Need software for a media PC, Please Help!

[kingy]

I’m going to be building a PC for the living room and have a few 2tb hdd in there to store all my videos and music.

I’m searching for a player that can read all formats of music and video including iso files, also what I want to be able to do within this program is have a picture of the DVD cover of the movie or TV show with information on there as well like how long it is, the year it was made and the synopsis as well.



Basically I’m looking for an iTunes type of player but for videos.


Where can I find such a player? If someone could point me in the right direction as I can only find windows media centre, xmb and boxee and they don’t let me add information in and a box art picture.

[garryward]

Check out

http://www.mediabrowser.tv/ as a plugin for MCE

and MPC-HC for the player

[jagabo]

Take a look at Boxee or XBMC.

[mh2360]

As garryward said Mediabrowser is very good, but you have to use it from within Media Centre. If you don't have (or like) Media Centre then Mediaportal has the "Moving Pictures" and "MP-TV Series" plugins, which do the same thing, one for movies the other for TV series.

When you set up programs/plugins like these they expect the tv series to be named and set out in a certain way.

First you need a folder named as the title of the series and inside that you need a folder for each season called "Season 1" "Season 2", etc, inside each of those you need each episode of the series to be named as below.

showname - S02E01- episodename.avi

or

showname - 02x01- episodename.avi

Where the "S02E01" would be season 2 episode 1, this is so that the episode information, covers and screenshots can be grabbed automatically from sites such as thetvdb.com

[bendixG15]

Take a look at Boxee or XBMC.

Looks like XBMC had a huge update a few weeks ago.

[TimA-C]

You might want to have a look at GB-PVR as well. (There's a new version being tested at the moment currently called N-PVR)