I should have been more specific. Youtube, sbs on demand, iview etc are all legal options. A Samsung Smart Tv has better connectivity to these than seems to be possible with W7MC. Of course you can reach for the keyboard and fire up a browser but that defeats the purpose of a htpc in my opinion.
Sorry, I wasn't really referencing what you said, I was more talking about people are looking for a player for their downloaded content, & WMCs videos section doesn't cut it. It was a large driver of traffic here - e.g. "I've got X thousand videos & the Videos section keeps redoing the thumbnails & it takes all day." Once the answer became, "just install MediaBrowser", that issue pretty much went away. Since I joined in 2006, these show-stopper problems are no longer problems:
- 50Hz
- Native resolution
- EPG
- Codecs
- The Videos Section
- Sleep/wake
The chances are, you won't strike any issues with the above when starting out, so you're not going to seek this site out. It's only when you run in to specifics that you might start searching. In 2006, you wouldn't have got things up & running without a visit here.
Do you think that xbmc with one of the tv server options is as solid as MC?
Not yet. TV in XBMC has had to go backwards a little to make functionality the same with any TV server, but it's now progressing again. With the current builds around, you can do good live TV, you can playback recordings, you can playback in-progress recordings, but you can't live pause, schedule recordings (well), delete recordings or set/use watched position (so if you play something back on XBMC, it won't mark where you're up to, or it won't observe where you were up to on another front end). However, there are test builds with live pause & watched position, & the rest is being worked on.
For video playback, it's much nicer.
I don't think MP TV Server is good enough - it just isn't quite right. ForTheRecord TV server however is rock solid (once you get it setup). When used with MediaPortal, it is as solid as WMC (more so actually - I've never missed a recording with it), but has the added advantage of being full client server. MP has some amazing plugins (for TV series, movies, online videos including iView), but even having used it for 18 months, I kind of find myself hoping that XBMC becomes a full TV client quickly as it just feels more solid.
What it boils down to is if you want just a PVR, a $50 STB & a USB hard drive now gives you that. A $100 WDTV Live gives you excellent video playback if that's your content. Proper combos of the 2 are starting to appear if you need all in one. Dropping $500+ on an HTPC that will probably need a little nursing doesn't appeal to a lot of people. We want the flexibly & are a little masochistic when it comes to tinkering, so we'll keep on with this stuff, but the era of mainstream HTPCs (if they ever were mainstream) is over.
Justin
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. But once W7 came along it really was a case of setup and just use it. It just works.
