Bit of background before I kick right into this one.
I’ve been using windows media center in it’s various flavours since 2005. It has gone through many changes since then bringing us to this point where in the soon to be released windows 8, it is basically a legacy product. I currently have a windows 7 media center attached to the main Tv in the living room, this is connected to a windows home server 2011 box in the loft that house a load of hard drives that has all our tv shows, and movies stored on it.
So as you can see from above I have basically become a become a media hoarder. Over the last few months I’ve been finding that we are using services like netflix and BBCiplayer a lot more. While these will not replace the blu-rays we have for the time being, they are more than good enough for day to day viewing. Especially with a four year old in the house who likes to watch the same thing over and over.
The question is now that microsoft are killing media center, is there an effective replacement. The answer for me is………. maybe. While there a number of really good possible replacements there is nothing out there that does everything (that includes WMC)
It’s simple really, I want all my movies, tv shows, iplayer, netflix, pictures and live Tv in one easy to use interface (not to much to ask is it?)
the options come from:
XBMC: http://xbmc.org/
Xbmc, has come a long way in the last few years, and offers a great range of features. Recently dvblogic released their Xbmc plugin for accessing live tv through their networked tuner, the little bit of testing I’ve done it seems to work great. The excellent plugin system means there pretty much anything you could want, from movies to tv and internet tv plugins like TWIT, revision3, ign and of course bbciplayer. These work great and add a layer that is severly lacking in Windows mediacenter. The missing link here Is great netflix support. With the next release (code named Frodo) it will add in native PVR support pretty much completing a fantastic media center replacement. This may give the the chance to move to XBMC for everything and use WMC as netflix only.
Media Portal: http://www.team-mediaportal.com/
Media portal is very similar to XBMC (it is a forked version after all) Again plugins offer a massive variety to what you can do. There is also good tv tuner support. There is also a solution to getting DVBlink working on the DVBlogic wiki, but I have yet to test this out. The one difference between this and xbmc is the speed. I tend to find xbmc faster, although the one thing I find media portal does really well is configeration, as it has a seperate config application.
JRiver media Center: http://www.jriver.com/
Jriver seems to be a very robust media center, and with continued development (as of today ver 18 beta is out) I have no doubt it will continue to improve. At the moment I’ve had very little time to really dig into it yet.
Windows Media Center
Windows MCE works great for live TV alongside mymovies, tunerfreemce. The missing piece here in the UK is a netflix solution. Without going into too much detail here, after many hours spent trying to get the US plugin working I have been able to get the plugin installed and working. The caveat? I want live tv as well. In order to get live tv working I need to have my region set as UK, as soon as I do that the netflix plugin disappears never to reappear again. In the mean time I have a solution where I have a netflix icon in media center the only problem is that it opens in a browser window therefore losing all 5.1 surround. So nearly but not quite.
So what now. Well the day to day buisness of tv archive, movie and live tv viewing is still going through the windows media center, I need a stable system with high wife acceptance factor. My xbox 360 is currently seeing the lions share of our netflix and iplayer viewing as the apps are high quality and streaming works very well. I’ve also modded my 360 somewhat to run 2 nearly silent 60mm fans with a speed controller, this makes it more than usable in the noise stakes, although it still not as quite as my HTPC. I will definaty keep playing around with XBMC for the moment.
With windows 8 on the horizen, great netfix and iplayer apps may see me take that path. Whilst using XBMC for live tv and archive playback.
Not forgetting the likes of the Roku (which whilst I don’t have one looks to be a great streaming device) WDTV devices and of course the appleTV.
More options than you can shake a stick at. But still I look that elusive one device that will do it all. Will I ever find it? Who knows? But as an enthusiast in this field I have no doubt I am gonna have loads of fun and spend many hours trying to find it.
Oh and not forgetting the rasberryPi. Might be getting one of those next month to have a tinker with.
Until next time thanks for reading, any comments or feedback very welcome.
Cheers
Paul
DadHusbandAndGeek 
Roku rocks! Been using it for years… certainly for us in the USA I can see my Netflix, Amazon on-demand and Hulu accounts all in once place. The box is $100 and then just your regular subscriptions. I wish that our Panasonic TV was as integrated although that’s pretty cool as I can get all these channels plus Skype which is cool.
That said, if I could have all that then my own personal stuff via the same medium I’d be set:)
Am seriously considering selling/donating my DVD (and maybe Blueray) stuff….as we NEVER watch it!
I can pick up a roku over here for £100 and through a bit of giggery pokery i’ll be able to access us content, but i’d have to clear it through the finance commitee at home, and it’s another box and another remote, my better half already loses track of which remote does what. 🙂