XBMC question

I am very new to all of this but I asked about XBMC vs WMC in another thread and was told that if you are watching live TV you want to use WMC for sure. I guess XBMC does not support that very well at this point. I feel like, from everything I have been reading, XBMC and WMC are fairly similar in most other areas though.

XBMC has everything built in. You don't have to rely on getting codecs for playback or software that will get posters and descriptions for all your media. It's also extremely lightweight and runs on old hardware much better than WMC. There are addons you can get for playing Hulu, ESPN, MLB, Youtube, Revision 3, anything you can think of really it's probably available for xbmc.

Depends on which "LiveTV" your after. Cablecard or Antenna? For digital capture devices without a cablecard, XBMC and MythTV have some workaround solutions and WMC has a dead-simple out of the box solution. If you're in the US, and you want to view your subscription to Comcast, Time Warner, FiOS, Cox, etc (U-Verse no luck) then you currently MUST use WMC.

There are good programs out there like MCEBuddy that take WMC's livetv recordings, convert them to mp4, rename, comskip, and move to your stored folders. They can then be viewed in XBMC, Mediabrowser, or whatever

XBMC, Mediabrowser, etc are just frontends for stored movies, shows, music with XBMC having some livetv support for Digital OTA broadcasts

XBMC will support live TV just fine. What it will not do, just like every other non-WMC media player is play cablecard programming that is flagged copy-once by the cable company. This includes virtually all premium channels, like HBO, and most channels like ESPN, A&E, etc. There are exceptions,and it varies by cable company. Only WMC will do this.

Can XMBC and WMC with Media Browser co-exist on the same PC so I can test to see which I like better?

Yes they can.

I started with XBMC and so am a little biased in its favor. I find it much more customizable than WMC and very easy to use/setup. It also makes migration of your media library database very simple with its export database functionality. That said, as others have mentioned, it can't handle premium TV content. Because of this, I use both programs but for different things. WMC for live and recorded TV. XMBC for my media library which includes TV shows I want to keep. MCEBuddy monitors WMC's Recorded TV folder, converts and moves the files if they are non-copy once flagged. I also use the XBMC integration plugin for WMC so switching back and forth between the two is easy to do with a remote control.

My suggestion though - play around with both and see which you feel more comfortable with. Both are excellent programs depending on your needs.

I am watch OTA signals only with the DVR functionality, etc... Is this available with XMBC?

I second the plugin for WMC. This was another concern as the wife will not like having to use the keyboard to move over to XMBC

Yes, I use WMC for recording live tv and XBMC for everything else.

http://xbmcwmc.teknowebworks.com/

If you haven't already, I would recommend trying out the Aeon Nox skin. I was previously using the Aeon MQ3 skin and loving it but Aeon Nox offers so much more customizablity in your views and what widgets you can place on the home screen that I don't see myself using any other skin. Aeon MQ4 is currently close to being released but it would have to offer so much more than Aeon MQ3 for me to consider switching from Aeon Nox.

I really like XMBC's latest build with AudioEngine and the ability to bitstream HD codecs. This combined with Aeon Nox make everything else fall so short. Plex Media Server is fantastic for streaming/transcoding the same library of BDs to iOS devices (iPhone 4 / iPad 3rd Gen) over the internet on the go.

You can go into the skin settings and customiser and change or remove whatever is on the home screen in Aeon Nox. So you could create virtual playlists that separate your kids movies and whatever other categories you want to set up and then set them as items on the home screen. You can also deactivate items you don't use like Concerts or Programs. TV shows and Movies are there by default and will show everything that you have in your library that was scraped into either category. The thing I love about Aeon Nox is the customizability. So someone like myself who loves all the little widgets and added features can have all that stuff but you can still make it pretty basic by just selecting what you want to see. There are also other skins that are pretty simple and straightforward but I'm not sure how customizable they are in regards to what you can add or remove to the home screen.

To separate out content, you could put all the kids stuff into a separate top level folder then add that folder as a source and call it 'Kids Movies' etc and set the scraper accordingly (movies or TV).

Use the profiles feature. You can setup a profile for the kids that's password free that only points towards the media you want them to have access to. Setup a second profile for you that can access everything and set a password on it.

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Profiles

Sadly, what you want to do is easier in MB than it is in XBMC. (I am a XBMC user...have been for years) but the one complaint I see most often
from MB users coming over to XBMC is the lack of an easy way to seperate movies.

But, there is hope as the new version of XBMC being worked on now has a way to do what you want. It doesnt look like the easiest or most elegant solution, but it may be what you are after: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Custom_Video_Nodes
Looks like the newest nightlies have the feature.

(BTW, did you ever solve your problem of only 10% of your movies showing up?)

You can just deactivate the default Movies menu item and create virtual playlists for the categories you want. Then you just add those as main menu items and you have your movies separated. It's really not that hard once you get used to creating virtual play lists and navigating the skin settings options to deactivate menu options you don't use and create ones for the stuff you do want to see like your kids movies.

I have mine setup like this:

Media Library
|
|__Movies (contains video files named as Title (yyyy))
|
|__TV__Show1__Season1 (contains episodes named as Title SxxExx)
.......|.............|__Season2
.......|
.......|__Show2
.......|
.......|__etc

I would suggest having a second set of movies and TV folders for just kids content then adding them as sources with links on the XBMC main home screen.

Edit: formatting didn't work so well but you get the idea.