Ian's Digital Lifestyle

Hi Ian, thanks for all your efforts in bringing this show to all us media centre fanatics.
You read out an e-mail from one of your listeners, with regard to having TV, movies etc available throughout the home. Basically this was the reason I moved away from MC to a program called Media Portal.
Since I have installed Media Portal I now have my live TV (Satellite), Recorded TV, Movies, Pictures and music all round the home via small and silent extender PC's in each of the rooms, which run the client version of Media Portal.
I have a central Media Portal ' TV server' with 4 satellite tuner cards, one of which has a CAM and my satellite subscription card and provides all my TV requirements for the other clients. I also receive most of the HD channels, as my subscription allows these channels to be viewed - this is also available to the other extenders.
It would appear that this setup solves your listeneners issues with streaming all this content to other locations in the home.

I suppose my main question to your good self is why still bother with Windows MC, as the functionality and look of it does not come close to Media Portal.
Admittedly Media Portal was riddled with bugs and issues some time ago, but since the release of RC3 (and now RC4) it seems to me that we now have a free and stable piece of software that leaves MCE way behind what we want in Europe.

I for one am so happy I moved away from MCE, as the constraints of using it was not delivering my 'utopia' of having all my digital content available throughout the home.................even on my laptop with a wireless connection!

Regards

Derek