The Handiest thing i Ever did!

Being a MediaPortal Tester and a Mediaportal user i find that the 2 often dont go in harmony.... this has been one of my frustrations... and this is my solution to it......

As most of you know the CVS builds are the cutting edge... meaning sometimes you get cut! Something may not work right, in extreme circumstances TV or Music may not work at all! this can be frustrating and most importantly MediaPortal loses WAF!

So we have a way round this... not one i can take credit for, as im sure plently of you guys out there do it... im just imparting the information to you so if you wish to play... well... heres how to without upsetting the Wife/GF

1, OK if your starting from scratch... then setup Mediaportal as you normally would... and do everything you need to do to get it working how you would like! get all the EPG info etc down.. configure all your media folders, codecs etc and arrange all your channels as required. Oh and make sure it all works!

 

2, Next take a copy of the MediaPortal Folder (c:\program files\team MediaPortal\MediaPortal) and copy it somewhere else (for me c:\) this folder then becomes your testing folder.

 

3, You can use this folder to apply any CVS you want and obviously test that particualar cvs. (feedback to us is always good!) the only thing you need to do is add 3 shortcuts to your desktop, one for MediaPortal, one for the Config tool, and one for the Start.bat that is in the Test Folder. Make sure you rename these so as not to confuse anyone to something like Testing MediaPortal, Testing Config, and Testing Start.bat

 

4, if you are lucky enough that RC1 with no CVS was good for you and is what you would class as your stable release... then you will also need to copy the start.bat over to the c:\program files\team MediaPortal\MediaPortal folder and add a shortcut on the desktop to the start.bat.

 

5, If you are running a CVS build as your 'stable build' then simply do the same as in section 2 and follow section 3 and 4 also... its just in this instance you do not need to copy the start.bat... just create a shortcut on the desktop to it as it already exists as part of the CVS Build.

 

6, Right... now to use it.... if your wanting to use your Stable build... run the start.bat shortcut before you run MediaPortal (maybe enhance the start.bat to run MediaPortal after its ran) if your wanting to do some 'testing' then just run the Testing Start.bat

 

Ok so Its not Rocket science but Hopefully this will enable some more to do relavent testing without getting the earache normally associated with it 'not working like it did' caused by a CVS build update