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 the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

media player and

digital video recorder A digital video recorder (DVR) is an electronic device that records video in a digital format to a disk drive, USB flash drive, SD memory card, SSD or other local or networked mass storage device. The term includes set-top boxes with direct to d ...

software project, often considered an alternative to

Windows Media Center Windows Media Center (WMC) is a defunct 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 Ultimate e ...

. It provides a 10-foot user interface 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 Last.fm is a music website founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. Using a music recommender system called "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of the tracks the user listens to, e ...

, 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, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

was initially forked from

XBMC Kodi (formerly XBMC) is a free and open-source media player software application developed by the XBMC Foundation, a non-profit technology consortium. Kodi is available for multiple operating systems and hardware platforms, with a software 10 ...

(now

Kodi KODI (1400 AM) is a radio station broadcasting a news/talk format. Licensed to Cody, Wyoming, United States, the station is currently owned by the Big Horn Radio Network, a division of Legend Communications of Wyoming, LLC, and features programm ...

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

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

, 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 In 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 platforms. Some cross-platform software r ...

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, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

/ 7 * TV / Radio ( DVB-S,

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 Proje ...

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 Febr ...

, DVB-C,

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 In Digital Video Broadcasting, the Common Interface (also called DVB-CI) is a technology which allows decryption of pay TV channels. Pay TV stations want to choose which encryption method to use. The Common Interface allows TV manufacturers to ...

DVB Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) is a set of international open standards for digital television. DVB standards are maintained by the DVB Project, an international industry consortium, and are published by a Joint Technical Committee (JTC) o ...

radio Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmit ...

EPG Electronic programming guides (EPGs) and interactive programming guides (IPGs) are menu-based systems that provide users of television, radio and other media applications with continuously updated menus that display scheduling information for ...

Teletext A British Ceefax football index page from October 2009, showing the three-digit page numbers for a variety of football news stories Teletext, or broadcast teletext, is a standard for displaying text and rudimentary graphics on suitably equipp ...

, etc...) *

IPTV Internet Protocol television (IPTV) is the delivery of television content over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. This is in contrast to delivery through traditional terrestrial, satellite, and cable television formats. Unlike downloaded media, ...

* 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 year ...

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 kin ...

player * Picture player * Internet Streams * Integrated Weather Forecasts * Built-in RSS reader * Metadata web scraping from

TheTVDB TheTVDB.com is a community driven database of television shows. All content and images on the site have been contributed by the site's users; the site uses moderated editing to maintain its own standards. Purpose The stated aim to be the most co ...

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 Keyboard may refer to: Text input * Keyboard, part of a typewriter * Computer keyboard ** Keyboard layout, the software control of computer keyboards and their mapping ** Keyboard technology, computer keyboard hardware and firmware Music * Musi ...

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 Gamepads generally feature a set of ...

Kinect Kinect is a line of motion sensing input devices produced by Microsoft and first released in 2010. The devices generally contain RGB cameras, and infrared projectors and detectors that map depth through either structured light or time of flig ...

Wii Remote The Wii Remote, also known colloquially 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 ...

* Android /

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

WebOS webOS, also known as LG webOS and previously known as Open webOS, HP webOS and Palm 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 ...

/ 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

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 word, blend of ''transmitter'' and ''responder''. In air navigation or radio frequency identification, a T ...

(multiplex).

Broadcast Driver Architecture The Broadcast Driver Architecture (BDA) is a Microsoft standard for digital video capture on Microsoft Windows operating systems. It encompasses the ATSC and DVB standards and gives developers a standardized method of accessing TV tuner devices ( ...

is used to support as many TV cards as possible. The major brands of cards, like digital-everywhere,

Hauppauge Hauppauge ( ) can refer to: *Hauppauge, New York, a hamlet on Long Island in the United States *Hauppauge Computer Works, a computer component company located in Hauppauge, New York **Hauppauge MediaMVP, a network media player by Hauppauge Computer ...

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 mainly ...

, TechnoTrend and

TechniSat TechniSat is a German manufacturer of direct broadcast satellite receivers. The company produces televisions, car navigation and entertainment systems as well. Together with Loewe and Metz, it is one of the few remaining independent consumer elect ...

, 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 ear ...

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

codec A codec is a device or computer program 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 on a signal or da ...

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 we ...

PowerDVD CyberLink PowerDVD is a universal media player for movie discs, video files, photos and music. During 2016, PowerDVD achieved certification from the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) for the playback of Ultra HD Blu-ray Discs, and became the world's ...

CoreAVC CoreAVC was a proprietary codec for decoding the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding) video format. In 2010, when CoreAVC was a software-only decoder, it was one of the fastest software decoders, but still slower than hardware-based ones. C ...

Nvidia PureVideo PureVideo is Nvidia's hardware SIP core that performs video decoding. PureVideo is integrated into some of the Nvidia GPUs, and it supports hardware decoding of multiple video codec standards: MPEG-2, VC-1, H.264, HEVC, and AV1. PureVideo occupie ...

etc. MediaPortal also support

video post-processing The term post-processing (or postproc for short) is used in the video/film business for quality-improvement image processing (specifically digital image processing) methods used in video playback devices, such as stand-alone DVD-Video players; video ...

, 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 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 Radionomy in 2014. Sinc ...

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

s with background music or radio. The picture player uses different transitions or the

Ken Burns effect The Ken Burns effect is a type of Panning (camera), panning and Zoom lens, zooming effect used in film and video production from still imagery. The name derives from extensive use of the technique by American documentarian Ken Burns. This technique ...

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 fans of a work of fiction and derived from a series character or other aspect of that work. They are usually done by amateur artists, semi-professionals or professionals. As fan labor, fan art refers to ...

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 video coding format, coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of Lossy compression, lossy video compression and ...

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

Hardware, HDTV

For

HDTV High-definition television (HD or HDTV) describes a television system which provides a substantially higher image resolution than the previous generation of technologies. The term has been used since 1936; in more recent times, it refers to the g ...

(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 A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobil ...

with at least 128MB of video memory **

Graphics chips A video display controller or VDC (also called a display engine or display interface) is an integrated circuit which is the main component in a video-signal generator, a device responsible for the production of a TV video signal in a computin ...

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