Ease of Use Ideas

Having had a good play with MediaPortal alongside my Tivo, I realise that MediaPortal is far more powerful, but as yet not quite as user-friendly. The main screen is great for simplicity, and the ability to navigate with my Hauppauge remote is superb. I've come up with a few ways that it could be easier to use:

1. When fast-forwarding or rewinding, pressing play goes to normal speed, but skips back a bit. This means that when you fast-forward through commercials and hit play at the end of the break, you don't find yourself 30 seconds into the program and have to rewind again. Those who have a Tivo will know what I mean. It's a killer feature. Of course automatic commercial skipping would be the holy grail, but who am I kidding, eh?

2. The ability to navigate directly to a certain screen such as the guide screen, MyTV, My Videos, etc. It's been discussed before, and I believe it's going to be worked on, so I'll leave it there.

3. Removal of the sorting options in the recorded TV window. I believe this just complicates the issue. Of course, this may be a skinning problem (I've not really investigated).

4. Removal of the group/channel buttons in MyTV. This is personal preference, I suppose, and I guess it's a skinning mod too.

5. Page up/down in the TV guide. If you have 60 channels, it takes an age to scroll through them all. Maybe this is already implemented, and I've not spotted it yet.

6. Bit of a non-point this one. A front end that i could place elsewhere would be nice. I have two different form factor screens which require different resolutions to be displayed. It'd be nice to have one PC doing 4:3 displays, and one dong 16:9 displays all from the same database and files at the same time. I've no idea how easy this would be. I envisage something like the Xlobby solution where many front ends can use the same database and media.

Just something I thought I'd throw in the mix.

Cheers,
Andy