Tutorial: Portal of opportunity

Craig Simms will have a small Sprite, thanks.

Craig Simms will have a small Sprite, thanks.

Way back in 2003, Xbox Media Centre (XBMC) was unleashed on the world, the Xbox’s true potential was discovered, and people around the world saw the light. A year later, the PC alternative, MyHTPC, became the commercial entity Meedio, halting all development on their freeware product. A vacuum was created, someone smelt opportunity and XBMC was finally ported to the PC under the name Media Portal. Not content at just that, it was extended to include TV channels, recording functions, a plugin infrastructure, and is becoming one of the fastest developed open source projects on the web today. In 2005, it ends up in an Atomic tutorial to help you make the most of the convergence revolution.

Initial setup

Version check! Make sure you’re running Windows XP SP2, and have the latest Windows Media Player and .NET Framework installed. Download Media Portal from mediaportal. sourceforge.net and install it. You’ll also want to grab Daemon Tools from www.daemon-tools.cc and install it too, so Media Portal can auto-mount and playback CD and DVD images in the virtual drive it creates.

Choose Configure from the Start menu, and select General. Check ‘Start Media Portal in full screen mode’, ‘Auto hide the mouse cursor when inactive’ (so it disappears after a given time when playing a movie), ‘Show special mouse controls’, ‘Enable animations’ and ‘Hide taskbar in fullscreen mode’. If you’re setting up an HTPC machine, you’ll also want to check ‘Autostart Media Portal when Windows starts’. You’ll want to deselect ‘Don’t show file extensions’, as they will be useful to troubleshoot later if necessary. Deselecting ‘Media Portal always on top’ is also a wise choice, as it will allow you to properly Alt-Tab to different programs should you need to change something in the background. Finally, the right mouse button is used as a ‘back’ button, so if you use a mouse or remote that emulates one and would prefer to double click instead, select ‘Use mouse left double click as right click’. Expand the General tree and select ‘Deamon Tools’ (sic). Enter its installed location in the first field, and set the virtual drive letter that has been assigned to the program.

Flick down to DVD, where most likely you’ll want to turn off the subtitles, and set your preferred aspect ratio -- for the average viewer, stretch and default display mode will do just fine. If you want to stop flicker in the right click OSD during playback, you’ll also want to set the video renderer to Video Rendering Mixer 9 -- Renderless from the DVD Player submenu.

On to the Movies section -- here we want to set a playlist directory -- you’ll need to do this in the Music section too, or else the configuration utility will complain when you try to close it. Expand the tree and select Movie Folders. Here you can add all the directories and/or drives you want Media Portal to have access to and their aliases. You can also lock out sensitive folders by setting a pincode that needs to be entered before Media Portal will open it. Once again, all of this is mirrored in the Music section, and additionally in the Pictures section, so set up to your liking.

More options than a gopher looking for a new home in a nudist camp.

On to the Radio section. Here you can set a folder for where your downloaded stream files are stored -- anything saved in this folder will automatically turn up in Media Portal’s ‘My Radio’ section. Note that Media Portal uses Media Player for streaming, so your radio station of choice will need to support the ASX format (all your streaming options should also be set first through Media Player, as opposed to Media Portal). Alternatively, for greater control over things like station names or genres, expand the tree, select Stations, click Add, change the type to ‘Stream’ and enter the appropriate details. For example, to add the ubiquitous JJJ, we’d enter JJJ for the name, Alternative for the genre, and set the URL to www.abc.net.au/streaming/triplej.asx.

Since JJJ only offers one bitrate, we can leave that section alone – however for other stations note that the value you enter is regarded as Kb/s. Also note that audio streams need to buffer before playing, and Media Portal displays nothing on screen to represent this – so if it appears to do nothing at first, just wait! The music will come. In this section you can also search for shoutcast streams, or add analog stations if you have an FM receiver card. Mosey to the Weather section, and click the Add button to search for the city of your choice (note that you’ll need an internet connection for this). You can add as many as you like.

Finally, select the Plugins section. Here you can enable or disable anything that appears on the startup ‘home’ page of Media Portal, as well as add extra things like an email checker, RSS news feeds, your online MSN contacts or change the default player for given filetypes to WinAmp or Foobar.

To change the settings for each plugin, you’ll need to click on the grey cell for the respective plugin on the left and hit the Setup button -- clicking anywhere else will result in the program telling you that no plugin is selected.

But what about Television and Remote? Unfortunately these sections are highly dependent on your hardware or where you live -- so your best bet is to hit the Media Portal forums, and do a search for Australian TV.