MediaPortal is an Open Source application ideal for turning your PC in a very advanced Multi-Media Center / HTPC. MediaPortal allows you to listen to your favorite music & radio, watch your video's and DVD's, view, schedule and record live TV and much more.

As Open Source software licensed under the GNU/GPL agreement, you get MediaPortal for free. This means anyone can contribute to MediaPortal or customize for their own needs!

MediaPortal is built on the Microsoft .NET framework using C# and currently has a growing international community of over 10,000 users. Ive been using it for about 3 years now and have seen the project develop from a largely unreliable beta level product with a very temporamental installation through to its latest incanation of a centralised TV & Media Server with local clients. The potential for this project is massive since its widely regarded as being much better than the now abandoned Window Media Centre Edition. Likewise other projects - such as Meedio - which showed great potential have commonly been bought by the likes of Yahoo! without any subsequent product being delivered.

Perhaps the most remarkable element of MediaPortal is how its managed to keep on track, as it matures. Initially the project was an integrated TV & Media player based on a single machine. It has now progressed to a system with a Server & a Client, which can run on 1 machine, 2 machine (1 Server, 1 client) or multiple machines with multiple servers and clients, whilst still supporting the original format.

Unfortunately, as an Open Source project MediaPortal is still only in RC3 stage and thats after at least 3 years. However it is still useable if you can put up with a fair bit of restarting servers etc, and waiting for everything to load up on all systems. Despite this the guys are still working on rewriting the whole project from the ground up, inorder to create MediaPortal 2 which offers so much potential with a more efficient and robust structure.

The following is taken direct form the project's site;

History

MediaPortal's roots lie in the XBox Media Center (XBMC) project which goal was to build a media center application for the Microsoft XBox gaming console. The founder of XBMC, Erwin Beckers(also known as Frodo), concluded early in the XBMC project that there were notable limitations to the xbox platform, mainly that it is unable to support TV cards. XBox Platform limitations like these would ultimately hinder the vision of a feature rich media center application.

In February 2004, Erwin left the Xbox Media Center project to start a new project, now known as MediaPortal that would run on the Microsoft Windows platform. Initially existing code was re-used from the XBMC project but after several releases and innumerable feature enhancements there has been almost a complete re-design.

Today, MediaPortal continues as an open source project, has a core team of  developers and a growing community of over 10,000 registered users.

In 2006 MediaPortal enters a new aera with the release of the TV server. For the first time users can now use multiple frontends for viewing & recording TV streamed from 1 or more TV servers.