[Khorus]

Hello all,

Just found out about XBMC and I've been fooling with it for a week or so. I must say, I'm VERY impressed by it. The interface rocks, skinable, fast and multi-platform. Congrats to the developpers on 8.10!

Now, I've got one of those speciality HTPC (a PC in a DVD case really) with a nice front led display and all. (It's an AlienWare DHS2 for those who wanna know!). The thing currently runs Vista Media Center rather slowly (the machine being a few years old, Intel P4 3.0ghz). Fortunately, I do have a decent videocard (NVidia 8000 series) for connecting to my 40" LCD TV.

So, I'd like to install a clean Win XP SP3 (probably TinyXP, or my own NLited version) and use XBMC exclusively. So far, ain't a problem.

The thing that I tried to understand was how the Live TV worked. I do understand that XBMC acts as a client and can play stream from various sources (SMB, UPnP, etc).

I probably need some kind of PVR "server" or something running in the background to record my shows (and stream Live TV) and tell XBMC to connect to it. I could probably hack the thing by saying "Stream from 127.0.0.1" but is there another way around?

What's the best Windows TV backend you guys use? I checked on MediaPortal's TV Server real fast... I wanted to use MythTV on Linux (Ubuntu) but my damn motherboard has a BIOS bug and the kernel panics at boot time! (Known bug, it's documented).

My ultimate goal is to have a dedicated HTPC running XBMC and the TV backend only. XBMC being my one and only interface. It would be a "Living Room" PC that my wife and kids could use.

Thanks for any help! XBMC Rocks,

Marc Girard
http://www.marcgirard.com

[paco]

Actually I currently use both myself. I have Vista MCE configured with 3 ATSC tuners and 2 analog cable tuners. Using the menu customizer, I modified the Vista MCE menu to only have a TV section and a 'Launch XBMC' section. I use Vista MCE to watch my recorded programs (it can run without a GUI in the background) and XBMC for everything else. If I launched XBMC from Vista MCE, I get sent back to the MCE GUI when I exit XBMC. To say that I love my setup is an understatement.

I wanted to give Myth a test but only 1 of my ATSC tuners is supported. MediaPortal is clumsy, slow and buggy (jack of all trades, master of none). I spent a good week trying to make MP work reliably before I decided on my current combo. Vista MCE is excellent for TV (it's included with the OS and no Guide-fee is even better). I have trained it quite well so it knows what shows I like and it queues them up 2 weeks in advance.

I can't praise the work the XBMC team is doing enough. This is THE killer HTPC app! The one all others try to imitate IMO.

[Khorus]

I tried ORB last night, it does work, the quality is quite low though. My main goal here would be to flush Vista all along as it's way too slow for old computers. I might try to find a UPnP server for MCE2005 and see how it works... The Live TV works OK in MCE2005.