Behind The Project
The vision of the MediaPortal project is to create a free open source media centre application, which supports all advanced media centre functions, and is accessible to all Windows users. In reaching this goal MediaPortal:
- Promotes open source ideology, building on and supporting other open source projects
- Promotes the sharing of knowledge and collaboration using information sharing tools and practices
- Understands development is a team effort and treats users as co-developers, which has proven to be the most effective option for rapid development
- Applies the 'Law of Diminishing Return' so the majority of effort is invested in implementing features which have the most benefit and widest general usage by the community.
The Team
With a core team of over 40 developers, plus hundreds of community developers, MediaPortal has a vast and active team who contribute their professional talents and genius to the project. It is truly open source at it's best.
"You would not believe the rate at which this group of volunteer coders fix any bugs (mine hasn't crashed or misbehaved in weeks. Lots of weeks)"
The Community
"We don't have users, we have fans!"
What really makes MediaPortal special is our community of passionate users. Many users actively participate in development daily, from modifying and designing skins, to submitting bug reports, patches for fixes and feature enhancements. As a developer, you get over 20,000 very enthusiastic and experienced forum users all eager to test for you. As a new user, you have the same expert users ready to help and support you. And they will!
We are as proud of our users as we are of our software.
History
MediaPortal's roots lie in the XBox Media Center (XBMC) project which aimed to build a media center application for the Microsoft XBox gaming console. In the early days of the XBMC project, Erwin Beckers (also known as Frodo) concluded that there were notable limitations to the XBox platform. Mainly that it is unable to support TV cards.
Thus, in February 2004, Erwin left the XBMC project to start a new project, now known as MediaPortal, using the more flexible and universal Microsoft Windows platform. Initially, existing code was reused from the XBMC project; but after several releases and innumerable feature enhancements, it has been almost completely redesigned.
The Future
As more and more people become familiar with the advantages of media center software, the number of MediaPortal users is growing rapidly every day. Thus, our developers are already hard at work on MediaPortal 2, a leap forward in time, to the media center of the future.
