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  1. Member
    Join Date
    May 2009
    Location
    United States
    Search Comp PM
    Hi,

    I'm looking for some suggestions of media center applications, didn't really find a lot in the tools section and figured someone here could help.

    What I've got today is a Philips DVP5990 with a couple of 500GB WDC portable HDs for storage. Everything is encoded in a DiVX container with TMPGEnc Authoring Works 4 as the encoding package. ALL of my movies have soft subtitles. I'm rapidly approaching a full first drive and although I already have a largely empty second drive, I really don't want to be switching drives continually, along with having to track whats on each drive. Obviously I could move up to a larger external, but eventually I'll hit the limit of that as well.

    I've been reading a little about the WD TV and I may pick on up next time they go on sale at Best Buy, but that will still lock me into purchasing a lot of external drives, and if I want to go with a single drive capacity of more than 500GB I have to start getting into power bricks for the drives.

    So, I've been playing around with the idea of buying some parts and putting together a cheapish desktop PC with a a ton of SATA ports, buying half a dozen 1GB internal drives and hooking that up to my TV. I was originally planning to do this as a test with some old hardware I have laying around and to that end loaded Ubuntu 9.04 up and played with that a little (it's been a while since I used Linux, back in the Slackware 3 days I think). The problem is that I haven't seen any packages that jump out at me for playback. It looks like there are a few decent player apps, but I didn't see anything that will let me browse my collection as a whole without navigating folders via a file manager.

    I'm not wedded to the idea of linux, Vista or XP would be fine as well. I'm also not all that concerned about the container I use for the movies, if necessary I could reencode the movies into a MKV with H.264 if necessary, but I do need it to support soft subtitles.

    I really do want a remote for file navigation, pausing and such (I work from home most days and I need to be able to pause a movie when I get a call). I've got a Samsung LCD TV with HDMI, so connecting to the TV shouldn't be a problem.

    So, is there anything out there that fits what I'm looking for or should I just wait for the WD TV to go on sale and go with that.

    Thanks for any comments.
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  2. if its a pc based app you are after a very good free app is MediaCompanion. it grabs posters and fanart (you can also add your own) and it can handle most formats (m2ts, ts, mkv, avi, iso, etc). the most up to date version is available in the announcements section of the forum.
    on a hardware front you could look at a popcornhour the b110 may be up your street but the a110 or a100 are very good units too, i have an a100 and i cant really fault it.
    it may not do you any harm to check out mpcclub if you are in the in the media player market.
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  3. Member
    Join Date
    May 2009
    Location
    United States
    Search Comp PM
    Actually, it seems like what I'm looking for is XBMC. I mistakenly thought it was just a XBOX media center. After looking at the MediaCompanion link I tried XBMC and it looks awesome. I see it supports embedded subtitles, but for some reason it didn't show them on the first test I did.

    So, thanks very much!
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  4. i would thouroughly recommend XBMC i have an old xbox in the bedroom running it and its top noch. the only downside is the old xbox is not up to HD material - not sure how that would work out on a pc though.
    you can find XBMC skins here and here (Aeon and Mediastream are excellent HD skins) and binary releases here[/url]
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