5 years of Mediaportal Bugs, now moved to windows media centre (1 Viewer)

[guytpetj]

5 years of MediaPortal and for most of that time 99.999999999999% bug free. the 0.0000000000001% bug was quickly fixed after asking on the forums.
Been running it in 2 continents (Australia and USA) on a Server with 4 clients environment, running the server 24/7. No problems for me. I must be doing something wrong being so happy with MediaPortal.

 

[craigparris1]

You're just showin' off now dude

 

[mm1352000]

5 years of MediaPortal and for most of that time 99.999999999999% bug free. the 0.0000000000001% bug was quickly fixed after asking on the forums.
Been running it in 2 continents (Australia and USA) on a Server with 4 clients environment, running the server 24/7. No problems for me. I must be doing something wrong being so happy with MediaPortal.

Nice.
Perhaps you could think about posting in our "why everything else is just a media center" thread (here)?

mm

 

[GreenJelly]

Yesterday I was getting allot of crashes. They where usually using addins. The big one was My Films where I could never seem to get it to scroll through all of the Movies without it crashing.

Plugins can be a really big issue for Open Source. People think plugins will be secure and stable and if they fail they can blame the entire project However not having plugins is worse...

"My Movies stopped Responding". It just crashes, no explination, no way to search for or report the bug. It should give some sort of answer, even if it is a bit cryptic.

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

If you run MP debug mode from start menu and collect logs using option 3 and post, then at least we have a chance of finding what went wrong, no logs and no hope

ps, this is the wrong place to discuss individual problems

 

[GreenJelly]

Yes, I will run debug mode and start a new thread. Sorry...

 

[Dadeo]

Yesterday I was getting allot of crashes. They where usually using addins. The big one was My Films where I could never seem to get it to scroll through all of the Movies without it crashing.

Hi GreenJelly, sorry to hear you ran into problems. You should report any issue with MyFilms in its forum. Thread depends on which version of MP and MyFilms you are using. There is a new version (My Films 5) for MP 1.2.0 beta which supports several different movie catalogs including MyMovies. So you can continue to use your MyMovies database in MediaPortal if you wish.

It sounds like a trip to the Support Section in our Wiki might be helpful. (It's free ) In particular, I noticed you have not yet entered your System Specs which is really essential info for anyone trying to help you out.

ABOUT WMC vs MP

@Happy Talk - really sorry to hear your frustrations. I know you have been an avid MP user/supporter for a long time. However, thank you for creating this thread. I am always trying to find good comparisons between WMC and MP and several people have posted some interesting comments in this thread already. A lot of people post about XBMC vs MP, but in my view WMC is a much better comparison because of the TV and PVR support.

In addition to what other users have reported here, I try to keep track of, and gather, comments from users who 'trade up' from WMC to MP. Here are some I have seen from users/reviews/forum posts:

Comments about MP

Pros:

• It's free. You don't need a special version of Windows to get WMC
• It's fully customizable - you can tweak it, skin it, develop it as much as you want
• flexibility - MP does not care HOW the pieces of the puzzle fit... just as long as they fit
• You can do 'everything' in one app - from Live TV to X10 (Home Automation) to Android streaming.... etc
• MP is like having XBMC PLUS "Live TV on Steroids" - MP is the only media center that lets you have a true TV-Server that "serves" the clients TV, not just getting it on its own (e.g. via a thumb drive present on each client, with its own antenna/cable hookup) so you don't have to pay extra TV Cable costs for each client
• You can record, you can stream, you can fully customize/tweak it, even change the coding to your liking
• MP supports a huge variety of TV Cards, you can have many cards and mix and match 'types'. You can record multiple programs and watch at the same time, and it has great menu options

Cons:

• Setup, especially for advanced options/customization is not always easy
• Lockups, especially with Live TV using XP - if MP is installed on a system by someone who understands codecs... then everything is okay. But when someone tries to put it on the main desktop that has, WMC, Roxio, PowerDVD, RealPlayer, QuickTime/iTunes, etc then codec hell arises and crashes ensue. If you install MP on a fresh install of Win 7/Vista... it is usually pretty stable, even if you install on a Clean XP system with the correct add-ons for MP
• networking local content and shared databases is not that easy/good and Server versions of Windows are not officially supported

Comments about WMC (of course I don't have as many of these as I am usually hearing from MP users)

Pros:

• Setup rocks - it is straightforward and easy to use. You can get up and running in no time, especially for Live TV with EPG data
• very stable

Cons:

• not good filtering, scraping, or database...
• it is not open source... cant skin it, cant make it better or anything
• try getting Comskip working in WMC! no luck
• M$ has too much control over what you can/can't do
• Menu options suck
• User Interface is not that intuitive as MP

Of course, these are only subjective comments from a variety of different users. Not my words!

I think the bottom line is that the software needs to fit your needs, so different people will always prefer one software over another.

However, I think this thread also makes it very clear we need to provide better instructions how to setup MP 'nicely' to avoid such problems. Who the hell is in charge of the Documentation anyways!

 

[CSMR]

I haven't tried WMC on Windows 7. When I last tried it on Windows Vista, it was missing many of the features that I would consider basic:

Playing music - didn't have gapless playback, didn't browse by folder
Playing movies - hard to get mkv to work with dxva and subtitles, I think I didn't succeed when I tried to do this
Pictures - Rendition was not correct. I felt that the software was increasing the saturation

I don't know if these are improved in Win 7, but I don't have confidence in the consumer units of Windows to get these things right.

Mediaportal's reliability and ease of use has improved. It is also much easier to set up than it used to be. Reliability is still its key shortcoming for me, but basic features are more important. Better to get it right 99% of the time than get it wrong 100% of the time without crashing.

 

[wietze]

I use MP since very early versions, and it was'nt good at that time but there was an great potential. The bigest problem in those days was the lack on testers and dev's, and the huge amount plugins and skins. Today the software is as good and better than all progs on the market where you must pay for. MP is on my system rock solid. it never fails to record anymore, it plays almost everything, my wife and kids use it now and still it runs 24/7. I do not use only basics, in my house i have a server/client in the closset where the cables coming in to my house, a client in the master bedroom, a second client in the kids playroom, and one in my office. The server/client is connected to the tv in the livingroom. I use 3 Terratec H7 DVB-C tuners and there is more than 10 TB storrage in the server where everything comes from. So i think that i have a complex system in my house bus MP Does it ALL. The configuration of all the systems is a lot of work, but on the other side i must say that almost everything can be done. There is nothing so flexibel and configurable as MP, and than all the hardware and os versions supported. Than there is the speed of developing, MP and all the plugins and skins evolving at super speed. Ofcourse there where problems that took a great amount of time to get rid-off. And also where is it possibel to talk 1 on 1 with the developers and desiners, that is a big advantage MP has. Everyone helps in case of problems, and most of the time when a problem not can be solved the reason is insuficient information from user side. From the time that the team decided a feature freeze and code cleanup MP gained preformance and Stability. User-friendly GUI was never a problem, configuration is much improved especialy TV Server side, but still it has minor things. MP is for an basic computer user configurable, you don't need special skills to do the config. And second of all, when it all is configured it works and you don't need to see that again. On the plus side as earlier mentioned you have a system that is superior on all available mediacenters including Microsoft MCE. When you go from MP to something else you go back in time. If friends come to my house for a visit and they see what its capable off their mouth is falling open and they loos teeth.

So thanks too all the Devs, testers, designers, community and other people and companys i forgot to make MP to what it is! Also to the retired team members and especialy Frodo

And i can not imagine that MP2 can be better than what we have now, but you guys will make it special.

Kind Regaards

Wietze

 

[boerkeboel]

I have to say i tried tweaking other media centers and none of them have the options mediaportal offers
it takes a while to understand everything but once u do it's a joy to start tweaking stuff i think in the last five years mediaportal came a long way!