report

Since the first publication in September 2008 and the last 2 revisions, our study on FLOSS Media Centers State of the Art was downloaded over 35,000 times.

It is now time for a third revision, and we found no better place to present it than the Open Video Conference in New York City from 19-20 June.



With 60 different features under comparison in the 10 most prominent media centers in the free/open source community, we consider all the aspects that matter to you - the end user - to pick your preferred system. Whether it runs on a HTPC or in a set-top box, you have all the parameters to ensure the right choice spending little or nothing. Oh, did I mention this work is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license?

So stay tuned, we see you at the OVC.

We launched the first version of our FLOSS Media Center Comparison Chart last year, on September 18. Four months later, we are pleased to announce that we just passed 20.000 downloads.

This is an impressive number for a niche used to see fragmented, disconnected initiatives here and there. Some flourishing, some dead. Free/Open Source Media Centers suffered for a long time from the lack of dedicated (and compatible) hardware to run on, and we are glad to see that 2008 brought us new players (like Boxee) and new products (like Neuros LINK), aiming to increase awareness and use of such home entertainment applications.

We bet 2009 will bring FLOSS Media Centers to a next level. From Home-Theater PC's to set-top boxes, we hope they reach the consumer mass-market pretty soon, and help users to discover new media, enjoy high quality content and connect even more using the internet.

So, thank you for your interest in our work. Thank you specially for those who are constantly telling us about the new features within your community. We'll be compiling the next paper update pretty soon, and we'll let you know through this blog. Subscribe to the RSS feed.

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.

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.