2014-09-27, 21:32
OK just finishing up a little after building my media Media Centre PC. Purely for reference (and so noone thinks my stuff is too slow to work properly, I am using a Zotan ZBox EN760 Plus as the base for my system. It's a tiny little box, but capable of playing most modern games on high and extreme settings. (It was basically intended to be Steam's Steambox, before Steam decided they couldn't get their controller ready on time). The Specs .can be found here: http://www.zotac.com/products/mini-pcs/z...tions.html
I am using two ASTROMETA DVB -T2 USB tuners, which despite their deceptively inexpensive price, give excellent performance in almost all other applications I have tried.
However I have noticed that Live TV performance in XBMC isn't so hot. Notably the image quality seems much poorer than in Media Portal. There is also (for want of a better word) quite frequent 'smearing' where portions of the playing video will appear to 'blend into each other.' This only seems to happen as far as I can tell on the HD channels and not anywhere else.
Some of you guys might think I'm being picky but it happens on average about once a minute and is sufficient to be annoying and to put me off the idea of watching live TV in XBMC.. After all the whole idea of HD is hugely increased image quality, so this intermittent glitching really serves to spoil this impression. In Media Portal itself there is still some occasional smearing, but it's much less frequent and much less severe than in XBMC. It would be great if there was none at all in either, but at least in MediaPortal it's a little more bearable.
Also the image quality in MediaPortal for LiveTV seems to be significantly better than for XBMC. (I guess someone is bound to pop up and say that as they use the same back-end that there should be no difference, but that really is my experience.)
I would love to wait for the developers to come up with a solution for this. I sincerely hope they do, as TV watching is a big part of my media centre experience. However in the interim I have looked at using Advanced Launcher to launch an instance of MediaPortal inside XBMC to handle Live TV and recording. This may seem like a cobbled together solution - and it is, but what am I supposed to do? XBMC can handle a lot of media types really well. It also has a lot of excellent media streaming resources and plugins. Mediaportal can't beat it in this regard. But MediaPortal TV performance is better, as is the EPG and recording functionality.
There are some frustrations in this approach too obviously. Firstly It means I have a whole unused section within XBMC for 'LiveTV'. Second to get to my Media Portal entry in Advanced Launcher, I have to navagate/click through about 3 or 4 different directory levels before I get to launch my app.
I seem to remember in the old (very old) days of XBMC when it ran on the old first gen XBox from MS, you could edit and change the entries in XBMC main menu (the bit you see at the start with 'pictures', 'videos' 'music', 'programs' etc.) and add your own entry. I wonder if that's still (or ever was?) possible. Ideally I could remove the default 'Live TV entry and add my own LiveTV entry, which would execute an advance launcher command upon selection to launch MediaPortal.
Being able to add one's own entries to the main menu window would have another advantage - and one that has been omitted from XBMC for several years now, in that ideally I would like to add my own section here for 'games'. this is a dedicated media centre PC. It's strictly for home entertainment, it won't be used for anything else, so clearly having a single interface to meet the majority of my needs would be helpful.
Second, unless you are very familiar with MediaPortal you might not know this, but how do I get MediaPortal to start up with the last watched TV channel in either fullscreen or minimised mode? (I haven't figured out which I prefer yet). Advanced Launcher allows one to add arguments to any executable, so if it's just a case of adding arguments what I wonder are these?
Third., failing being able to add my own entries to the XBMC main menu window, I would at least like to be able to add my Advanced Launcher program entries to the main 'programs' section. I'm sure my old XBox based XBMC did a better job of separating music, programs, games, movies etc than the more modern version does.
All input would be appreciated.
PS
Sorry for the long post, but after 72 hours non-stop configuration I just want to get this thing finished.
I am using two ASTROMETA DVB -T2 USB tuners, which despite their deceptively inexpensive price, give excellent performance in almost all other applications I have tried.
However I have noticed that Live TV performance in XBMC isn't so hot. Notably the image quality seems much poorer than in Media Portal. There is also (for want of a better word) quite frequent 'smearing' where portions of the playing video will appear to 'blend into each other.' This only seems to happen as far as I can tell on the HD channels and not anywhere else.
Some of you guys might think I'm being picky but it happens on average about once a minute and is sufficient to be annoying and to put me off the idea of watching live TV in XBMC.. After all the whole idea of HD is hugely increased image quality, so this intermittent glitching really serves to spoil this impression. In Media Portal itself there is still some occasional smearing, but it's much less frequent and much less severe than in XBMC. It would be great if there was none at all in either, but at least in MediaPortal it's a little more bearable.
Also the image quality in MediaPortal for LiveTV seems to be significantly better than for XBMC. (I guess someone is bound to pop up and say that as they use the same back-end that there should be no difference, but that really is my experience.)
I would love to wait for the developers to come up with a solution for this. I sincerely hope they do, as TV watching is a big part of my media centre experience. However in the interim I have looked at using Advanced Launcher to launch an instance of MediaPortal inside XBMC to handle Live TV and recording. This may seem like a cobbled together solution - and it is, but what am I supposed to do? XBMC can handle a lot of media types really well. It also has a lot of excellent media streaming resources and plugins. Mediaportal can't beat it in this regard. But MediaPortal TV performance is better, as is the EPG and recording functionality.
There are some frustrations in this approach too obviously. Firstly It means I have a whole unused section within XBMC for 'LiveTV'. Second to get to my Media Portal entry in Advanced Launcher, I have to navagate/click through about 3 or 4 different directory levels before I get to launch my app.
I seem to remember in the old (very old) days of XBMC when it ran on the old first gen XBox from MS, you could edit and change the entries in XBMC main menu (the bit you see at the start with 'pictures', 'videos' 'music', 'programs' etc.) and add your own entry. I wonder if that's still (or ever was?) possible. Ideally I could remove the default 'Live TV entry and add my own LiveTV entry, which would execute an advance launcher command upon selection to launch MediaPortal.
Being able to add one's own entries to the main menu window would have another advantage - and one that has been omitted from XBMC for several years now, in that ideally I would like to add my own section here for 'games'. this is a dedicated media centre PC. It's strictly for home entertainment, it won't be used for anything else, so clearly having a single interface to meet the majority of my needs would be helpful.
Second, unless you are very familiar with MediaPortal you might not know this, but how do I get MediaPortal to start up with the last watched TV channel in either fullscreen or minimised mode? (I haven't figured out which I prefer yet). Advanced Launcher allows one to add arguments to any executable, so if it's just a case of adding arguments what I wonder are these?
Third., failing being able to add my own entries to the XBMC main menu window, I would at least like to be able to add my Advanced Launcher program entries to the main 'programs' section. I'm sure my old XBox based XBMC did a better job of separating music, programs, games, movies etc than the more modern version does.
All input would be appreciated.
PS
Sorry for the long post, but after 72 hours non-stop configuration I just want to get this thing finished.