Yes, you can watch encrypted channels, if you have a valid subscription card for the channels you want to watch. MediaPortal does NOT support softcams and will never support them! See this thread for some more details. Furthermore you need a TV card with CI that is properly supported. Currently only 2 kinds of cards are confirmed to be working with CI. Others might also work but that still needs to be tested thorougly.

Review the MediaPortalFeatures to see why you should use MediaPortal over other Mediacenter software. MediaPortal has been designed for Windows and will not run on linux. Myth TV is a similar project designed specifically for Linux. Yes, it does out of the box. As Windows MCE is basically an XP, all XP-requirements also apply for MCE. The MCE services are stopped by MediaPortal as well automatically. This is not supported officically.

On the right side of My New Satellite TV there are various filters that allow you to only see the channels based on a country of your choice, based on the language of your choice, and so on. If you want to watch music videos for example, choose English as the language, TV as the channel type, and look for MTV U.

To watch one of the channels you require a suitable player. We currently recommend Winamp. Watch Now!

For instance, if you want to check what's on the sports channels, English language, and from any Country you just need to select "Sports", "English" and "Any" for Country. If you want to see sports in English but on Indian channels, you would select "Sport", English" and "India" as the Country. The channels list will open on the left side of the software and you will only need to click on the one you want to view.

Your can install an antennae on your roof or use a rabbit antennae to watch local channels. If your local channel is also on satellite and is clear, then, you can watch them on FTA. Your receiver has an antennae input and output. You would not lose your existing connection on installing FTA.

But at the moment switching between LNBs is only supported with Skystar2, firedtv/floppydtv and Technotrend TV-Cards.

The MediaPortal source code is about 160MB. However, SVN uses compression so only 66MB need to be downloaded, if you download the needed main trunk only. All other branches should not be downloaded.

To view separate channels in different rooms, you will need additional DIRECTV System receivers. In order to hook up a receiver in each room that you require programming you would need an equal number of outputs from the satellite dish. You could hook two TV's up with a dual output dish or up to four TV's with a DIRECTV Plus dish that has four outputs.

With Windows XP you can only use 1 DVB-Card without issues. You can still use multiple analog cards and one DVB-Card. But because of the bug in Windows XP you can't use more than one DVB-Card out of the box. The only exception is the Skystar2 which doesn't use a BDA-driver and is supported by MediaPortal. You can use one or two Skystar 2 TV-Cards along with one other DVB-TV-Card and multiple analog cards with WindowsXP. With "MCE Rollup 2" Microsoft updated the files "mpeg2data.

This can be configured in the "MediaPortal Configuration" program where in the "General" part screen selection can be enabled by selecting "use screenselector" and setting the appropriate screen in the selection box afterwards. the moment there are no media extenders that work with MediaPortal. As a developer you are more than welcome to add support for those. This depends on your remote control.

Yes, it is required that MediaPortal is running to record a scheduled TV Show. MediaPortal is not designed to run as a service.

Hit X or your fullscreen keyboard shortcut. On some remotes the red button is mapped to fullscreen as well.

IMPORTANT: Read this document to follow our adoption of those guidelines, especially the paragraphs about formatting, identation and commenting.

Since MediaPortal uses VMR9 a DirectX 9 compatible videocard is required and older cards are not supported.

MediaPortal needs to support a large range of TV cards. For this it uses the Windows DirectShow API. The applications provided with most TV cards will communicate directly with the card and therefore can perform better in certain conditions. They can do this because they only need to support a very limited set of hardware and the provided applications typically have a limited feature set compared to MediaPortal.

NO, our system is purely FTA for the purpose of watching Free To Air unscrambled channels from satellites that carry these signals. For paid channels viewing you must contact the companies that provide these services.

You cannot watch TV Channels while receiving a Multicast download as this would interrupt the download (nor tune the DVB card to another transponder than our data transponder).

Yes. Picture-in-Picture (PIP) allows you to watch two programs simultaneously with four selectable window positions. Picture-on-Picture (POP) allows you to watch two programs side by side. PIP/POP is available when your video source is set to TV, AV, S-Video, Component 1 or Component 2. For example, you can watch two analog TV programs simultaneously with PIP/POP by using the built-in TV tuner and an external tuner such as the one inside your VCR.

Yes. You can watch all the local channels on TV as usual. At the same time, you can switch on to Comet Cable channels through the decoder, with laser disc quality picture and CD quality sound. This means you will get even better quality than normal local TV channels.