When this project was first conceptualized and my requirements of playing mkv's, recording OTA TV from an antenna, and streaming video from the internet (including Netflix), I repeatedly came across a community project called XBMC. It even made Lifehacker's top five five most popular tips and guides. Though in the primordial stages of my project, PVR support was not officially supported by XBMC version 11 "Eden", but could still be patched in. By January 29th, version 12 "Frodo" was released with full PVR support.
For the streaming side of XBMC, there's plenty of video add-ons. The official add-ons can be browsed here. I also recommend Fusion, blueccop, and the Advanced Launcher. For me personally, I also added an unofficial BYU TV add on. This gave me access to Hulu, Amazon, PBS, NASA, Vimeo, YouTube, BYU TV, all via remote control on my TV. Bluecop has one called Free Cable, that accesses a lot of cable network websites, but the Hulu add on (also by Bluecop) gives you a similar access, but with 'limited commercial interruption'*.
The Advanced Launcher became a necessity because of my Netflix requirement. I had Windows and Silverlight installed. But XBMC hasn't had a supported Netflix add-on since version 10. Version 11 wasn't quite polished for release, but could be made to work. It's yet to be seen if the guy working that add on will support it for version 12. From the looks of this though, it may have been orphaned.
With Advanced Launcher, I get around the not having a Netflix support inside of XBMC by using the Advanced Launcher to open an Internet Explorer window. The only downside to this setup, is that once I launch Internet Explorer, I can no longer use the remote to browse Netflix, and must use my mouse and keyboad. This is the case with any website I'd like to visit, that doesn't have a native add on. It's cumbersome that way, but it works.
And I have to say, video playback is fantastic**. Ripped blue rays and DVD's play back fine in XBMC and with the hardware I've chosen. The music and picture library are equally functional. In the end, XBMC gave me everything I wanted: a media center for all my media, DVR, and internet streaming. I can't say enough good things about it.
Having purchased Windows 8 Professional during their promotional period, I also was able to get Windows Media Center as an add on for free. So, I tried it out and compared it to XBMC. It was equally easy to set up and comes in a very refined package. Internet TV is easily accessible and customized (and includes BYU TV). It has native Netflix support. The TV portion was easier to set up than in XBMC, and the Electronic Program Guide is taken care of by Microsoft and partners. The one drawback that was a deal breaker, was that I couldn't get it to play mkv files. If WMC played mkv's, I probably would have used it. But I really didn't feel like ripping my movies, and then converting them all to playable format. It just takes twice as long.
While setting up the DVR portion of Windows Media Center was a lot easier than in XBMC, the setup for XBMC was still manageable, and deserves some detail. So I'll cover that, and how to set up your antenna, in my next post.
*I actually found out later that you can eliminate having to watch commercials on Hulu by configuring the plugin to do so. Even Better!
**As I've worked with it, I've discovered some playback issues. I'll cover them in my follow up 'improvements to be made' post. Update: Since I haven't gotten around to writing more on this lately, I'll summarize it here: When you configure XBMC's global resolution setting (1080P for example), it will try to output all video at that format. So the issue I've run into is when watching 720P video recorded from over the air signals. 720P comes in at 60 frames per second. While 1080i is 60 frames per second, but interlaced (so only half a frame changes at a time). A 1080P blue ray is 24 frames per second (but the Hobbit will be 48...I wonder how that will work...?) 1080i and 1080P blue-ray playback is excellent with the hardware I have. However, XBMC tries to take that 720P 60 fps video and up-convert it to 1080 resolution while maintaining the 60 frames per second (i.e make it 1080p at 60 fps). This is where the integrated video card on this board has a hard time keeping up, and ends up dropping a few frames. A higher powered graphics card can fix this, but was outside my imposed constraints for this project. Changing the global resolution to 720P also fixes this, but it's annoying to go back and forth manually. I've seen a number suggestions in the XBMC forums, to have the output resolution automatically change to the video format. We'll see if that happens.
