Ask anyone who runs the eye-catching Plex media centre on their Mac about Snow Leopard, and you might see them wince. A new update fixes that painful Apple Remote incompatibility and also improves audio for those without 5.1 sound systems. More »
Media centre Boxee lets you access a lot of web video sources, but what about that clip your friend emailed you earlier today? Boxqueue is a bookmarklet/webapp combo that feeds bookmarked clips into your Boxee feed. More »
Windows/Linux: Clean, straightforward media centre Elisa has grown into something else—namely Moovida, a similar but more advanced and TV-focused media centre. Take a look at what’s new in this brief screenshot tour. More »
Last week, SBS upgraded its digital transmitters around the country. The practical consequence? The station can now differentiate its broadcasts for different regional areas, offers full 720p resolution on its HD channel and now has a seven-day EPG. The downside? You might need to retune your set-top box, digital TV or PVR/media centre software to match the new requirements. If your equipment gives you grief in this respect, the SBS how-to linked below has contact details for most TV manufacturers.
SBS Digital UpgradeIf you’re that rare breed of Windows user who also owns an Apple TV, you can max out its potential with the free Boxee media center by creating a USB stick from Windows—a hack previously possible only with a Mac handy. The atvusb-creator site now offers a relatively stable, command-line based XP/Vista tool that creates an image, offers the tool to copy it to your USB drive, and works just like the Mac-created version. Check this forum post for more detailed instructions—I’m loading Boxee on my ATV right now, and I’ll share the results in another post.
Popular media centre application and XBMC-spinoff Boxee has opened its alpha to all Mac and Linux users and is ramping up invites for the Windows private alpha, meaning that if you’ve been dying to try Boxee, you should be able to do so sooner than later. Apart from that, Boxee has also released an update supporting MTV Music, Joost and BBC iPlayer (UK only), along with more bug fixes and improvements.
Windows only: Open-source application XBMC has received all of the attention in the media centre arena lately, but it still can’t replace your TiVo. MediaPortal can, and it just hit its official 1.0 release. MediaPortal is a Windows-only media centre application that was originally spawned as a fork of XBMC almost five years ago. Today the application has been entirely redesigned, and apart from offering much of the same functionality of other popular media centre applications, MediaPortal works with hardware TV tuners to add DVR functionality to your PC. We showed you how to roll your own DVR and media centre with MediaPortal a couple of years back, but now the full featured MediaPortal is better than ever. As an added bonus, now that MediaPortal has hit that official 1.0 release, the MP developers are starting to ramp up for MediaPortal II, which aims to bring a better design and more stable architecture to MediaPortal. MediaPortal is a free download, requires .NET 2.0 or higher. I haven’t used MediaPortal extensively since we last covered it, so if you’ve got more experience with it, let’s hear your thoughts in the comments.
MediaPortal [via GeekTonic]
