media center

All Videos and Presentations of speakers in the IPTV2.0 conference, held last wednesday in the "La Sapienza" Rome's University are now available for view and download:

• in italian
• in english

You can also download the full PDF file for revision 1.2 of our FLOSS Media Center State of the Art paper (in italian, english or portuguese).

The UI Remix Video presented is available at: http://vimeo.com/1982143

And, finally, you can subscribe to our RSS feeds to be notified when the next revisions in the Media Center study are published:

• in italian
• in english

It's time for a new revision on our report on Media Centers in the FLOSS community. Among the changes, surely the Apple TV version of Boxee and XBMC is the big one!

With our upcoming event next week about IP-TV's and Media Centers we thought it would be a good occasion to publish the 1.2 revision online and distribute printed copies to event attendees.

We'll have live demos for Boxee and XBMC using the Apple TV, and also: Elisa, MediaPortal and Neuros OSD. Don't miss!

See you soon... 

My email to Chris Pirillo informing about the paper release was read, and here is what Chris has to say about it.

Chris, the 1.1 revision is out, downloads are here.

Here it is ... Subscribe this feed to get the latest updates...

We have just published a new revision for the FLOSS Media Center paper (v.1.1), based on the feedback we received in these first days. What's new?

• Fixed table inconsistency for audio/video player for XBMC, Boxee and Plex+CenterStage;
• Got feedback that Plex+CenterStage are not working on EPG/PVR, just waiting until XBMC releases their work which is currently under development;
• Added availabilty of XBMC LiveCD (which runs also as a LiveUSB);
• MythTV can also listen to web radio though the unofficial plugin Mythstream;
• Fixed MMS video player/handling

We will also evaluate if and when to remove or split CenterStage from Plex. It all depends on the success of their collaboration. If they merge (new name?) we'll update the chart accordingly, but if CenterStage becomes a skin for Plex then we will remove it and leave Plex. Please leave your comments about this issue, we'll be watching...

Thank you everyone for helping in this work.

We released a first version (1.0) of the FLOSS Media Centers State of the Art paper yesterday, and we'll be posting new updates and revisions in this blog.

In less than 24 hours the paper had more than 1,000 downloads. We got a lot of positive feedback from the community and we will be releasing a 1.1 revision later next week to fix some table inconsistencies.

Stay tuned, and bookmark this blog to always get the latest updates.

We'll be adding the RSS feature pretty soon in this blog, sorry for the inconvenience.

The Surveys for our Media Center State of the Art Comparison Chart compilation ended yesterday (sept. 2nd 2008). We are now concentrating in compiling results within a quick comparison chart, solving and researching the web and each project documentation for controversial answers which are appearing.

By mid/end of this month we expect to publish a first version, under a Creative Commons License. Anyone will be free to download the final paper, the survey raw data (of course without participant's names, emails and any other information that may compromise their privacy) and our most important research links. Anyone then will be able to extend, complement, correct or publish a derivative study, under the same license terms.

Our FLOSS Media Center State of the Art Survey was very well accepted within almost all communities, the most active being XBMC and Freevo.

We are getting good and high quality responses and work already started to cross-check all information and build a very practical comparison table, reference notes and useful information on each project.

As we'll have our offices closed from August 9 to September 1st, we decided to close the Survey on September 2nd, and then work on final adjustments and clarifications to be able to publish everything by mid-september. So there's enough time for people in less active MC Projects to participate and make them justice.

 

What is the State of the Art in current FLOSS Media Center projects?

To answer this question, we picked the 10 most prominent MC FLOSS projects and we're now asking for your help to collect as much information as possible about their functionality and support.

The 10 selected projects were: XBMC, MythTV, Boxee, Elisa, Neuros OSD, Freevo, My Media System, Entertainer, CenterStage+Plex and MediaPortal.

Because of our limited resources, we can't afford creating a Lab to run and test all 10 media centers. So we are relying on the community collective intelligence to gather all data necessary to provide a broad view on state of the art work in FLOSS Media Center projects.

There is one webform available for each project. The forms are very easy to compile and we invite Project Leaders, Developers and Power Users to actively participate, to provide the most accurate information we need.

You can find more information and links to the web forms in this page.