
MediaPortal used to be a derivative of XBMC or Xbox Media Center however, it has been rewritten and is now an option which you can choose over Xbox Media Center in case you don’t like the latter’s interface layout. It also reads any type of media format that you throw at it and is also fully compatible with services such as Youtube, Hulu, Pandora and Netflix or even more for as long as you choose to install and subscribe to these add-on services. Xbox Media Center is capable of interfacing with popular TV capture cards that will enable you to record live TV shows or even pause or play them on demand. Xbox Media Center can also run in iOS and Android device whether its an iPad, iPhone, smartphone or tablet that you own.

This application was originally developed for Xbox but is now able to run in different devices that has different operating system platforms such as Mac OS X, Linux and yes, even in Windows above all.

If you want to get the most popular alternative to the Windows Media Center application that has already been phased out in Windows 10 then you will need to try Xbox Media Center or also known as XBMC. However, the downside with Plex is that it doesn’t allow watching and as well as recording live TV shows which is a basic feature in other Media manager applications that are available over the Internet. You can also take advantage of the Android and iOS versions in order to stream contents that are stored in one main server. Using Plex Media Manager, you can actually turn a single computer in your household into a media server then you can access its contents on another machine using Plex Media Center.

Plex is a popular media player application that contains two major components, the Plex Media Center which more of the front end component and the Plex Media Server which operates at the back end. If you really loved Windows Media Center and you really want it back on your Windows 8.1 basic edition or Windows 10 computer but you don’t want to pay for the upgrade and the purchase itself (in Windows 8.1) then you can try some alternatives and in this tutorial, we will be showing some of the available programs and apps that you can install to your Windows 8.1/Windows 10 computer which will do quite the same thing that Windows Media Center does. In Windows 8.1 Home edition, this feature is no longer included and if you want to have it back, you need to upgrade to the Windows 8.1 Professional version and purchase Windows Media Center’s package which can be installed to it while all versions of Windows 10 doesn’t have it at all. Among the list of features that have been removed in Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 is a common one which is called Windows Media Center.
