Voor mensen die geen beschikking hebben over Windows XP Media Center Edition of een alternatief ervoor zoeken, biedt Media Portal misschien een uitkomst. Met dit programma kan een gemiddelde machine met Windows XP omgetoverd worden tot een waar mediacenter, inclusief alle mogelijkheden. Zo kan er vanuit Media Portal naar muziek geluisterd worden, video's bekeken worden en is het ook mogelijk om tv-uitzendingen op te nemen. Inmiddels is Media Portal aanbeland bij versie 0.2.2.0. Sinds de voorgaande versie zijn de volgende veranderingen doorgevoerd:
Changes:Many GUI and skin improvements for more smoothness including some nice animations. (new recorded tv look, changed font, "watched" status, ...) New thumbnail handling with configurable quality & size options. Relying on locally cached thumbs MP should work much smoother especially in the music part. A completely re-written Home-Menu-Control offering skinners more flexibility. A completely re-written Powerscheduler being fully event driven now. Music visualization support via MP's bass engine. Use lots of free Sonique visualizations with MediaPortal! The new lightning fast music tagreader supporting many more filetypes and tag fields. A Last.fm radio stream plugin allowing to listen to your personal radio, love, ban or even skip tracks! (Audioscrobbler plugin needed) BASS supports Steinberg VST and Winamp plugins (experimental!) More easily sort your TV channels like you're used to with music playlists The Sudoku game has a highscore mode now Many fixes to bring the MyBurner plugin up to date including DVD support A Dreambox TV plugin including its EPG Clickfinder supports the new 5.2 release (pls set "usedatabasedate" to >yes<) Some Web-EPG grabbers have been added / improved New autocropper plugin based on live picture with subtitle support Ability to deactivate unnecessary zoom modes[break]