Killer Mediacenter's Top 5 Mediacenter Apps
H P Ladds
From: Taylor Banks <tay...@killermediacenter.com>
Date: Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 8:34 AM
Subject: Killer Mediacenter's Top 5 Mediacenter Apps
To: Preston Ladds <househo...@gmail.com>
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Does your TV make you mad? :( Your mediacenter should be the centerpiece of your home theater and is there to make it easy for you to find, play and enjoy your music, movies and television shows. (Our Killer Mediacenter gives us a 96-inch screenful of whatever-the-hell-we-want-to-watch, whenever-we-want-to-watch-it. :) I mean, it's your media, right?! We want you to be able to stream all of your media from virtually every device in your home to every device you own, including your PCs, Macs, iPods, iPhones, iPads, and Android devices! That's what we call a Killer Mediacenter. There are certainly tons of options for home theater PCs available. We've found that only a select few can provide all of the features of a Killer Mediacenter, which has got to be able to: [✔] Get and play tons of FREE content, legally! If you attend our Action Class in January, you'll learn step-by-step, exactly how we build our own mediacenters. XBMC contributes much of the feature set listed, with plugins and dozens of tweaks to ensure that media that streams to and from every room in our own homes and offices, seamlessly. As you embark on the Killer Mediacenter path of your own, there are a few solutions and platforms that we think you should keep on your radar. These are our Top 5: XBMCWe believe XBMC is the real standout in the list, and it's why we've based much of our Killer Mediacenter class around it. XBMC provides a beautiful and polished interface with tons of functionality. It's also highly customizable with skins and plugins, and is the basis for several other mediacenter projects and live operating systems, including Plex, Boxee, Element, XBMCLive, and OpenElec. One of the most notable qualities of XBMC is its library management. Unlike traditional file-system browsers or "channel-oriented" approaches, XBMC automatically finds and displays extensive metadata for TV shows and movies, resulting in an interface that is at once user friendly and also extremely extensible. Because of its flexibility, excellent interface and the ability to front-end everything from your own videos to streamed and downloaded content (including Netflix and Amazon VOD) to live and recorded TV, we use XBMC as the basis for almost all of our Killer Mediacenters. BoxeeBoxee, which started out as a fork of XBMC, has grown into a full-featured and popular mediacenter front-end of its own, with little evidence of it's XBMC roots remaining. Boxee presents a radically different approach to content as compared to XBMC by focusing on delivering web content through pseudo-traditional media 'channels,' a growing variety of which are browsable directly within Boxee's app library. PlexAlthough Plex also started as a fork of XBMC, like Boxee, Plex has taken on a life of its own. Although the interface still shares much in common with XBMC, the architecture of Plex is quite different in that it takes a client-server approach to library management and streaming, relying on a Plex server to deliver media to one or more Plex front-ends, including those running on Apple TVs, iPods and iPads or Android devices. MythbuntuMythbuntu (based on MythTV) presents a different breed of mediacenter, in that it is designed to provide PVR capabilities for an existing Cable, Satellite, or OTA (over-the-air) television feed. Although Mythbuntu isn't as well suited to getting, managing and viewing free content from the Internet, it's certainly a killer (and super-easy) alternative to a PVR or DVR like TiVo or the CPE (customer premises equipment) provided by major cable and satellite providers. MythTV supports an extensive variety of hardware for displaying live TV and is considered by many to be the best TV tuner capable mediacenter app available. Furthermore, XBMC includes a media source that can communicate with a MythTV backend to ensure standard XBMC navigation in a sensible way, with automatic commercial-skip and delete-after-watch capabilities! Windows Media CenterThe only exclusively Windows-based solution in our lineup, Windows Media Center is still a reasonably simple and effective mediacenter that comes pre-loaded on high-end editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7. Though WMC provides a fairly easy DVR if you have the right hardware, streaming from Macs or Linux computers may prove to be a bit of a challenge. Furthermore, out-of-the-box codecs are a bit limited, so fewer videos will be supported for playback without a bit of hacking. Still, if you want a cheap mediacenter, it's hard to argue with "built-in to the operating system." :) If you're really intent on using Windows to power your Killer Mediacenter, we'd suggest you look at XBMC, Plex or our honorable mention for runner up: MediaPortal. MediaPortal has an interface much like XBMC, and similarly provides the ability to play local content as well as watch and record live TV, but it runs exclusively on Windows. References:
We hope we have helped expand your mediacenter horizons with some good information and some new apps to explore! Make sure to follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, circle us on G+ and share this message or a link to our mailing list with friends you think would be interested! If you're planning on attending our live event in January, registration is limited, so make sure and sign-up today! Let us know what questions come up in your media center adventures and how we can help you take advantage of all the great technology out there! Cheers,
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