Software for Digital home Entertainment is one area where there has been frantic development in recent times. With the number of people who are into the "Home Entertainment Hub" this was expected. Though there were many products geared towards this aspect, it was Microsoft who jump-started the 'Home Entertainment' wagon with the development of the XBox and the humongously popular Windows Media Center Edition (MCE).
Though Windows MCE is an excellent product and is somewhat of a pioneering attempt in the development of HTPC (Home theater PC), it does have its limits. And the multitude of commercial solutions available on the shelves don't offer much either. This is where Open Source steps in.
MediaPortal by Erwin Beckers and team is the perfect solution for turning your PC into a complete Media Center. Well its not perfect, but the closest thing to it. Erwin was the founder of XBMC (Xbox Media Center) project who later went on to start MediaPortal as a free open source product.
There's more after the turn...
In their own words,MediaPortal is an Open Source application ideal for turning your PC / TV into a very advanced Media Center. MediaPortal allows you to listen to your favorite music & radio, watch and store your videos and DVDs, view, schedule and record live TV as a digital video recorder and much much more. You get MediaPortal as Open Source software. This means you can help in developing MediaPortal or tweak it for your own needs with lots of innovating plugins from our great community.
MediaPortal includes a host of excellent features.
To speak from a general overview, they are:
Create your own skins, or choose one of the available skins!
MediaPortal can easily be extended with extra plugins
You decide which keys you want to use for which actions
Internal support for several remote controls
Windowed and fullscreen support
And many more features like MyTV, MyVideo/DVD, MyRadio, MyPictures, MyMusic, MyWeather, Emulators, CD/DVD burning within MediaPortal, Email, PC monitoring, Scheduled Recording, alarms, games etc. MediaPortal is not a demo, shareware or anything like that. Rather it is a complete, free-to-use full version software that will turn your PC into a real 'Media Center' without changing much of your computer's hardware. Moreover, since it is open source, anyone can contribute to or customize the software according to their own requirements.
The hardware and software requirements to use this software is very much acceptable and will run as it is on almost every PC that is somewhat up to date. MediaPortal is developed on the Microsoft .Net framework using C#.
Download the full product here.
You can learn more about this amazing FREE, open source product by visiting their website, and also by having a look into this extensive documentation.
"Designing a Home Theater ? Why would someone design a home theater ?", one may think. Some people may feel that no designing needs to be done while setting up a Home Theater, you just shove the right equipment in the right places. While this may be true for most "Home Theaters" that are set up in living rooms or the "I too have a Media Room", we are not talking about those kind of setups.
If not them, then who are we talking about ?
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Well, we are talking about the serious Home Theater Enthusiast. The kind of person who would invest his time and money in building a great Home Theater setup or at the least one who would make some rather dramatic changes in the existing room setup to accommodate a kick-ass Home Theater. To make life easier for these kind of people, a number of software tools for planning,diagramming and making schematics for your Home Theater have been developed. They make it possible to design a complete and complex Home Theater setup, with all the different components, lighting, wiring, room setup etc, before starting the actual work of building it. Using these tools, you can have the actual plan in your hands and then go about on the business of building your dream Home Theater.
If you are planning your Home Theater from scratch, these tools will be of immense help. As with all software, there are both 'FREE' and 'PRO' type software packages available.
The 'PRO' tools include a host of excellent features to aid in schematics and design. Most notable among them is d-tool's System Integrator 5. It is one of the best in the business and its abilities go far and beyond designing a Home Theater. You don't have to spend big bucks to get some of the same features, a good many of the schematics can be made with Microsoft Visio. However its the custom templates and pro features that set quality designs apart from amateur doodles.
Among the 'Free' packages for designing a Home Theater or just making line schematics are AVsnap and Rack Tools. Of these, AVsnap from Altinex is actually very useful and more based on "wiring" in the two packages. You can create your own custom equipment types and then line draw all of the connections ahead of time, or use their pre-made library and modify the results to your system and needs.
Racktools from Middle Atlantic is geared more toward equipment layout. Even if you don’t end up purchasing one of their fine equipment racks, the space and dimension options of rack tools can be very useful for space planning.
If you’re planning a home theater system with a DVD player, A/V receiver, and a cable box, these tools might not really shed any more light on system design than a piece of paper could. But as more and more home theater systems approach the complex to ridiculous in intricacy, so does the need to fully plan them out ahead of time.
