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Previous review is unfair; this is a work in progress and it's free.
It looks a great deal better than BeyondTV, Showshifter, MCE, MyTheatre, iMedian, GBPVR, Meedio, and the others.
I've found that GBPVR has very bad stuttering when playing back live TV - this doesn't happen with MediaPortal or Showshifter.
Media Portal supports multiple DVB-T cards, plus analog MPEG2 capture cards + devices - BeyondTV still does not support DVB-T cards, and Meedio does not *officially* support more than one DVB-T card at a time. GBPVR supports multiple DVB-T cards and analog cards, but I think you have to specifically assign which channels you want to view against each DVB card which is painful.
However, GBPVR does allow you to have Media MVP devices around the house that can receive video from the central GBPVR - I don't think this is possible with Media Portal just yet.
Certainly, Media Portal has it's irritations; it still occasionally causes a BSOD when performing DVD playback for example.
But its potential (its source code is open, it's free, but it doesn't suffer the from hardware support strangling that occurs in Linux) makes it worth sticking with - and there are some really neat plugins such as being able to view lots and lots of movie trailers (assuming your Media PC has a connection to the internet), plus it's reasonably easy to get it to function with the myriad of remote controls out there.
The Lady of The House likes it, despite the fact it crashes occasionally (much less now it's reaching an official 0.2.0 release). She likes the cute little chap with the Popcorn when playing DVD's, and how he changes depending on what functionality is being used.
And believe me that's more important than the occasional instability if you want to have your Media Centre accepted underneath the TV.
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