Free Alternatives to Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005

By Jim on October 8th, 2004

If you’re looking for free or open source alternatives to what Microsoft is offering, check these sites out:

Freevo

Freevo is an open-source home theatre PC platform based on Linux and a number of open-source audio/video tools. MPlayer and/or Xine can be used to play audio and video files in most popular formats. Freevo can be used both for a standalone PVR computer with a TV+remote, as well as on a regular desktop computer using the monitor and keyboard.

Freevo is easy to download and install for new users. Most hardware is supported (graphic boards, sound cards and video capture devices).

The Freevo core is under heavy development. It is mostly written in the Python programming language which is very well suited for high-level control applications like Freevo.

freevo

mythTV

Basic ‘live-tv’ functionality. Pause/Fast Forward/Rewind “live” TV.
Support for multiple tuner cards and multiple simultaneous recordings.
Distributed architecture allowing multiple recording machines and multiple playback machines on the same network, completely transparent to the user.
Compresses video in software using rtjpeg (from Nuppelvideo) or mpeg4 (from libavcodec). Full support for Hardware MPEG-2 encoder cards (Hauppauge PVR-250 / PVR-350). Preliminary support for DVB cards and the new pcHDTV tuner card.
Support for the (very nice looking) hardware MPEG-2 decoder and TV out present on the Hauppauge PVR-350.
Completely automatic commercial detection/skipping
Grabs program information using xmltv.
A fully themeable menu to tie it all together.

mythtv