I'm one of the latest faces in the MP dev group. As I yet have to make my first line of code in an official MP release, I don't consider myself a real MP dev and I think you have to work for such an honour which I haven't done so yet.
I'm a 31 year old, Danish engineer in computer science with a special interest in software design and the .NET framework. I work for a large (in Danish scale) software company where I'm currently hired in the security department. I work mainly with ASP.NET applications but have also worked with webservices and on larger Winform apps.
In my years at the university I got more and more interested in music. Especially local and British indie bands had my attention and I always had to check out the latest alternative bands. I ripped my whole music collection down on the harddrive, downloaded (legal) bootlegs and invested in a pair of good speakers so i could get the music and lyrics just right. However, I hadn't always luck to get the lyrics right the first time when I was listening, and that annoyed me quite a bit.
In the mean time I downloaded this .NET based open-source project 'MediaPortal' which I found quite interesting. I had discovered that you could write your own plugins. As I just had enterred a company where I had to achieve .NET skills (worked with various PL's before, but never the one from M$) I found it would be a good way to enhance my .NET skills. Accordingly, I started to implement a MP plugin to manage lyrics inside MediaPortal. I believe it was in spring 2006 and I've been "around" MediaPortal every since.
We now have a dedicated HTPC in our living room where MP is THE application we use. My girlfriend loves to see her series and I like just everything about it. Except the architecture of MP-I which has been become outdated as the app has evolved. I have never been motiviated to deep into the stomach of MP-I as I knew it would take a lot of time to get familiar with all corners. I really like the design of MP-II and finds in the perspective the motivation to contribute the best I can, develope a plugin or two, and in generel work with MP-II architecture. Let's see how things turns out. Viva MediaPortal!
I'm Albert, the main developer of MediaPortal-II, the second version of our great product.
My name in real life is Daniel Hoeh (with a german "Umlaut" in my lastname), I'm 30 years old and I live in Koblenz, Germany.
I had my first computer when I was 12 years old. It was a C64 with 64kb RAM which could do calculations with 1MHz! What a cool computer. I wrote my first programs in C64-BASIC and later in assembler.
In the meantime, I had many PCs which I was programming in many programming languages. Turbo Pascal, Delphi, Java, Python, C++, C#, ....
I've been studying computer science at the university of Kaiserslautern and currently, I'm working in a big german company.
In 2007, I was searching for a MediaCenter software which I could use for my new MediaCenter PC. I evaluated many products which were called "MediaCenter software", but only few of them were usable and none of them was really stable. At the end, I chose MediaPortal to be the best available product.
But as I am perfectionist, I couldn't cope with some problems in the software. So I decided to fix those problems which annoyed me. At that time, at the beginning of 2008, the team was short of devs and so I was invited quickly as a developer. To that time, frodo, the former lead developer, was quite advanced with the development of MediaPortal-II. I started to learn much about the project, and as frodo was just leaving the team at that time, I took over his work in the MediaPortal-II project.
Now, I am the developer who has the "big vision" of MediaPortal-II and I'm working hard to achieve it. I have a big goal setting for a stable, reliable, maintainable system which is easy to use and easy to extend.
My real name is Flavius Georgescu and i'm from Romania but since 1999 i
live in Rome,Italy...I used Pretoriano like nick since the day i've
start playing the "BattleField" videogame and i was affascinated by the
Roman Empire history since i was a kid.
I've found MediaPortal 4 years ago on a magazine while i was searching
for a software to make my Twinhan card work decently... but had no luck
cause my card wasn't supported yet.Joined the MP community forum 2
years ago and this year i was invited to be part of the Team as a
tester and i have to say that i'm very proud to make part of it.After
joining the Team i've realized the amount of work done by devs and
testers is far beyond my expectation...sometimes feels like MP is a
full time job,so thank you all guys.
MediaPortal community amazed me too,and is great to see how people try
to help each other... so most of the time i try to do the same for all
those users that need a hand.
Big Thanks to the community and keep up the good work guys
User perspective:
How I got here? Well, like always it started from curiosity - a free
HTPC software! What it can offer and can it match against other
open-source projects?
So I started first lurking around and downloading all kind of versions
whilst trying to get all working nicely together. As you might already
guess it was everything than easy at those days; year must be something
like 2005-2006 (can't remember anymore). After some experiment time I
totally got rid of the idea of having a HTPC in living room as main
source for media. MP was not ready yet for that task and Meedio failed
to meet my expectations as well. Year 2007 however changed everything
when urgent need of total media experience forced me back to MP arena.
Like you can see from nick status it was May 2007 when joined to forum
to get some help and enable some user submitted downloads.
And yes, in
the meanwhile, MP evolved quite nicely
Ever since this has been a love - hate relationship... oops. Seriously,
nowadays using MP is a pure pleasure and I can recommend it to everyone
from my heart.
Other view - being a developer:
It is time to reveal some backgrounds about one developer behind the
curtains. Why to spend your valuable free time for a project like
MediaPortal you may ask.
Well, I have spent so many enjoyable hours with MP watching movies and
listening music that it was time to pay something pack. There is no
free lunch if you ask me. Actually my first touch with c# was with some
corrections I made for a plugin. And there it started. Doing some
plugins that were missing and patches for things that annoyed me
finally brought me into the team. And I'm amazed about the dedication
and passion of the team members!
From coding skills point of view, if there exists such a thing, it goes
back to 80's when I got my first computer; Sinclair Spectrum 48 with
rubbish... I mean rubber keyboard. What a machine!
Today best use of
that is door stopper
Some basic and micro code stuff saw daylight even it took ages to
nik-nak (= type) it. After that some other hobbies took my time and I
passed Amiga era totally. First PC was Pentium 60 and then also some
interest to coding raised again but in a form of study exercises. Some
PC's later I'm here as a team member trying to make your media center
experience a bit better.
Thanks for reading and try to bear with us developers
I first joined the forum in December 2005, and got the privilege to
join the team two years later – something I’m still excited about! I’m
still amazed about the amount of effort the “productive part” of the
team is doing to give us users so much joy in front of the telly – for
free!
Secondly, I’d like to say that being a (super) moderator here is rather
painless. If you see how many active members the forum has (currently
about 19 000!), there is very little for us to point our fingers at. I
sincerely thank the forum users for this, and hope it will continue, as
it makes it possible for us moderators to do what we like best; help
and guide.
I hope MP will give you as much joy as it has given me – and my family.
If you get stuck, please use the forum to find your answer or start a
support thread (with system specs and logs, of course )
– there are many very skilful AND helpful forum members that are sure
to give you good guidance towards a solution. And if you think you
stumbled upon a bug, a proper bug report makes the whole team very
happy.
I'm "Morpheus", this is my nickname since I studied informatics, and obviously I got inspired by "The Matrix" Why there's Morpheus_xx? Don't know, other aliases were already in use nearly everywhere, so I took this one...
I started my computer experience when I was about 13-14 years, playing
C64, starting coding in BASIC and Assembler (what there was possible
with 64k of memory, amazing...). Well, now we have a a lot more of
memory, I'm 30 years old and live in Saxony, Germany....
After I used MP for a long time, in the last year I got sometimes
annoyed by tv cards that didn't work so well. I modified some parts
here and there, and finally I joined the developer team in January 2009.
My current focus is on the TV(-server) part, caring about "misbehaving"
tv cards, implementing DVB Conditional Access related stuff and so on.
But with MP1 going slowly "final" there is a new star on horizon to
focus: MP II
And nobody knows how deep the rabbit hole really is.........
My real name is Panayotis Kouvarakis and I was born 37 years ago in
Athens, Greece. Ten years later I wrote my first computer program on a
TI-57 when my father upgraded to the TI-59 (for those of you who
remember it). I've been hooked ever since.
I finished my studies as an Electrical Engineer at the University of
Patras and have since been working as a software engineer, now mostly
in ASP.NET. When I don't code, I like to take photos and bake cakes and
cookies.
By the end of 2007 I was sick of all the clumsy and buggy TV Card
software and started looking for some real media center / PVR
application. I had tried a lot of software (free and comercial) when I
came across MediaPortal. Since then I never looked back. It had almost
everything I wanted, and what it didn't have, I could add it. That's
how it all started. Soon I began to code small patches and bugfixes,
and recently I was invited to join the developers team. I naturally
accepted and hope to help make this great project even better.
In real life I am working as a scientist at a University in Denmark. This background is helpful in testing stuff systematically, and provide good bug reports. Thanks to my background I have the skills to help out with the advanced math now included in the skinning engine in MediaPortal 2.
I was invited to the team a couple of years ago after lots of testing of particularly DVB subtitles. Before that I already had a severe case of MP addiction carefully reading SVN logs, and constantly updating my installation to get the newest fixes and additions.
Nowadays I have started programming some small stuff and fixing the bugs that annoy me most. I have received no official training in programming and MP is my first experience with any flavor of C. However, at work and in my spare time I have always been doing lots of programming in other languages.
My personal life is quite busy with 3 children between 3 and 8 years old. My children are maybe one of the most important reasons for starting to use MediaPortal. They love their choice of lots of recorded TV, and my wife and me enjoys being able to pause our TV/movies in the evening when the children require attention.
All in all it is a continuing fun and a great learning experience to be a part of this fantastic open source project.
Since a few months everyone seems quite eager to test Windows 7.
Many of you also run MediaPortal 1.0.2 on it.
Now testing is always a good thing, but right now i would like to ask you to not create any support nor bugreport threads when running MediaPortal on W7.
Mediaportal 1.0.2 does not support Windows 7 at all.
The reason is that we know that MediaPortal 1.0.2 has quite some major and minor problems on Windows 7 RC1, especially if you have UAC turned on.
We will fix the most issues in the 1.1.0 ALPHA release, but there is still a lot of work to be done (by Microsoft and us) until you can call the combination of Windows 7 and MediaPortal stable and ready for a productive system.
So if you plan to switch your HTPC to W7 RC1 + MediaPortal, then you should better reconsider this decision.
My real name is Simone Chemelli, and this make you understand that I have not so that creativeness when it comes to nicks
I'm Italian and I live in Padova, near the more famous Venice. I'm proud to be the first Italian Team Member!
I'm an IT guy since long time, started during University as Linux admin and then grown (yes I know it can be considered a downgrade by some of you...) to manage Windows machines. Currently I'm a system integrator and a consultant on all common, and less common, M$ applications.
I started looking in MediaPortal when I married and moved to my own house: I wanted to get rid of all that stuff people usually have: VCR, DVD player, SAT receiver, DVB receiver and so many cables.
I was immediately pleased by the result of this GREAT software, and then started trying to help the project as a counterpart of being free.
I was then first invited in the Test Team and after taking care of DeployTool, I was upgraded to developer status even if I was writing in C# only occasionally.
Hi to all the wonderful people who make this software so great, that includes all the supportive forum users.
A little about myself, background is predominately refrigeration\electrical based, not so much hands on nowadays,
more design and support.
For my sin's I'm one of the few Chelsea Football Club supporters in the
Cheshire region where I live, have been sad since José Mourinho left,
considered him a great asset to the club, but then people come and go,
you need to just remember them.
Being the only supporter of a southern club.whenever they play a
northern team, like Liverpool or Manchester United, or more recently
Everton, who we beat in the FA cup final. there is always lots of good
hearted banter in my local pub\club, but as long as everyone laugh's,
win or lose who cares, just carry on and buy the beers.
My next love is my Toyota Celica, the poor mans ferrari, well it is
bright red, absolutely brilliant for going around the winding roads of
Wales and always puts a smile on my face.
My first involvement with computers was based around a Amiga 500+ which
my wife got for me to tinker with, her comments as a IT person were, "i
took to computers, like a duck to water"
After buying our first pentium based pc, I realised there was really
nothing to them that would stop you creating your own build, just make
sure the components are the best you can find for your needs.
My hobby as it became, was to get the most bang for bucks pc system I
could build myself, with the best software around, that's how I
stumbled upon mediaportal one day on sourceforge, just loved the idea
of open source, a community all helping each other.
I have most probably built more than 30 pc's for friends over the years
and if required, installed and setup Mediaportal for them and they have
all loved it, this also inspires my dedication towards this
software\forum.
Do I ever regret my nick "Paranoid Delusion", sometimes, but more so
for people who type it out, just call me PD or Ray, hey even answer to
"Oi you".
Hope you enjoy your visit to our forum, please respect that everyone does this in their free time and if we can help we will.
First thing I want to let you know: chefkoch (engl.: chef) is only a nick, I chose many years ago when I was a South Park addicted.
I have no or bad cooking skills at all
My real name is Tommy and I am from Germany, near Dresden.
How did I get in contact to MediaPortal?
I am not sure anymore, but according to my forum account it was already in the early days of the project in 2004.
In 2006 I got an invitation to become a member of the test team.
Since I started to take care of MediaPortal's installer, I got upgraded to a developer even if software development is only a hobby for me.
Currently I am quite often busy with my studies Transport Engineering. So when I am not doing anything MediaPortal related, then I am learning for my studies or doing any kind of sports.
My favourite one is only possible during winter, so I need to wait at least until October every year.
Thanks goes to the other team members for the great time we already had. It's a pleasure to work with you.
Some basic and micro code stuff saw daylight even it took ages to
nik-nak (= type) it. After that some other hobbies took my time and I
passed Amiga era totally. First PC was Pentium 60 and then also some
interest to coding raised again but in a form of study exercises. Some
PC's later I'm here as a team member trying to make your media center
experience a bit better. 
My real name is Tommy and I am from Germany, near Dresden.
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