When ?

[ziphnor]

Considering that the program is only version 0.2 i think its working pretty well. However, that doesnt mean its stable in any way! Far from it in fact. Ive been running for some time using fully supported hardware, and still suffered from massive problems.

Media playback filter and codecs are also notoriously unstable which only adds to the misery

I think MP development has been going well, but its time to stop adding new features and go bughunting in the *core* areas of the application such as TV,EPG,DVD and Music.

[ASiDiE]

From my understanding, thats what they are doing. In the past several months nothing really huge, in terms of features, has come from the DEV's. If you look at the changelog... thats all they seem to be doing... is fixing bugs.

[ziphnor]

Originally Posted by ASiDiE

From my understanding, thats what they are doing. In the past several months nothing really huge, in terms of features, has come from the DEV's. If you look at the changelog... thats all they seem to be doing... is fixing bugs.

I had noticed that they seemed to be concentrating on bug fixes, but i thought that was because they were preparing for version 0.2.

My worry is however, that they will make a version 0.2, which has alot of bugfixes, but is not 100% stable, and then start adding new features again ( i have programmed alot myself, and i *know* its much more fun to add features than to remove bugs

Maybe it is necessary to update the recording engine for example, but generally i think it would be a good move to make a version that was stable enough to really to take over all music playing and TV viewing. Its okay to have some unstable plugins, but the plugins are worthless if the core functionality isnt working 100%. If the core functionality was working many people would consider this a real alternative to MCE. When i try to suggest MP to people, its always the same issue that pops up: *stability*

If this is already what is planned then fantastic! Dont get me wrong i have plenty of confidence in the development team.

[ASiDiE]

The focus of RC 2 was/is stability, so you wont see much new functionality in this release candidate when comparing it to RC 1.

This was taken from a Dec 18 post from Frodo on the front page about RC2. This is mainly where I am getting my information. I truly believe that the DEV's are continually working on making the "CORE" of the product 100% stable. I think that was the main goal from 1.3 to 2.0. They still have almost a whole month to continue working on fixing the last remaining bugs.

[esperado]

Originally Posted by FlipGer

But esperado just posted the above comment into bugs. No information about system specs and no detailed problem description. If he would have posted this in support with more infos, I would never have reacted that way!

Hello, FlipGer.
Before everything, i'm not english, and, if my message can look like rude, it is because my poor English and little free time on it. I know how to take precautions in French. Any way, answer was more rude than my post.

My answer:
First, my configuration is at the bottom of my message. Second, don't you remember ? I've spend near one month in the past to try to make people over there taking in mantis a "real" bug making MP not working at all for latin (French) people. The answer were: "it is working here". Same kind of reactions in that thread. As i tried to convince the team with copies of similar french reports of other users, "those reports are not in relation one with each other, blabla", and i had spend a lot of time making correct reports with logs, photos of graphedit and so on, the reactions were only negative. MP is perfect !.
One nice developer had take this case in consideration after one month of arguties: the day after, the bug was corrected, for all the french users !
Thanks to him. Winner is MP. At the begining, i realy wanted to help, and i had make proposals to help with testing and translations (i'm a delphi man). No answers. who loose ? MP !
You can understand i do not want to redo the same experience ?

I'm a developper of freeware too, i've an other way to consider people wich take time to report bugs, or offer their help. I'm gracefull to them and take their reports as gold. "You have this problem ? Please, tell us more". May-be that's why the programs i'm working on are solid. May-be the reason we don't publish releases with major bugs.
Here, i have the feeling to talk to a kind of religion, Mp fans for ever. Hey, it is just a software, friends, not a religion.

Well. To make a snap shot, my system is solid. And i am experienced with direct-show. Mp is *realy* not solid on my system, i can make-it crashes on many different ways. I have a special partition to test Mp, all alone, and an other for real life. Mp crashes on the two. (Please, forget about my system, other similar software are running ok for what they can do. My configuration is clean. Graphes are what they are supposed to be. Just the direct-show components i need , Dscaler for decoder).
Forget too with fairy tails about Pinnacle cards, i know quite well about. IT is possible to make this card working perfect, components are standards (as long as you do not work in the developpment team of Pinnacle, for sure ;-).

My position is: Ok, transparencies of splash screen is funny, and meteo very nice, but, *before*, the body of the system has to be solid. Resize is a problem ? (i do not understand why) it is easy to make windows impossible to resize and forget for a while for this *critical* bug (unhandled exception).

Everithing is working with your card ? I believe-you.
I told you it is not with mine. You dont believe me ? Ok, don't believe-me.
It does not help to say "here it is solid". It helps better to say: "here it is not".

If a developper need to experiment on my system, i can open a VNC to him. But he will not ask, because my post will be not on the bug report forum, and i've experiment how things goes over there.
(Anyway, as long a tv program will be developped on Direct show, and with various codecs it will be never a fast and solid program on my point of view, direct show is what it is, thanks to intelligent connect !)

Last report: i use sometime Mp on my second screen. If i open an other window on my first with the focus, the tv image is cut in two on the second. And Mp is the only Tv program (i tried four) with this problem.

As a conclusion if you want to pretend that MP is the best HTPC program of the world, it has to be as solid as KTV was for analog cards. Simple and solid. First live tv perfect. After, time shift perfect. And, only after, the gadgets and good looking, because it gives a bad image of the program, those thousands skins and plugins before the core is ok. And, if other programs of this kind are not so good either, may-be we can conclude for a while that a tv is better than a pc to look tv and a reciever better than a tv card.

If some of you like to play with buggy experimental programs, spending hours to learn how to get some of the feature working, and to be proud of that, i can understand that. It is an other game than to use a program for what it is supposed to do:
Open Mp with tv, resize if you want, change a channel, (even on an non existing channel), return on an other, start timeshift in full screen with a clic on the pause button, browse in it with no fear backward and forward, pause again, go to the restaurant, watch the end of the program.

This sequence will ask ten ctrl/alt/supp here, and i will ask friends for how ends the moovie, half of the time.

I do not says that i will not use and says good things about Mp in some time. I just says that i'm unable to use-it in a confortable way at this moment, and i stop testing-it for a while.
And, as an old scool man, i do not understand how a program can be developped in a serious way with all the features in the same time, before the most basic ones are fully stable. One thing after an other and not every problmes in the same time.
Good night everybody. And, really, thanks to the developpers for what i'm sure will be one of the best htpc in one year or two.

(My 2 cents.)

[Taipan]

Hi esperado,

I appreciate that English is not your first language, but I don't think that excuses you from submitting useful and complete bug reports. As a programmer yourself, you must appreciate the value of a bug report that is clear, complete and reproducible?

I have just had a look at your submitted bugs (take this one, for example), and I am not surprised that you have had a poor response....you have provided the barest of information.

If you are truly interested in getting these issues (or bugs) fixed in MediaPortal, then I suggest that you provide as much information as possible, and put yourself in the place of the MP developers - what information would you like to receive in order to fix the bug? Remember that the bug that you are reporting may not be affecting any of the developers, so they are unable to reproduce it.

If you put as much effort into your bug reports as you did into the post above, I think you would be much happier with the progress of your MediaPortal bugs....don't you agree?

[esperado]

Originally Posted by Taipan

Hi esperado,

II have just had a look at your submitted bugs (take this one, for example), and I am not surprised that you have had a poor response....you have provided the barest of information.

Hi,
Here, the problem was simple enough and answer immediate. No need to dig more .
About the bug i was talking about in my too long post: in different messages i had send Logs in debug mode, name of the affected dll, screenshots of graphedit with the buggy cvs, an other with the same cvs and an older working dll.
How, and where.
http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/vi...656&highlight=for my very first post.
I was asked to go to the testing forum...

The graphes and dll, after that, on the testing forum, if i remember well.
In team with an other french user, on two different threads.
The bad feeling i had was not on this forum, but on the testing one, to be true.
EOT for me, thanks and good night to everybody.

[broadband412]

Just adding my two cents. I agree that problems with mediaportal may not always be the fault of mediaportal itself but of the fault of poor drivers of tv cards/graphic cards, poor codec currupt critical files on pc that are needed for mediaportal to run. I learned this becaue I had to do a system reinstall because there was so much curruption on my computer that I could not play my video files or make DVDs. At the time I thought mediaportal was really buggy and I really didn't like many things about it. After reinstalling everything I was really supprised with how well mediaportal performed. To start off, the importing of hte tv guide data with 7 days of information took seconds to a few minutes to completely load and most importantly it did not make my computer run sluggish at all while the import porcess was taking place wihc really took me by suprise as I thought this was a bug in mediaportal or it was my graphics card not being able to handle the import process. I've ben using mediaportal happly ever sicne to record my tv shows and converting them to WMV for about 3 or 4 days now.

[anything]

Taipan,

my system is very similar to yours, yet i cant get MediaPortal's stability high enough so that i could use it every day.

what drivers (ati, dvico) and MediaPortal CVS are you using? do you use nVidia decoders for all parts of MediaPortal? are the nVidia decoders settings on defaults? what is the deinterlacing control in the ATI pannel set to?

Thanks.

[FlipGer]

Hi esperado,

thanks for posting back so detailed!

And I can understand, that it is difficult to describe a problem or your opinion, in a proper way, if it is not done in your own language. Especially if there are two translations french -> english -> german.

But in those cases it is just essential to provide as much information as possible. We have a very nice support template and even a tool to collect the data and fill out the template:
http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/viewtopic.php?t=6444
And don not ever think, that some informations might not be needed! I often saw a problem solved after asking back because of:
- wrong drivers
- wrong windows versions
- codecs problems
- unsupported hardware

I can understand your frustration with the resize bug. I get also very tired when I see it raising up and up again. I dunno why it isn't fixed yet (or just worked around by not allowing to resize). But I don't rage about that, I simply ignore this bug by not resizing.

If you want to get the attention of a dev:
- make detailed reports
- nag and niggle them on IRC!

To conclude, I did not want to give you the feeling that nobody cares about those problems and bugs.
Just be more detailed and keep nagging the devs in a polite way. It would be sad, if you gave up right now. The release date for 0.2 is fixed for 18.03. So now it is to best opportunity to get those things fixed!

Flip.