media centre frontend for pc

Hey Guys

Just picked up a nice shuttle pc for use as a media centre for under the tv. its pretty powerful (well faster than my main setup anyways) 3ghz p4, 1gb ddr ram, 128mb radeon 9200se agp graphics with dvi output (have also bought a dvi-hdmi converter)

apart from the obvious and buying windows media centre edition, is there any alternate options to use? i know there are commercial ones such as nero home, powerdvd etc, but are there any decent open source ones for use on xp?

at the moment im fiddling around with one called media portal, which is pretty good so far.

what im ideally looking for is something along the lines of xbmc for the xbox, where i can play movies, music etc, and launch games as well without the need for keyboard and mouse to be hooked up, either by using a wireless gamepad or media remote to navigate menus etc.

i was considering linux, either unbuntu or kunbuntu, as am quite familiar with both of these, but then i loose the ability to play pc games (unless though wine, but thats not really a option)

Any Suggestions on what to try?

Cheers

DD

 

LinuxMCE looks amazing (check out the videos) but I don't think it's mature enough yet. You should try KnoppMyth (a knoppix based MythTV distro) too.
I'm using Media Portal, it's really nice if you got a remote control but it's nowhere near XBMC.

 

MediaPortal actually IS based on the source code of XBMC, so that is probably the closest you will get to XBMC on PC

 

I dled and compiled the XBMC linux port last night, pretty good but not very useful. It only ran ~2-3fps

 

Just get XP Media Center. Easier to setup.

 

I like XPMC myself. I've just setup my Wiimote to control it via BT, but for some reason the two won't sync up on boot. Anyone got any tips?

 

yea, try using the PS3 BT remote buddy

 

what kind of game are you going to play? if you like directx games/emulator you can use cedega, a special version of wine that allow you to play directx game. you must check che compatibily list first...

if you like emulators you don't need wine and, there are port and native version of mame, zsnes etc etc...

 

Mainly for pc gaming (im a point a click fan) but at the moment ive settled for winXP and media portal frontend, works pretty good thus far and looks damned good playing x264 movies on a 37" screen! plus my tv supports most native VGA resolutions, so for gaming its pretty good also.

Will stick with XP for now, as am still getting used to Kunbuntu on a old celeron 600 laptop, but i am impressed with how far linux has come along since i used to use redhat years ago