Announcement: MediaPortal II

[Darre]

Great! So within two weeks.. Im actually looking more forward to that then Christmas eve

Edit: is that healthy?

[GetWell]

Darre you are not the onlyone with that fealing

and no! I don't think its healthy

[lillis_55]

We celebrate chrismas every year, but how often do we get to try out a brand new Mediaportal =)

[JeromeF]

Not that often, but when we do... we always know we'll be overly impressed!

Looking forward to the release of MP2, very much so

[infinityloop]

Originally Posted by JeromeF

Looking forward to the release of MP2, very much so

if you would know how close it realy is....

uh, have i said that loud? damn.....

[JeromeF]

Originally Posted by infinityloop

uh, have i said that loud? damn.....

Nope, you only said it to yourself! So that means you can finish 'typing-whilst-thinking'

[Spragleknas]

:::Out now:::

[lulsam]

After reading the whole thread (several hours) and the architecture document I was walking through different feelings: Shocked, excited, curious, excited again and finally a little bit dissapointed....

1. Shocked by the announce of MPII while MP1 has (in fact was at that time) still a lot of bugs, and fine tunning to do => a lot of time to invest. Really impressed how you (MP team) get time from nowhere to start thinking in the (r)evolution, which is the most important thing to do (plan and architect)
2. Excited about the functionalities that MPII listed but much more with the ones that a step forward architecture could provide, if it is desgined wide open minded
3. Curious about all the questions, suggestions, requirements not really / fully answered about the big boxes of the architecture (central database, central configuration, uPnP server side, ....) while others like the skin engine, codecs selection, etc related to the presentation layer were answered by people involved in the design / development of MPII
4. Finally, when I finished reading the thread and got the link to the architecture document, a little bit dissapointed about the scope of your work. Please, don't missunderstand me, it is not a question of what you are doing it is not extremely great abd requires a huge ammount of work, it is about expectations. .... and I thought you ware talking about a new client - server architecture where possibly the server will take much more resposabilities than the current one ("just" TVE3)

Maybe I am missing the big picture and you (MP project team) are thinking in a much wider approach, but please forgive me if I think that IMHO you are loosing the opportunity to change the way 50%, because your approach is just for the client not for the client and the server. Again, could be that I don't have all the information, or I am missing something, or there are reasons like having an alpha prototype coded in the short term that have to be done first, or maybe the architecture is flexible enough to focus right now on the client and later on the server side through the providers layer (I am not fully sure on the last point).

When you guys announce the new MPII and the architecture was not published (at least I was not able to find it) my expectations were so huge:

Centralised server for almost everything but the presentation / rendering layer: centralised configuration, centralised storage of the configuration for each client, centralised database for all the metadata for every media file despite of the type of it (video, audio, pictures, ...), full multimedia streaming server, not only for TV / radio, but for everything with transcoding and multicasting capabilities (you already ride some part of the path with the work done in the TVE3 => rstp + mpeg-ts, and also vlc code could be incorporated into MPII server side to do it)

Most of the points but the last one have been commented / requested several times in this thread, even there are a couple of posts talking about samba shares instead of streaming for performance reasons. It is not only a question of performance, it is a question of how far you want to go, with samba shares you are almost tied to your secure local lan and to the clients that can run the full MPII client, but with a full multimedia streaming server you can connect to the server from the internet and have fun with your media library (and TV), of course if you have enough bandwith, which is is where the transcoding goes, analyse the available bandwith and the client capabilities to transcode the media on the fly.

I am aware that with the approach of server thicker (of course with the same core + message broker + plugins architecture) the issues to implement it moves from the clients (basically rtsp - mpeg-ts players with a good skinning engine) to the server, but this is what I mean with a real step forward architecture.

If it will take one year who cares. Did not take one year to implement TVE3 and how many extremely happy users are out there? Do we have an absolutely great application (TVE3 + MP1) up and running? Too many people pushing for new things in the short term could drive to wait for all this stuff till MP-III (3 years??)

Sorry for the long crying mail, just my thoughts...........

[risu]

Just my personal opinions:

Originally Posted by lulsam

1. Shocked by the announce of MPII while MP1 has (in fact was at that time) still a lot of bugs, and fine tunning to do => a lot of time to invest. Really impressed how you (MP team) get time from nowhere to start thinking in the (r)evolution, which is the most important thing to do (plan and architect)

1. People should read more posts before saying this. Most common thing we see on forums when new stuff shows up is that people start whining about correcting the bugs. It's been discussed countless times why step forward to MP2 was necessary.

Yes, MP1 has bugs but most of them are because people has requested more and more features and different people apply them. Core gets bigger and bigger and whole MP1 base gets really tweaked. It's impossible to implement any larger scale changes on top of it anymore, not without major rewrite. And that's what MP2 basically is.

People should remember that when there's open source project like MediaPortal, there are many people contributing stuff for it. People get lost when time goes by and part of their code stays on project and bugs can still be left behind. Now then users ask for more features they want and same time other users are pissed off because they don't like bugs on software. Nobody likes bughunting but creating new stuff is fun, and that's where new devs are found.

I think if MP didn't have all these nice features, userbase wouldn't be as big as it it's. We all know MP1 and TVE3 are at featurefreeze so we really shouldn't complain about this now don't you think?

Originally Posted by lulsam

Maybe I am missing the big picture and you (MP project team) are thinking in a much wider approach, but please forgive me if I think that IMHO you are loosing the opportunity to change the way 50%, because your approach is just for the client not for the client and the server. Again, could be that I don't have all the information, or I am missing something, or there are reasons like having an alpha prototype coded in the short term that have to be done first, or maybe the architecture is flexible enough to focus right now on the client and later on the server side through the providers layer (I am not fully sure on the last point).

I think you are indeed missing the big picture. More info will be online later. And you could have read yourself that better server-client link has already been planned for MP2.

Just please search the forums.