First appreciations about media portal. (1 Viewer)

esperado

Portal Member
July 24, 2005
27
0
Paris France
A two weeks ago, i tried to find an HTPC to work with my new Pinnacle 300 i DVB-t card, pissed off by the Pinnacle media center (as it was with PCTV softwares) full of bugs, not able to manage the composite inputs of the card, not able to scan channels in my contry without two patches (takes 45 minutes to scan) and so on.
Tried a lot of replacement softwares, and, finaly found MP.
My first impression was desapointing: No help delivereded with the soft, lot of configurations menus not very intuitive, lot of crashes, bugs and so on, very slow opening menus, etc.
But, i cant explain, despite of the hours spended on it, i was pretty sure to be able to configure this software in order to get-it working more or less correctly with all the features i was dreaming off. I was right.
Some days after, the 0.130 version was there, much more stable, and very fast new CVS. Better and better.
Omho, many things still needs to be fixed, many little bugs, many ergonomic improovements but, today, i have an HTPC able to do the essential: watch DVB-t TV with a good quality, watch analog tv (PCTV rave) with not so good quality (de-interlacing), get timeshift, perfect XMLTV, very goog watching DVDs, recording facilities and some more nice gadgets like meteo ;-)
I was able to configure my PCTV remote to fully drive the soft.
I have all the video and SVHS of my two cards working together.
And i can use the soft in window on my main screen (LCD) while i have the TV/Videos full screen perfect on a second monitor (CRT).
I still have some desagrements: Mp crashes sometimes when i change DVB-t channels (random), strange effects when an other window take the focus, (depending of the drivers), stay stuck when opening on a video input with no signal or a bad channel, i still spend time experiencing codecs and different configurations to try to inproove quality with the analog composite inputs, but i have the "every thing in one" that i had not found nowhere else, even with commercial progs.
On my opinion, now, MP will be THE HTPC. If i can make some suggestions, better than adding more features or skins, it is urgent to work on the code in order to correct bugs, make-it rock solid (if ever this is possible with Direct show ;-), improove ergonomy, specialy in the configuration.exe, simplify architecture (too many XML, and database configuration files, omho), and try to reduce CPU loads.
I can't help developpers because i'm only familiar with delphi, witch is far away from C# or visual, but may-be i can help with a project of an help file in CHM or so, with contextual facilities (if that has been or will be implemented in main program and configuration.exe).
I have done that kind of work for Hamster-FR (a GNU NNTP/SMTP server) that you can look at : http://esperado.chez.tiscali.fr
My language is french (apologies for my poor english), but structure can be the same in English and traduction is an easy job.
If somebody of the community is interessed by my propostion:
ch.esperado[at]tiscali.fr.
Have a good day, and congratulation for this fantastic job full of promesses.
 

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