But a good media center not only plays your files or lets you watch television, it also gives you the opportunity to stay connected over the web, to stream content, or grab subtitles and movie reviews.

The reason so many people are still hooked to their VHS/DVD/VCR boxes, lies in relation to the vast size and complexity of the media center market. Acting as your guide in this realm, MakeUseOf proudly presents its latest PDF release – How To Build a Great Media Center.

In this free PDF, active MakeUseOf contributor and eBook writer Stefan Neagu from tuxgeek.me, will walk you through all the steps of understanding and creating your own media center.

Read all about the different hardware components, software candidates and media extenders, in this manual for geek to techno-deprived.

Download this free PDF now, and get started! Using this illutrated guide, we’re confident that you too will be able to grasp and get started on the road to your very own media center.

If you enjoyed this ebook, be sure to check out the other available MakeUseOf manuals.

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Using Your Linux Computer As A Media Center (Part 1) (66)
• Using Your Linux Computer As A UPnP AV Server (Part 3) (5)
• Using Your Linux Computer As A Media Server (Part 2) (20)
• Top 5 Free Media Players For Windows (57)
• The BIG Book of iTunes [Free PDF Download] (49)

Recently, they released a desktop application designed specifically take advantage of viewing videos and movies on your large-screen TV. Using this application, aptly named Hulu Desktop, you can now watch all your favourite shows from Hulu without using a browser! Here, at MakeUseOf, we like to properly test applications before writing about them. After three days of testing, I examined how Hulu Desktop compares to other media solutions such as Boxee.

This standalone application offers better integration, including remote control support and a full-screen TV-friendly interface. Although it is still in beta, the application proved to be very reliable in my tests:

• The interface was responsive and fluid even on low-end laptop graphic cards. The frame rate was adequate and stable even for watching, even in close proximity to the screen.
• The stream was not interrupted even when browsing with a video playing in the background. All the thumbnails and descriptions appeared without a glitch.
• Minimizing and restoring the Hulu window did not have any adverse effects on the playback.
• Navigation is simple and intuitive, a slightly better implementation compared to Boxee. Browsing the Hulu catalog on the TV provided an adequate user experience.
• The same selection on the Hulu website is also available in the desktop application, you’re not missing anything.

Overall, I am impressed with the quality of this release – not even a single crash or bug in three days is quite a feat in my book. And believe me, I did my best to make this thing crash. I ran it every night for about 3 hours, testing all the functionality available.

Hulu Desktop is not a complete media center application yet. Unlike Boxee, you can’t use this application to view content stored on your computer, be it music, photos or videos. You’re also limited to Hulu’s catalog: no Jamendo, BBC, Netfllix, YouTube or Revision3. That doesn’t mean that Hulu is not worth having; Family Guy, Stargate, and The Simpsons are just a few of the top notch material available. The best thing you can do at the moment is install both Hulu and Boxee and switch between the two when necessary.

Linux users will have to stick just to Boxee for now because there’s no version available for the penguin lovers. Windows and Mac users can download Hulu Desktop for free from here. You can also choose to sign in to your account and view personalized recommendations and subscriptions. This service is only available in the US. If you are trying to access Hulu from another country, try reading our article on How To Watch Movies and Shows on Hulu & Sling from Abroad.

Hulu Desktop is all about the lean-back experience. It’s adapting the platform to compete directly with old distribution models such as cable. At this point, why would you want to pay $100 monthly for a service you can get for free? Granted your ISP doesn’t implement bandwidth caps, with Boxee and Hulu, you can enjoy more content than was ever available on cable TV, on demand and with less commercials, on your big screen TV in the living room.

I’d love to hear what you think about Hulu Desktop, Boxee and switching for cable TV? Are you happy with the selection and user interfaces? What needs to be changed? Have your say in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• How To Turn Your Gaming Console Into A Media Center (2)
• Boxee – Cool Media Center for Mac and Ubuntu (88)
• Top 5 Internet TV Players + TV freebies (26)
• INTERVIEW with Top 5 Free Movie & TV Shows sites (14)
• How To Watch Movies and Shows on Hulu & Sling from Abroad (78)

However, what is the point of having all this sweet content at your fingertips if you can’t watch it on that nice big TV you’ve got sitting in the living room? The makers of TVersity Pro have the answer. Today, I’m going to walk you through adding feeds and shows to your TVersity library, and how to connect your gaming system to your home PC in order to watch these shows. TVersity will also stream most types of audio and video files from your My Documents folder. The extensive list of supported devices includes Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, and Nintendo Wii; TVersity’s interface is also accessible through any Web browser.

Before I proceed, I should explain something very important. There are two versions of TVersity, the Free and Pro versions. The Pro version supports many premium-video websites including Hulu, Joost, and TV.com, which are not supported in the Free version. Both versions of TVersity are free to download. However, if you enjoy your experience with the Pro version, I highly encourage you to pay for a license in order to support development of future versions. Payment again, is optional but encouraged.

First up is to download and install the Tversity Media Server. You’ll need to provide your email address in order to download the Pro version. After installing and opening the program, you’ll be at the Guide. From the Guide, you can add the feeds for many suggested shows. The real meat of the program is in the Library, which is where you can add feeds and shows as Media Sources. You’ve already likely added two media sources, your Hulu queue and YouTube channel, during the installation.

In the first example above, I’m adding a Hulu search for “daily show” as a Media Source. You can also add lists of popular videos and videos about to expire. Adding a Joost show isn’t quite as simple. In the center screenshot, I’m on Joost’s page for Transformers and using Firefox’s auto-discovery to obtain the show’s feed address. I’ll use this address to add a “Video RSS” media source. In the last example, I’m adding the This Week in Tech podcast feed. Watching this show on my TV wouldn’t be very satisfying, however it’s handy to have audio feeds for streaming via the PSP.

For streaming audio and video to the Xbox 360 or PS3, the console should recognized the TVersity server as a network-attached device. You’ll be able to browse TVersity’s menus through the console’s native interface. For streaming to the Wii or PSP, you’ll need to use the built-in browser and connect to your PC’s server. Follow the instructions here for the Wii, and here for the PSP.

TVersity, in both Free and Pro versions, is an excellent piece of software for accessing audio and video throughout a networked home, but there are alternatives. If you have a setup such as this, let us know about it in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Hulu Desktop: Instant TV Shows and Movies on Large Screen (9)
• INTERVIEW with Top 5 Free Movie & TV Shows sites (14)
• How To Download Free Movies For Your PSP (18)
• Fancast – Get TV Listings & Watch TV Shows Online Legally (12)
• Ditch Your Cable Company With Free, Legal Alternatives (232)

If you are like me who is a Linux user and owns a huge collection of music, videos and pictures, the world is not over for you yet. There are many open-source applications that you can use to turn your Linux machine into a lean, mean media center.

In part one of this series, I will go through some of these free media center software that you can use in your Linux machine (also see Media Center alternatives for Windows).

1. XBMC

XBMC is by far, one of the best media centers around. Originally built for Xbox, the XBMC team has now ported the popular software to the various platforms, including Linux, OSX and Windows. It supports a wide range of protocols and audio/video formats, making it a versatile media player that you want to have in your system.

With XBMC, not only can you enjoy your audio/videos/images that are stored in your local drive, you can also stream the multimedia content from the Web, via network share, SAMBA or even from uPnP devices.

In addition, XBMC is also extensible via the use of scripts. There is even a site that is dedicated for XBMC scripts.

2. Entertainer

Entertainer aims to be a simple and easy-to-use media center solution for the Gnome and XFce desktop environments. It uses the Gstreamer library in your Linux system to playback multimedia content and it allows you to play audios, videos, pictures, RSS feeds and weather.

One of its abilities is that it can download metadata (like cover-art and movie information) from the internet and makes it easier for you to organize and search your media files. The installation and initial configuration is not as straightforward as it should be and it involves running several scripts to get the application running.

However, once you have done the configuration and got it up and running, the rest is simply a matter of ‘point and click’.

3. Elisa

Elisa is an open source media center available on the Linux and Windows platform (the Mac version is due to be released soon). The interface is simple, with only 5 icons in the main screen that lets you select between Picture, Video, Audio, Settings and Plugins.

It has a tight integration with the internet and allows you to watch YouTube videos, listen to Shoutcast, view photos from Flickr and many other popular internet services. It is also extensible via the use of plugins.

4. MythTV

MythTV is a popular software that need little or no introduction. With the necessary hardware, MythTV can turn your computer into a PVR (Personal Video Recorder), a digital multimedia home entertainment system or even a Home Theater Personal Computer.

If you are familiar with TiVo, then this is the equivalent to the software version of it. MythTV initially started as a PVR project, but now with the use of modules (similar to plugins), one can also listen to music, play DVD’s, access NetFlix, view pictures, and many more features.

Due to its popularity, MythTV has also been integrated into several Linux distros to make the whole usage process easier. The most popular one is Mythbuntu, a Ubuntu-based distro with MythTV as the frontend. Other distros include KnoppMyth and Mythdora

5. Freevo

Rather than calling it a media center, Freevo is in fact a “media manager” that organizes your media files and enables you to access them all in one place. It uses the mplayer or xine to play your multimedia content and has an image viewer that can rotate your picture on-the-fly to allow easy viewing.

With the use of a TV-tuner card, Freevo can also act as a TV recorder. In addition, Freevo also comes with a series of in-built plugins that you can activate to extend its functionality. One of the interesting plugins is the game plugin that allows you to play your console game on the computer (via an emulator).

6. GeeXboX

GeeXboX is not a software that you install on your Linux. It is instead a small Linux distribution built with the intention to turn your PC into a Home Theater PC. There is no installation required. You just need to boot up the LiveCD and it will run by itself. You can even use it on a diskless computer, where the whole system is being loaded in your RAM.

While a full Linux distro comes in a size of up to 700MB, the ISO of GeeXboX is only 9MB and it comes with a complete and automatic hardware detection, thus does not require any drivers to be added. It supports playback of nearly any kind of audio/video and image files and all known codecs and containers are shipped in, allowing playing them through various physical supports, either CD, DVD, HDD, LAN or internet.

Now, if you are looking to recycle that old computer, GeeXboX might be the one for you.

In Part 2, I will discuss using your Linux machine as a media server.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• How To Build A Great Media Center For Your Home [PDF] (15)
• Cool Windows Media Center Alternatives (14)
• Boxee – Cool Media Center for Mac and Ubuntu (88)
• Watch Free TV Channels On The Go With KitePlayer (18)
• Using Your Linux Computer As A UPnP AV Server (Part 3) (5)

Boxee is basically XBMC on steroids because it has social networking features so that you can view what your friends are watching and listening to on Boxee, as well as plugins that are written in Python so you can really customize Boxee a lot. Boxee also gas a skinning engine so if you get bored of the default look of Boxee then you can always download other skins or make your own.

Get on Boxee

Because Boxee is still in alpha there is a very limited amount of invitations that they’re going to give out so the best thing to do is to get to Boxee.tv as soon as you can and enter your email address so that you can get on Boxee as soon as possible.

Once you’re emailed your invitation and go to their website you’ll be asked to enter a few details such as username, email, etc and it shouldn’t take anymore than 20 seconds to complete. After you’ve signed up you’ll be logged into your account.

The first thing that you will see when you login is a feed of your friends. Within the feed you will see the latest movies that they have watched and the latest music that they have listened too. If they rated it and liked it a thumb up will appear but if they didn’t like it then a thumb down will appear on the feed next to that movie or song. Whatever they listened to or watched will also linked to the imdb or last.fm page depending on if its a movie or music.

Under the Profile page is information about movies you’ve watched and music you’ve listened too.
The Friends page displays all your friends and also allows you to invite and add new friends.
Under the account page you can change your personal information and who you want to share your information with such as the world, your friends or nobody. Here you can also change your picture that is displayed throughout your profile.

At the bottom of the account page you have services. Here you can enter your twitter, friend feed and tumblr information and decide what information to share.
With these services you can twit, post and share.

Download and Installing Boxee

To download Boxee simply press the Download Boxee link once you’ve logged into your account then choose either the Mac OS X version or the Ubuntu Linux version. Support for Windows will most likely be added soon.
If you want to see the code behind Boxee then just simply download the source from the download page and play about with it.
If you’re on a broadband connection then Boxee should download fairly quickly as its only 30mb. The OS X version downloads as a package so you double click the package and click agree then click next then once the installation has finished Boxee will be in the Applications folder.

Using Boxee

When you first load up Boxee you will be presented with a window like the one shown above. From here enter your username and password for Boxee and you’ll be logged in.

This is what Boxee will look like the first time you login. In the top right corner is the weather and the time. Down the left side is what’s new, video, music, pictures, profile, downloads, settings and exit.

The main content that you see is the what’s new content and this is videos and music that your friends have recently listened too and watched.

When you select Video and hit enter you’ll see two more options My Videos and Internet Videos.
My Videos are movies that you have on your computer locally and Internet Videos are videos that a streamed from the internet and updated automatically via an RSS feed.
When you load up the Internet Videos for the first time the RSS feeds for sites that are there is blip.tv, CNN, Revision3, Cnet and Youtube.

For music it is the same but for the music streaming websites its jamendo, muxtape, shoutcast, bbc, last.fm and NPR. You can also listen to music that is on your computer or in your iTunes library.

Pictures allows you to look at pictures that you have on your computer or you can search for pictures on Picasa and Flickr.

Under Profile you can see the latest content that you and your friends have viewed on Boxee.

Downloads allows you to view content that you’re currently downloading.

Under the Settings tab you have options for video, music, pictures, network, appearance, system, media sources, general and the credits of the people who made Boxee.

I think that Boxee is a really good media player and that it is a lot better than Front Row.

Want An Invite?

If you want to give Boxee a try we’re giving out invites to the first 20 people who ask for them in the comments.

[rating=5]

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Top 5 Internet TV Players + TV freebies (26)
• Hulu Desktop: Instant TV Shows and Movies on Large Screen (9)
• 4 YouTube Tools you Probably Don’t Know About (48)
• Using Your Linux Computer As A Media Center (Part 1) (66)
• Transmission, The Lightweight BitTorrent Client (11)

MediaPortal – MediaPortal is an open source alternative to the Windows-based Media Center software.

It is compatible with Windows only and sports a customizable interface that, by default, looks very similar to the Windows Media Center interface.

The main benefit to this program besides being open source is its vast collection of plug-ins.

This makes it very simple to add utilities to the application such as new functionalities, skins, and numerous codecs.

GB-PVR – This open source solution is very similar to MediaPortal.

In contrast, however, GB-PVR requires a more advanced pre-configuration but provides more plugins than MediaPortal out of the box.

This program also seems more to have minor bugs here and there but is a worthy alternative.

MythTV – This solution is a very complex solution but provides probably the most flexibility out of any media center alternative I have seen to date.

The previous mentioned solutions install on top of the Windows operating system. MythTV, however, runs on top of a Linux distribution or Mac OS X on a dedicated machine. This means you have to use the computer for MythTV only and nothing else. For many people this is probably not an ideal solution as it requires knowledge of Linux and hardware that is compatible with Linux.

This solution is for advanced media center users that are looking for a much more advanced solution. Not only does this machine run off of a dedicated box but also has built in gaming, webbrowsing, news, telephony, and DVD ripping. MythTV can be used standalone or in conjunction with multiple MythTV servers to create a “cluster” of media centers that can perform various functions.

TVersity – TVersity is perhaps the best of both worlds in regards to MythTV and the other mentioned solutions. It installs on Windows PC and allows you to create a library with the media on that machine as well as internet content and stream it across your network.

It includes support to stream content to a plethora of devices such as Xbox 360, Wii, iPhone, PSP, PS3, as well as other PCs on your network. With some advanced configuration you can also stream your media across the web, however I find it to be a more worthwhile tool for home network usage.

On the downside, TVersity doesn’t support TV tuner cards which means it cannot be used as a DVR or to watch live TV but the vast list of supported devices should make up for it.

Note :

This is by no means a complete list of media center solutions currently available. Most of these solutions are for more advanced users to configure so please be aware.

Have you any suggestions about these or other Media Center solutions? Let us know in the comments below.

Nick Volpe is a freelance blogger and web guru from techNETWORK.US, a provider of tech news, open source software, web development tools, useful tips, as well as podcasts, tech videos, and much more.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Using Your Linux Computer As A Media Center (Part 1) (66)
• How To Turn Your Gaming Console Into A Media Center (2)
• Ditch Your Cable Company With Free, Legal Alternatives (232)
• Watch YouTube Videos on Your Large Screen TV (4)
• Using Your Linux Computer As A UPnP AV Server (Part 3) (5)