Waldemar Schlackow

After I got finally fed up with Windows, I uninstalled it on the last machine in our home, which happened to be the Mediacenter. Unfortunately this also meant getting rid of Mediaportal. Whilst I think that Mediaportal is great software, it's written for an OS which is outdated, inflexible and oftentimes unstable [especially when it comes to dodgy hardware drivers!].

I have then purchased a Mac mini, which was the only machine of that form factor which was able to handle full HD quality videos. I then had to decide whether to run OSX on it or whether to go with Ubuntu, which is running on all other machines. The final decision however was to run Mac OSX, for several reasons, for example it's internal infrared port can be easily used with the Harmony Universal Remote (using Remote Buddy). It's much nicer than fiddling with LIRC in Linux, and gets wife acceptance as well. Another very important reason was the Plex Mediacenter which has a great plugin framework that makes it easy to scrape webcontent and show web videos.

Unfortunately, as I discovered recently, Plex is not fully open source, which is a real pain in the back side. I am never sure when projects that decide to become closed will make the next step and start charging for it. With an open project there is at least the possibility of forking it.

In any case, whilst not knowing that the Plex Media Server was closed, I decided to develop an eTVnet plugin for it, which makes it possible now for us to watch Russian TV from the couch. It actually went very smoothly due to the very nice Plex Media Server framework. There are one or two slightly hacky solutions, for example in order to do a search you type in latin and that is then "detranslitified" to cyrillic. I.e. if you look for KVN that will search for "КВН" and "Chto? Gde? Kogda?" will become "Что? Где? Когда?".

It seems to work for me, but obviously if people find bugs let me know. The graphics are not as polished yet, as I would like, but perhaps that will improve.