[david81]

Hello all.

Forgive me if I'm barking up the wrong tree here, but I'm in need of some advice.

I currently use SageTV for TV recording from a Hauppauge PVR-150 + HDHomerun, and XBMC for all my playback (TV, Movies, Music, etc.). I know there is a project to bring TV support to XBMC (unified front-end) but at this time I'm ok with two different programs as I rarely touch the backend stuff. I just set up favorites and away it goes. Once in a while I'll add a one off recording.

As it stands though, I play back the shows from file view. One large folder that holds everything and isn't very pretty. Now that I have my movies looking great (thanks to djh and fekker) I'd like something similar for my TV shows.

I don't really keep anything archived (Planet Earth being the only exception currently). I record shows that we don't have time/aren't around to watch and watch them later. Most are only around for a few days or a few weeks if we get behind on a particular show.

SageTV does a great job of recording, and the client version is OK for the one room that has an HTPC to watch live TV, but the way it names and stores recorded files isn't too compatible with the TV scrapers in XBMC or MediaInfoPlus.

I've done a bit of reading on Mediaportal, and it seems that it may be able to record the with proper nomenclature (showname/season#/XXXXXs##e##.mpg). Theoretically I could set up MIP to run the commandline tv scraper when a recording completes (using DirMon) and grab the appropriate nfo and thumbs. Then when opening TV Shows I could update the library and have everything ready to go with a proper looking interface.

Thoughts?

Is MediaPortal an adequate replacement for SageTV to accomplish my goals? Any other options I should be considering?

[PainToad]

I used MP years ago, few weeks back I decided to give version 1 a try (as I finally decided to buy a tunner). After a day, I reformatted and straight back to xbmc/linux. MP is the ugliest most poorly disgned crap imo.

I ended up with a combo of mythtv and XBMC (switching with menu items i hacked together in both apps).

Near perfect.

[david81]

I used MP years ago, few weeks back I decided to give version 1 a try (as I finally decided to buy a tunner). After a day, I reformatted and straight back to xbmc/linux. MP is the ugliest most poorly disgned crap imo.

I ended up with a combo of mythtv and XBMC (switching with menu items i hacked together in both apps).

Near perfect.

I'm currently trying out gbpvr as the backend recorder. It's a bit of a pain to set up but offers great flexibility in file naming/location. It also offers multi-record, which I understand is also offered by MythTV. I just can't make the switch to linux personally. I have too much running on the Windows box already.

The client/server functionality of GBPVR is a bit lacking as it hasn't been updated for digital/HD material. Perhaps this weekend will see me trying out MediaPortal after all.

If they could only port MythTV to Windows I'd be a happy camper.