Create a Home Theater with Media Center Software

by Lisa Hoover - Mar. 21, 2008Comments (3)

We certainly do love our media. We upload our photos to public sharing Web sites, download videos to watch on our laptops, and stream radio stations through our browsers. That's a lot of media to manage -- and leave it to the open source community to come up with great ways to help us do just that.

If you're not a fan of Microsoft products but like the look of Windows Media Center, then you'll love MediaPortal. Led by a former member of the team that created the Microsoft XBox Media Center, this open source app lets you view DVDs, watch and record tv programs, listen to the radio, and even monitor the weather right from your desktop. MediaPortal doesn't run on Linux, but its perfect for open source enthusiasts with Windows systems who are looking for a more feature-rich media center than comes natively with Windows.

MythTV is one of the most popular basic media center applications available for Linux users. It's mainly used for time-shifting television shows but it comes with an RSS news feed reader, DVD ripper, and basic video player.

Elisa is a cross-platform media center developed in Python, and is able to manage a wide variety of audio and video formats, including Ogg/Vorbis, AVI, MP3, Windows Media, and Flash. If you're putting together a system for someone with limited computer knowledge, consider Elisa since it's "designed to be simple for people not particularly familiar with computers."

More than just a media center, Freevo bills itself as a "home theatre platform." This robust app easily handles standard duties like time-shifting tv shows and playing DVD, but Freevo has a few tricks up its sleeve. It can also detect and remove commercials, control home automation equipment, retrieve video information from imdb.com, and retrieve album track lists from Amazon.

It wasn't that long ago that we used to have to have elaborate setups in our living rooms, each with a different wired component to do a special job: tv, dvd player, stereo, etc. With open source media center tools like these, its easy to manage all your media right from your computer -- no wires needed.


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3 Comments
 

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