First I didn't know where to make this post so I put it in the one with the most topics (minus foobar since there's more than one part to it).

Anyway, for the past week I've been trying out different software to turn one of my slightly old computers into a dedicated media PC. I have to say none of them really satisfied me although there a few that came VERY close. For instance,
1. meedio is a fantastic program and has great configurabilty and functionality and easy to use/configure (for the most part). It does lack one MAJOR thing and that's a liveTV part. So it does not have support for watching/recording TV.
2. showshifter is yet another great media/PVR type software but it lacks configurabilty like meedio. I also noticed it ran a little laggy.
3. Freevo is a program for a linux based system. It'd been great to try it out if I could get it to work in debian. (BTW I luv linux but when it comes to media..I think it lacks)
4. Mythtv is another linux program but I couldn't get that to work either. I even tried the knoppmyth distro and it still didn't work the way I wanted it to.

For the two programs in linux I can only blame myself for it not working. My linux skills, even though I do have some, aren't sophisticated enough to get it to work .


While I was playing with meedio and trying to get it to work with media player classic it suddenly dawned on me that these programs are really jus reinvinting the wheel...stay with me . After thinking it through a bit I've come up with an idea for a new approach to making a media PC and that is....why try to make a program work completely by itself when u can make it work with other programs.
In other words just make a frontend program to browse your media and then use whatever player program u want to play it in. Granted meedio does try to give the user this option but it doesn't work out too well. Since this program is bascially telling other programs what to do I can use a scripting language (python, php) paired with wxWindows to get such a program. To start out...I'd like this program to script media player classic and foobar2000. I have a different program to use with my tuner card but I think i'm going to use MPC instead of that.

I don't want this new approach to go to waste so if anyone wants help or make suggestions or tell me I'm completely insane and what I'm saying is just non-sense...PLEASE do so. I'm really excited bout this idea and I want to share with everyone here because I think u'll enjoy it.

for programming I'm going to use python paired with wxWindows....python would probably be a better choice for this type of project. If anyone thinks different please let me know.

THANK YOU.

LOL I think other ppl have thought of this...or at least for MPC. I feel kinda foolish . Many ppl on the MPC site have been pleading for an activeX version of MPC and it might actually happen . Active X allows developers to embed and control a program in other programs (ie. your browser). This would actually be really cool if it happens. If it does then I can make an entire frontend as a web site for MPC and embed it in my browser and then use a server language (php :wink: ) to design a browsing of a database of all your media etc.