Never really believed that .NET and Open Source could find any sort of common ground yet here we are! Wait, where are we again? Sorry about that, sort of got ahead of myself here. Today I came across an Open Source project called MediaPortal and before you even say it; yes, it is a total take off of the MCE (Windows Media Center).

To be honest, I never thought anything like this would appeal to me. Yet, being that I have had limited experience with the MCE side of things, I sort of found this clone fascinating in a bizarre sort of way. The features being offered are certainly cool enough. Not to mention the the fact that this clone is offering remote control support, plenty of cool skins, HDTV and AC3 support, runs on your current Windows XP install (with .NET of course and oh yes…did I mention that it was completely FREE?

Folks, I am not going to sit here and pretend that it offers everything that MCE does. Hell, I won’t even say that you can run this without any bugs. But by gosh, for the price being asked, how can you not take a few minutes to check it out? After all, free is right in my ballpark. How about yours?

Tags: pvr, tv, mce, hdtv, media center