Tutorial: Portal of opportunity

The sounds of silence

A silent interface is a good interface, so let’s remove the annoying sounds that are played everytime you perform an action in Media Portal. While we can do this through the General\Keys and Sounds menu in the config tool, it’s much easier to simply open up ‘Keymap.xml’ from your install directory in a text editor, and globally replace ‘click.wav’, ‘cursor.wav’ and ‘back.wav’ with nothing. Pretty much all config files are similarly stored in XML files, so if you prefer code to GUI, take a wander through your installed directory.

No, Artoo, turn them all off!

Lock’n’load

On the final leg! Load Media Portal. Most likely it will harass you about not having FFDShow installed – tell it to not show the message again and click OK.

Monitor users can skip this part and bask in the glory of their newly setup system – however if you’re running Media Portal through a TV, you’ll need to head to Settings, Screen Calib, then Screen Calib again. A standard TV typically overscans – that is, makes the picture slightly larger than the borders – so the image appears to fill the whole screen. Since the amount of overscan varies from TV to TV, here we are setting where the top left and bottom right edges of the video will be displayed Simply use the arrow keys to move, and enter to cycle to the next option. When you’re done, hit Esc to return to the previous menu. Enter UI Calibration and centre the screen, then go back to the main menu. From this point on most settings are personalisations, so spend some time customising the config utililties and settings menu, and enjoy the fruits of convergent multimedia technology to its full potential!