Dear "Coremembers",
first of all, thanks for all our hard work and congratulations to both the old and the new mediaportal :-) !!!
Although I assume, you have discussed all of this already and will do decisions about architecture by your own, as requested ;-) some thoughts to networking environments:
I agree on your announcement, that networked environment is important today. Nevertheless, central configuration and central ressources as well become more important. Thus imho both of those are requirements for a modern design. So i would hope, that this approach will be found in the general archittecture with central database, including:
- media information: (thus only to support once all the stuff like covers, descriptions, etc. for media, that is stored anyway centrally or let's say on the same place/share for all users/machines that use it)
- configuration: Why keeping configuration centrally? Because this easily allows to restage new clients and supports the above approach. THe client only needs very basic information (where to find configuration or let's say location of the central db/server/place. Maybe even hierachical concept might be used (like use central config if available, cache it locally (also for speed) and use local configugration if no other found or availyble). Might also help administration easier for the whole environment.
- user concept: I would appreciate a concept, that includes "users", "groups" and "machines". This should be used together with configuration. This solves requirements like: parental control, custimisation of menus, visible features, etc. and even "moving profiles". THus "wife" will always have few menus for easy access (regardless of the machine used). Kids will always onloy see moves (and for future TV Support) TV-programs assigned to Kids-Group. Techies will always be blown up by features (and have settings menu to spend more time tweaking the machines instead of using it ;-)). It also allows things like "movies watched" and other "personal settings/favs" to be bounded to users, roaming to all machines. In addition you could define the "defaultuser" (thus profile/config) for a certain machine (physically) to start with. Again an example: Kids room has a mediacenter, that default to "kid1" (user) that is member of group "kids". Thus MP2 is starting with basic menus, (disabling "settings" ofcourse) and limiting moves, music, tv-programs, series etc. to stuff being defined for group "kids" in central configuration. Other example could be livingroom, where MP2 starts with choice of user (maybe defaulting to wife after 5 secs. for WAF), etc.
Hope I made understandable, what I mean. I think this belongs in the "core" and will be basics, that can be used / supported by plugins in the future as well (see example TV-series).
THis would help alot in many todays situations, like having to manage each mediacenter separately, having to maintain configuration changed and/or updated in many places and finally ofcourse the acceptance factor for wife, grandpa and kids plus controlling the parental control, so not being forced to personally missing e.g. rated movies because they had to be deleted to avoid kids watching them...
I am very curious about more details from the devs on planned architecture ;-)
Thanks again for your efforts,
Guzzi
