Tag Archives: media center

Hands-On With The Official XBMC 12 ‘Frodo’ For Android [Review]

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XBMC is likely the best and most feature-rich cross-platform media center application available for almost all leading computer platforms. The immensely powerful open-source software has always been revered for the wide array of media discovery, playback & streaming tools it supports, and things only seem to get better with the release of version 12 of XBMC codenamed ‘Frodo’ that not only brings with it a slew of brand new features, but also introduces us to the official Raspberry Pi and Android variants of our beloved media center. As with both recently-supported platforms, the latest release of XBMC now lets Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, ATV and iOS users enjoy full HD audio support, improved AirPlay support, new translations powered by Transifex, advanced content filtering in media library, better UPnP sharing support, video library tags, improved image support, and most importantly, integrated Live TV and PVR support. More to follow. Read More

MediaPortal: HTPC App To Play Music, Stream Radio & Record Live TV

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Media center applications have become a popular phenomenon among HDTV enthusiasts. While the concept of  “media center” might have been brought to mainstream market by Microsoft with their Windows Media Center application, there are a few other media center applications that have become quite popular such as QVIVO and XMBC. MediaPortal is another media center/HTPC application that let you access all your media collection from one place. It is an open source program that provides ‘10-foot user interface’ to play, pause & record live TV, play videos/DVDs/music and view photos. The application supports a number of plugins and skin packs. The default UI of the application offers an eye-candy blue theme that supports navigation via keyboard, mouse, gamepads, compatible remote controls and even smartphones. More to follow after the jump. Read More

QVIVO Media Center Comes To Mac, Better Than Windows Counterpart

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If you like to try out new media centers with novel and interesting features for organizing media collection, you must’ve stumbled across QVIVO, a brilliant media organizer which capitalizes more on social media components to easily manage and share media collection (movies, music albums, and T.V shows) with your family and friends. Back in March, we covered QVIVO for Windows because it wasn’t available for either Mac or Linux. Just today, QVIVO dev team has notified us about freshly released Mac version. Comparing Mac alpha release with Windows version, it is far more responsive, quick in listing down watched folders, can detect and play movies with all the variations, and importantly doesn’t lag while playing audio and video files and switching between different interface sections. In a nutshell, QVIVO for Mac is better than its Windows counterpart. Read More

QVIVO Media Center Automatically Organizes Your Media Collection

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QVIVO is a new media center application that organizes all your media collection into beautiful libraries. The developers like to call it a social media center app. Apart from having aesthetically pleasing user interface, it gives one stop solution for managing media files of almost all types of widely popular formats. It is developed for organizing moves, music, T.V shows, and for streaming online channels with an ability to observe user-specified location(s) to automatically sync the movies, music, and T.V shows list. Leaving further details aside, suffice it to say that QVIVO is out to revolutionize yours media management experience. Read More

Kylo: Web Browser For Large HD TV Screen

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There are number of popular web browsers for desktop which have been developed keeping only desktop browsing (close-up viewing) in mind. When connecting your laptop or PC to a large HD LCD via  HDMI cable, you will often find these desktop browsers difficult to use for reading and accessing most of the content because they are too small for a large screen. Heck, even typing the URL in the address bar is a pain and so is accessing all the options. Read More

How To Schedule Media Center Downloads In Windows 7

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Windows Media Center lets you enjoy videos, music, photos, TV, and much more. You can easily access the latest online videos, movie trailers, sports clips, etc through Windows Media Center on your PC. Now the upcoming version of Windows 7 Media Center will offer many more enhanced feature. You can now schedule Windows 7 Media Center to start downloading data at any specified/preferred time,  thus in this way you can prevent it sapping your bandwidth for the rest of the day. Read More

Moovida – Powerful Open Source Media Center For Linux And Windows

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Today, I finally got some time to try out Moovida(formally named Elisa Media Center). At first it looked like just another media center, but I have to confess that it got me addicted for the last 6 hours(my longest with any media center). It has a sleek design which gives it a professional eye-candy look, supports 3rd party plugins, and has a very robust and intrusive interface. Since this is a new app and has a small but growing community, the plugins available are limited. At the moment, you can view Photos from Flickr and DeviantArt, Videos from YouTube, GameTrailers and TED Talks, listen to Music from GrooveShark, Radio from Shoutcast and Yes.fm. Read More

How To Convert Zune Playlist(.zpl) To Windows Media Player Playlist(.wpl)

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Microsoft’s free Zune software is a great place for managing your music collection, for $15 a month you can have access to unlimited music downloads and 10 DRM free downloads every month.You can download and manage your music playlists, but these playlists are not compatible with Windows Media Center. ZplToWpl is a free opensource tool that converts Microsoft Zune playlist to Windows Media Player/Windows Media Center compatible playlist.

My Advise To Microsoft: Making Zune playlist compatible with Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center gives users a choice to listen to their music anywhere they want. Wonder why nobody is buying Zune? One reason among many is that it’s not compatible with other Windows Media software, so for God’s sake fix this issue fast.

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