Hi All, Just about to give up with my media centre PC. Got a few old bits together (Sempron 2400, 512MB RAM, GF5200) to run as a media machine to play MP4's on my TV, but every piece of media centre software i've tried has had massive flaws! MediaPortal was useless, half the time it felt like it barely knew what it was doing and took an age to load a fancy interface and not much else. XBMC was buggy as hell on Linux and wouldn't even start in Windows MCE was good, but trying to get it to read MP4 and AAC files isn't easy... Is there much left for me to try? Any suggestions guys?
VLC does great with AAC and MP4, along with a plethora of other formats. It runs natively on linux (at least on ubuntu) and on windows as well.
How about Elisa media center? Some friends of mine swear on it. Runs perfect on top Ubuntu and is very customicible (sp?)
VLC is an excellent video player, I'm not sure it would qualify as a media centre software though. That 'Elisa' antiHero linked to looks nice.
meedios is great (example vid) and extremely customizable via plugins, as well as an active forum e.g. you can set it to launch zoomplayer for playing mkv files, vlc for viewing dvd ISO files etc. and powerdvd for bluray discs but all this is set up in the config. so the user will just see video launch immediately.. this is windows software, but it's my fav. by far, compared to XBMC and mediaportal seeing how other people are asking about storing/accessing their media via HTPC as well, and the recent hardware guide, i wonder if bit are keen to do a software roundup maybe? or gauge interest in it before embarking like they did for the hardware.
Yeah VLC is great and I use it as standart for video for years but its not really what you would call a "Media frontend". I tryied VLC with Media Portal in a hybrid once and it was really good, but it took the guy ages to config that way
XBMC refusing to work, even on windows? thats strange as i run XBMC on an old laptop (not that old as it runs vista) and its wonderful. I tried it on linux (ubuntu) but the intel internal Graphics card sucks far too much for it to be useable, its a driver issue with linux. I use XBMC for its shiney front end, it passes the W/G-A test and the intergrated media scraper does the job really well. W/G-A = Wife/Girlfriend Approval
XBMC is hardly flawed. Not booting on your system is problem with you setup, not the program. Well worth getting it working.
