A killer-application or MP-the-killer? (2 Viewers)

[bounguine]

Ok, my dear friends, let’s talk a bit before going to bed about MP-the-winner.

I had did try several HTPC-programs and I would rather say big “THANK YOU” to people, who are making this piece of SW for us!

What makes this piece of s… an outstanding program?

Too many reasons:
- nice GUI (definitely, it’s much better then Dreambox Enigma, or minimalist ProgDVB (oops, how I love childish fonts of MyTheatre!)),
- thank you for working with Imon VFD without switching it to ‘work with third-party programs’,
- yes, the SW has convenient music sorting (mainly using ‘genre’ tags, which is too important with my 43K of songs),
- thank you for last.fm plugin.

I would rather say – that’s all a may need.

But…

Let’s omit useless words.

MP is a unique program, where every new daily-nightly build (a real night(ly)mare) solves a problem and present me with a two new critical pains-in-the-grass!
It places me on the needle, making me an addict, who spends days before PC making it work instead of using it.

Please, programmers, STOP IT!
I’m full!
MP slows down and I have to upgrade my PC.
With some builds I’m not able to use ID3 tags, because some wisest man corrupted DB instead of sleeping. What is to rescan music DB for me I’ll tell you later.
Oops, now ‘genre’ tags went mad again – I have ‘Techno-industrial’ and ‘techno-industrial’ with the same quantity of songs… Funk it!
Problems, problems…
No salvation!
Dead end!

Now stop crying and FACT-up it.

MUSIC
1. Scanning 43K of songs placed on Netgear SC101 storage connected through LevelOne PLI-2030 HomePlug (200Mbps):
- MP – 12 hours (last RC – 9 hours – BIRD OF PREY(!); hey, wisest man, why don’t you go to bed and not give me a new problem)
- DVBViewer Pro (a totally TV prog) – 4 hours,
- WMP – 1-2 hours,
- Musicmatch Jukebox – 1-2 hours.

Upgrading from AMD 64 3000+ to AMD 64x2 6000+ and RAM from 1Gb to 2 Gb was of no use.

2. MP is convenient in manipulating with tags and playlists, it has two ‘now playing’ pages. Yes, I didn’t find any other program with such features, but they are not like such dying turtles.

VIDEO
1. Opening a DVD-movie ripped to Netgear HDD:
- MP – 1-2 minutes,
- DVBViewer Pro – 2-5 seconds,
- WMP – 2-5 seconds.
- WinAMP - 2-5 seconds,
- ZoomPlayer - 2-5 seconds.

2. What on the screen:
- MP – artifacts, when watching files from 1 Gb and above (slowing down and jumping in fast movements of camera, an artifact like ‘>’ in the lower left corner); the problem isn’t solved when changing codec or adjusting it,
- DVBViewer Pro – no artifacts,
- WMP – no artifacts,
- WinAMP - no artifacts
- ZoomPlayer - no artifacts.

Upgrading from AMD 64 3000+ to AMD 64x2 6000+ and RAM from 1Gb to 2 Gb was of no use.

3. TV – an MP killer-application (!)

Too many questions to programmers:
- Why do I need in TVE3 concept both a server and a client on one PC (I’m not going to switch off my HTPC)? Many programs, like DVBViewer Pro or others, use a separate prog mainly for real network streaming between two PCs, which I can use or not (!). Two application on one PC slow it down. Please remember it! I don’t have a Sun 490 server. I have merely a PC without HDTV watching!
- Why do I need ‘always timeshifting’ in TVE3? It also slows down my PC. Really slows down switching between channels. Sorry, but your idea of always timeshifting kills HTPC idea. Make an option ‘always timeshifting’, which I’ll switch off for ever. You know, other progs do have it or they let me watch TV ‘as is’ with manual timeshifting, if I wish.
- I didn’t have any chance to use my analogue Gotview PCI DVD2 Lite card properly. In summer it worked 50/50, but now I always have ‘no video/audio’ even without switching to SS2. I may see channels in configuration panel, but in MP only one channel works. If I open configuration panel again, I see ‘no video/audio’ and no channels. And it lasts from summer!
- I decided to roll back to simple TVE2 and build the graph manually, but I can’t add cards any more. Why? TVE3 is of no use! It’s a real harm to my PC! No TV and slowing down – that’s the result of creativity.
- TVE3 can’t find all the channels. With Gotview PCI DVD2 Lite I miss some and can’t add them manually. I can do it in panel, but I can’t watch them.
- As for SS2 TVE3 doesn’t see all the transponders in last builds. Say, I can browse only one transponder from HotBird from LNB A. Earlier it worked!
- I didn’t see DVB EPG at all!
- Another problem – some builds of TVE3 were installed without problems, some proposed me to recreate the DB, and I lost everything (let the wisest man go to sleep!). But once the DB was recreated, I had connection to MSSQL, but I couldn’t work with it. I asked the question and got the answer – ‘reinstall TVE3 and MSSQL, if everything goes wrong, use MySQL’. Everything went wrong, and I was forced to use MySQL. I got a problem with Russian names. I tried to rename ‘???’ in panel, but in some builds new information wasn’t saved at all. In some I succeeded in it, but got ‘???’ again in MP. I adjusted MySQL to understand Russian. I could type Russian letters directly in DB and see them. But if I do it in panel, I got ‘???’ again. That’s not a problem of DB! It’s all your fault!
- Slowest GUI + always timeshifting + needless TV server on the same PC = nonsense. But why do you use MSSQL or MySQL? To kill my PC? Are you working for AMD, Intel, Kingston, etc? Be professional – use Oracle! Why not?! Forget about primitive SQL-lite or even MSAccess!

So, what the end of my piece of rubbish?

- Do you want to rebuild the whole concept and make your SW really HTPC SW? Please, let the wisest man go to sleep! I beg you!
- Look at the core critically – is it for PC-users? Throw out things which prevent me from fast using MP. You saw my fingers above. I read about useless TV ideas. And, please, let the wisest man go to sleep! I beg you!
- Stop belching your daily nightmares! Make one working version (RC is not working properly) and one big beta-release (I won’t use it, as I’m not a beta-taster).
- Find a project manager.
- Be simple!
- Go to bed!


PS. You may delete my post.

 

[upspace]

i already mentioned problems with stability and especially performance one or two years ago and recommended the mp team to focus on core funtionality.

this weekend i gave it a try again because i wanted to include my dvb-s card into a htpc media center. vista media center (which is nice if you like microsoft or not) does not allow that:-(

after giving a try for 1-2 hours a gave up. slow response in setup, startup, ui, crashy, huge resource footprint. switched to dvbviewer pro, paid my 15 euros and what the hell... this is some serious live tv (and htpc) killer ap.

 

[mzemina]

upspace - I'm not surprised you are wanting to pay for a commercial product. I looked through each of your posts. Nowhere did you provide details of your system or any logs so the developers and other could help you out. Since this is a volunteer and free system a user HAS to take some responsibility and dig and and provide details so others can help out. Otherwise those that are trying to help are just guessing.

 

[seco]

I agree that more attention should be paid to core functionality, especially performance and stability. As I said in another thread, I don't give a crap if I can rip a DVD or do something totally irrelevant with Mediaportal if I have problems with watching TV and video files all the time.

Adding more features all the time rather than testing and bug fixing the old ones sounds like something that not should be done in this kind of software. I hope Mediaportal2 concentraces to key features of media software to which I would count in watching TV and videos, and playing music.

 

[Olodin]

Adding more features all the time rather than testing and bug fixing the old ones sounds like something that not should be done in this kind of software.

I don't agree: we need this. Without new ideas and implemented features MP is dead.

But I would really like to see another way of handling the code base. At least with MP2 you *must* spilt your code into branches to concentrate on your stable release tree with RCs on the one hand and a fancy-eyecandy-new-features branch where stability is no issue. Then merge selected features as needed.

I've never seen a software where major database changes occur between two release candidates.

 

[mcraenz]

I find it amazing how varied peoples experiences can be. I run an oldish athlon xp 2500 (1GB Ram) and a cheap DX9 video card and my systems runs perfectly.

I've got a good fast harddrive (Seagate 320GB SATA) I guess that's why I was able to successfully test record 7 channels at once while still watching another on my networked client perfectly smoothly.

In fact just yesterday I was recording I think 3 things at once on the server and I had to go into taskmanager for something else what did I notice. tvservice.exe fluctuating around about 5% CPU.

I don't understand how people with even more powerful systems have so much trouble. I'm not trying to argue one way or the other. Just my experience of MediaPortal/TVE3 thats all.

Cheers,
mcraenz

 

[infinite.loop]

I find it amazing how varied peoples experiences can be. I run an oldish athlon xp 2500 (1GB Ram) and a cheap DX9 video card and my systems runs perfectly.

yes, me too.

and most of the time the mother of all bugfixes is a clean windows installation, without all the crapy codecpacks and weird tools

btw. those users which still think that we add tons of new features every day, should start to carefuly read the changelog (or even better the svn-log).
no, not the TV-Server changes, because that one was not in feature freeze.

 

[aidbish]

Infinityloop hit the nail on the head. My MP installation is on a dedicated pc that does nothing else, and it has never been a problem for me, the wife or the kids. Having other applications and games on the machine only adds to the problems. and i beleive are the main causes to people not being happy with MP.

 

[THDBASED]

Same here, it is best to have it installed on a dedicated machine, no serious problems here either...

 

[dir]

I only recently switched from Meedio to MP so I guess I already had the fundamentals (file structure, compatible h/w, knowledge of configuration, calluses, patience, temperament). It took about 2 hours to get things running about 90% correct, then of course another 4 weeks so far in tweaking and fiddling and trying out each changed feature, or skin, or add-on, etc.

The thing that impressed me about MP was that it is still pre-release and already quite usable. I think people forget this and expect MP to be stable, reliable, and consistent. It doesn't have to be - it's still being developed! I think we're sometimes a bit too impatient and our tolerance for variations, instability, and changing development directions is too low because we just wanna start using it.

Kind of like watching a friend build a custom made car for you - as soon as it has a frame, you want to sit in the driver's seat and go "vroom vroom" with the imaginary steering wheel. As soon as the engine's mounted, you want to start it up. As soon as the shell is finished, you want to take it for a drive. That's all well and good, but you can't get mad at anyone if it stalls around the corner, or doesn't have any brakes, or appears to run just fine but occasionally totally locks up!

Asking for predictability and stability, even between builds, may reduce the creativity and spontaneity in the individuals that are creating this thing, and eventually turn them off from wanting to stay involved. These guys aren't working in large enterprises or corporations and using structured application development lifecycles, or project methodologies, or JIT, or RAD. They're a hodge-podge of (mostly) guys dotted around the world driven by the desire to code really cool stuff. For some, it's a desire to be able to retire from coding and be able to finally sit down in the living room and have their home theatre doing exactly what they want (and have the smug satisfaction of knowing they had a part in it).

My advice to those that want MP NOW - put it away and use something else for another 6 months then come back to it. Try it out again, have a play, and if it appears to work, Great! But if it's not totally working, let the devs know and leave it alone.

If you want to play with pre-release software, you're really only entitled to test, play, demo it, and provide feedback. Try to tame your impatience, frustration, and desire to have it all, now!