I ran across this awesome open-source project called MediaPortal from a recent lifehacker article and it really caught my eye.  So I downloaded it and installed it as a test on one of my XP boxes, and Wow! 

We've been using XP Media Center for a couple years now in our living room and it's been ok for watching and recording TV.  We started out using the pictures, music and video features of it too, but found them somewhat lacking.  Especially the music features, since it's obviously optimized for use with WMA's (i.e album art, etc.).  (I prefer to keep everything in MP3 to remain as flexible as possible and I never could get MCE to pick up the album art embedded in my MP3s.)  So we haven't used any other features besides TV in a long time.  There are a few interesting add-ins for MCE (i.e. weather, RSS, etc.), but never really use them heavily either.

So back to MediaPortal; this looks very promising.  Here are some of the things I like about it so far:

• very slick interface
• over 100 plugins and extensions
• you can actually turn off the annoying "My" prefix -- :)
• built-in weather features are very nice (check out the cool GeoClock)
• developed in .NET 2.0 (very cool indeed)
• works with many remotes (including my MCE remote)
• skinnable

From the look of it, there are a ton of other features that I haven't even discovered yet.  Needless to say I'll be looking into this quite a bit more and will definitely be trying it out as a replacement for MCE, since I can't see myself upgrading to Vista for my media center needs anytime soon.  (Not sure I'd want to anyways...)

If I had the time, I'd love to contribute to an OSS project like this...  along with a handful of others of course.  Those darn 24 hours just go by so fast... 

So anyways, check it out... it's a free download!