMC for windows, the Aeon skin is stunning. Only problem is you have to use an external launcher plugin for tmt, but its fairly easy to setup.

edit:: not positive it supports iso's because i use mkv's, but it's the has the largest community and support out there, so i cant see why not.

I agree XBMC is in a league of its own. If i had my choice it would be XBMC or PLEX (which is a fork of XBMC for OS X) all we need now is a new mac mini with hdmi.

It supports ISO's , Rar's Zip's just about everything you can throw at it. iirc it supports bin/cue as well.

MediaPortal. Check out the guide in my signature.

Native playback coming soon with a plugin (I'm whurlston btw).

I don't have much experience in this area, please forgive me if I'm asking questions that are trivial.

Are there any evaluations/reviews for each of the front ends describing their features and capabilities? So far, from what I can tell, the front ends are pretty limited in their ability to present the user with a list of media options.

In other words, most of the functionality I've seen provide basic ways for listing movies, music, ect..., either alphabetically or by date.

I'd like something with the ability to list media by more varied options. Say. By genre, by type: Comedy, Drama, SciFi, Sports by rating: Y, G, PG, ect... or by predefined play lists.

I'd like to see similar options for photos. Display by who is in a photo, lets say all photos with Panamamike, photos by type: art, landscapes, portraits, people, ect. location: Beach, Mountains, Texas

I know this type of thing would require potential additional data entry, for photos, or tag info for movies and music. Do any front ends provide an interface to add that type of data for the media?

Are there any front ends that can do this type of thing.

Regards,

Mike

To piggyback on this thread...and so as not to create a new thread, I'll post here:

Can someone provide a synopsis of the various front-ends available to home theater n00bs? I can find out things about each of these (and have by reading the related threads), but can't seem to find reasons to choose one over the other.

So far, I'm considering XBMC, Media Center, and MediaPortal, mainly because of the vast amount of information available on each.

Things I'd like to accomplish with my HTPC:

1) archive and play sDVD
2) archive and play BD (eventually)
3) archive and play home videos
4) archive and view photos
5) play streaming video from Hulu and related sites

At the moment, we have HD DVR service, so we don't need to record TV, but in a few years, this may be something we'd like to be able to incorporate.

We haven't yet purchased the computer, so OS and other specs can be customized to fit the best available application.

I've been an avid user of Xlobby and really like it. Though I have used it so much, I'm pretty proficient in setting it up. That being said, I have to admit, I'm starting to look at XBMC more and more. Mainly for the fact that though Xlobby can do everything I ask of it, it is starting to show its age - being the last free version hasn't been updated in 2 years.

I give a quick synopsis of all the front-end software I have tried in the past here: http://sites.google.com/site/maycrea...ed-frontends-1 , though I don't get into full details of any of the software, I've just given a general view of them. A little biased, yeah...a little, but any mention of a particular front end from any general user will be a little biased.

Wo, that would be sweet! I'm assuming AnyDVD HD would still be required though.

Look into J River Media Center too; it's amazing for cataloging all your media and then deciding how you wish to view it. A bit of a learning curve if you want the cooler features, but worth it imo. Also, a lot of positive changes have been made to the Theater View big screen front end, but not as flashy as some of the XBMC skins for sure.
It plays back any formats that are supported by directshow, and will even launch external programs to handle certain filetypes should you specify that.

I really like media center with MediaPortal if you maintain your metadata, but then again I'm lazy and haven't taken the time to try and properly set up XMBC or MeediOS.

I've tried out a lot of the options myself and ended up sticking with Media Portal simply because it is the solution with the most options and customization abilities. Media Portal has also come a very long way since the 1.0.0 final release a few months back and its always improving.

Out of the box is pretty easy to setup and get going, but great thing about Media Portal is you can get it to do pretty much anything you need to through plugins and if it can't do something you want, a quick post on the message boards usually results in that functionality being added by someone very quickly. Right now I probably could not live without the MPTVSeries plugin among other features that are unique to Media Portal.

My only real issue with Media Portal at the moment is its high resource requirement though fortunately I'm now running a HTPC with plenty of resources for it. Stability also was a bit of a concern however the source of that seems to be plugins rather than the MP core and actually that has improved lately as well. I haven't had Media Portal crash once or had and reason to reboot my HTPC for about a month now. Blu-Ray integration is a bit iffy as well but I think thats a concern for a lot of the 'all-in-one' front ends since there aren't any available directshow filters for the formats.

What resources did you have before that struggled, and what are you using now?

I'm also curious.

I was thinking of using an X2 5050e and only around 2GB of RAM. I love MediaPortal and would recommened it over Media Center and XBMC over and over again. I *have* used all 3 extensively and for long periods of time. I've used XBMC all the way back to the xbox1 days, and was using Media Center for the better part of a year now until I switched to Media Portal. With its plugins, for fanart/information, it blows Media Center and XBMC out of the water.

I've only ever ran MediaPortal on a pretty beefy desktop solution with my TV as a second monitor. The HTPC I'm building will be significantly weaker.

I was previously running MediaPortal on an E6400 with 2GB of RAM over Vista. I believe the biggest issue was the amount of memory as I watched MediaPortal consume over 1GB of RAM at some points after being in modules that have background fanart. With that and Vista consuming so much RAM it would become sluggish often. I saw a few posts a few days ago on the MediaPortal forums from one of the dedicated developers showing concern about the amount of used RAM that was being reported so it could also be a bug that may be resolved soon.

My current system is an E8400 with 4GB of RAM running on Windows 7. I've had no performance issues with this system though MediaPortal RAM has hit the 1 GB mark a few times. At this point I wouldn't recommend running MediaPortal on anything less than 4GB. Considering the current price of RAM I wouldn't put anything less in a HTPC these days anyway.

Anyone care to compare/contrast MediaPortal with the latest XBMC? Pros/cons? Both look pretty stunning w/ great fanart, etc. What makes one better than the other?

win7/vista media center with media broswer, secondrun.tv and netflix addons.... plus whatever player you choose for bluray...

microsoft nailed this one.

So has anyone seen/done a direct comparison of frontends running on XP Pro? Vista is a resource hog by itself, and I think most people would rather use hardware resources of an htpc for playback, not OS "features" like Aero.

Being this seems like a Windows section, but I'll ask anyway (please don't be offended), but has anyone compared any htpc frontend on Win XP to a similar setup on Mythbuntu> If so, please comment or point me to the place where it's posted.

I'm running Vista Ultimate stripped down with vLite and NO, it isn't a resource hog. I tweaked it pre-installation with vLite by removing unnecessary junk. And then I tweaked it post-installation by disabling many services, Windows components, etc. My system is fast, blazing fast. I'm running MediaPortal 1.0.2 constantly and it handles everything I throw at it and the UI is snappy and responsive. All this with only 2GB of RAM.

Unless you've really taken the time to tweak Vista you shouldn't say it's a resource hog.

I could never get the same performance out of Windows XP on the same system.

Simple: MediaPortal supports hardware acceleration and TV tuners. XBMC doesn't. If you have a GPU you want to use for hardware decoding of high definition video, then XBMC isn't a good choice at all.

daMaster, I do appreciate your input, but when comparing Vista and XP, optimize both and then make your comparison. I can run multiple apps on XP with no performance degradation, even on an old P3-800 box w/1GB RAM. That box will also transcode an avi cleanly, although it does take awhile to do, the XP O/S on it is not optimized, it just works. Try that with Vista. MythTV also runs on that dual-boot box, with very good results, although it will not handle high resolution (720p+) .mkv files.

All I'm trying to make a point of is XP/Myth are much less resource intensive than Vista. Maybe you have tweaked Vista to wring out every ounce of performance, but I'd rather spend those hours enjoying my extensive video collection.

Now that XBMC supports HA (Nvidia) my vote is for XBMC.

Running mediaportal 1.02 with 1Gig of ram and an E6300. Not really having any slowdown / sluggish issues then again I don't run the tv-server.

XBMC has been the best option I've tried, although I haven't put much time into MediaPortal. XBMC support is superb too.

Are you referring to CUDA only for Nvidia? Sucks for us ATI users... Oh, and link to proof please? I just checked XBMC.org and don't see much info about it supporting HA.