Linux Media Player Part 2

This time I tried one of the most popular ones, MythTV.

I tried this first a few years ago and failed dismally to get it to work properly.

This time around I did not fair much better. It is overly complicated and poorly documented. Sure, there is loads of docs but I found it difficult to follow. After two days of install and set-up, what I ended up with was a poorly operating system. It was slow and sluggish.

Too many things. I just wanted to play a few cds and watch a few videos.

A single application device.

So, I basically abandoned Myth TV.

Hello again Freevo.

It installed fairly easily on Fedora 11. There is just 1 configuration file. Excellent.

It all works. No issues.

There are many new features added since I first set-up Freevo.

The Question: "Which is a good and lightweight Home Theatre / Media Player to install on an old or low spec PC?"

The Answer: Freevo

It is really an answer and not the answer. There are other other ones.

Another one I played around with last year was GeeXboX. It was fairly good. The best thing was that it came on a bootable cd, so it was easy to test out.

I think I shall just do that.

In the mean time, I am a Freevo sort of guy.

Linux Media Player

I have been a fan of Freevo for a few years now, but decided to review what the current state is with other application.

The reason I chose Freevo, was because it was relatively easy to set-up and did not require a powerful computer to run on.

The PC I choose to run the tests on is a 1.? Ghz machine with 512Mb of RAM.

The first candidate was XBMC. It looked good. Downloaded and installed it, no problems. When I started to use it, there were some serious issues. It played fine but the user interface was very, very slow. Dragging the mouse accross the screen produced a large number of jumps.

This product was quickly dismissed, as it would fail the UAT (User Acceptance Test) straight away.


The next fella was LinuxMCE. This requires a specific version of Kubuntu to install. It is all contained on the DVD image which is handy.

The install took many hours, about 5, to complete. There were a few hangs and reboots. It didn't fail but just picked up from where it left off.

When I got it installed, I had some trouble setting preferences, such as IP address. The changes were not retained. This gets very frustrating, after 5 or 5 attempts to set something.

I noticed that it failed to pick up various media available.

The main issue was the customisation. It wouldn't take the changes.

After a number of hours, there was only one decision and that was /bin.

The end.

The next system is MythTV. I have it installed on Fedora Core 11 and need to configure it.

More next time.