A future for abandoned but important plugins? (1 Viewer)

[Requiem]

Hi everyone,

MediaPortal is great. And what makes it even better are skind and plugins.
However, some plugins have become so important that they provide essential functionality to MediaPortal.
Some of these plugins are no longer being actively maintained as their authors are no longer interested or simply real life doesn't leave any time to continue development. To make things worse, sometimes not even the source code is available.
Examples are @cul8er 's plugins (e.g. Fanart Handler, Latest Media Handler) or the development of @Oxan 's MPExtended and WebMediaPortal.
At some point, these plugins might stop working as the become incompatible (already happened with Fanart Handler which is only working because @Sebastiii recompiled it).

Is there any way to deal with this except from complete rewrites of the functionality and to integrate it into MePo itself? I am sure nobody would like to have no fanart available and the MPExtended functionality is really great for external access to MePo resources.

Any ideas by the devekopment team on what to do about these things long-term?

 

[Sebastiii]

That's a good question, i think only dev willing to dev for it is needed

 

[Lehmden]

Hi.
I always thought it's highly dangerous to "outsource" essential functionality into community plugins. If the eleventh skin isn't compatible any longer, who cares??? But MP without Fanart Handler is unthinkable. Even worse is TVSeries.. Imagine this plugin someday wouldn't be developed any further... Without a solution for Series MP simply would be dead... If Moving Pictures is dying, no problem as we have a build in solution for movies, but for TVSeries there is none. Some really important parts any other HTPC software has included are not part of "core" MP1 (TVSeries, FanartHandler, MPExtended, MultiShortcut,...). And most of them are dead. This is extremely dangerous for sure.

IMHO it's too late to change something here as this will add a huge amount of extra work to the team. Time better is used for MP2 development, where (nearly) none of those mistakes were made.

 

[RicoHTPC]

MPExtended and WebMediaPortal

Would also like to see someone continuing this...

 

[skorz]

MPExtended, Webmediaportal and AMPdroid are the one where I'm afraid of the future. honestly i must said. last week i was taking a look over to xbmc.. only because i didnt see development in all of these 3 extension.. as a user, i cant understand. because network / streaming / access of files worldwide is the future, isn't it?

 

[RicoHTPC]

AMPdroid

Is being developed at the moment.

 

[skorz]

AMPdroid

Is being developed at the moment.

Mh... Your opinion. 20 month since the last release. At least i would say ampdroid is not under heavy development.

 

[RicoHTPC]

Your opinion.

Nope, DieBaggers quote...
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/threads/ampdroid-1-1.114109/page-25#post-1099802

 

[seco]

As a plugin dev I would like to point out my opinions

1) Personally I don't consider *Handler plugins "essentical functionality" since in the end they are just eye candy
2) I don't think it really matters if the plugin is core functionality or 3rd party. On the contrary I believe that 3rd party plugins can evolve much more than being a core feature. In both cases devs can "disappear" for various reasons.
3) I consider many MP plugins to be very complete e.g. there are no features that I am missing. Of course there are always some special needs, but if they are something I don't need and are requested by one or two users, it is probably not worth of work.
4) Take for example SubCentral, there hasn't been a release for a long time since there is no need for such for majority of people.

So I don't think that essential plugins are going to "die" for a long time. What comes to development, what would help are clear feature requests voted by a lot of people so that there is actually a motivation to implement something (for someone else in my own spare time)

 

[erichzann]

For me the MediaBrowser plugin helps fill some of these gaps:

https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...for-mediaportal-v0-30-beta-2014-08-20.119513/

The activity on the MediaBrowser site is impressive and having a single plugin for adding my movies, music, tv etc means that these days I only use 2 or 3 plugins in total for MP. I also have found the Web interface and Android clients fantastic and therefore stopped using AMPdroid for media.

Along with this I am only running Online Videos plugin and that's it.

I am sure at some point someone will develop a MP PVR plugin for MediaBrowser (it already supports WMC and Next PVR) and then that will be the complete MP mobile solution that we need.