XBMC and MediaPortal, How closely related are they?

By jane | March 14, 2010

  • I just recently set up my xBox using XBMC as my main dashboard. I really like it. It is much easier and open than Microsoft's XP Media Center Edition or Vista's Media Center. Looking for a solution for my Desktop that hosts all my XBMC media files I came across Media Portal. I was hoping somebody had ported XBMC to a PC already but I see it is still in the works. According to the MEdia Portal site it was started by some of the same guys that started/worked on XBMC? Is this true? If so is there any kind of built in interoperability? Shared database? Anything?


  • Three other things to add which is:

    1. There is an (archaic) mediaportal script and plugin which ostensibly allows you to control video recording and view EPG from mediaportal and to access and play the recorded videos remotely (but not live TV).

    2. There's a TV server application produced by team mediaportal which isn't exclusively aimed at mediaportal but at other applications too (not sure how it works UPnP? I'm currently trying to find out if this works for live TV (Orb apparently allows you to do this but I've never got round to attempting this. NE1 any experience with this?)

    3. Actually you *can* run XBMC on windows as there's an app for doing it **BUT** it was intended for script development and testing skins and unless you're computer's uber good I suspect mediaportal would be a much better choice.

    Also remember you can share the directory for mediaportals recordings and watch them over Samba shares. ;-)


  • It is true that MediaPortal initially started as XBMC port to Windows but that was about 4-years ago now and A LOT has changed over the years since then, in both softwares, so there is not much interoperability between them any longer (if any), ...I guess the most common thing between them is the skinning-engine, which makes it fairly easy for a good skinner to port skins from one of the software to the other and vice versa. There is no other interoperability such as databases, etc.

    If TV-tuning and recording from live-TV is a must then MediaPortal might be a good choise (as there is no such function in XBMC yet), but if you do not care about that and only want to playback downloaded video and music files on a dedicated computer then I recommend XBMC for Linux instead (please search, we have a forum for it).







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