First impressions, issues & quirks (1 Viewer)

DragonQ

Portal Pro
August 30, 2011
644
79
Home Country
United Kingdom United Kingdom
Just installed MP2 for the first time and started writing notes as I was playing with it. Hopefully some/all of this feedback will be useful to the devs here.


It started up really quickly, which was surprising and nice. The first thing I notice is that the image for each item on the front page is distorted when highlighted. You shouldn't mess with the aspect ratio of images like this; if the effect is to remain, the images should expand both vertically and horizontally to maintain aspect ratio. This issue also happens with other pages, e.g. OnlineVideos.

The first thing I did was go into the settings. I enabled GUI anti-aliasing and the application froze once I hit "OK". No error messages. Once I restarted MP2 anti-aliasing was correctly enabled.

All other settings seemed to work fine, although I was hoping to see some rendering options - I complained a couple of years ago about the lack of scaling algorithms in MP1 (it just uses EVR's default of bilinear, which looks rubbish) and was told that MP2 would have better algorithms available. I can't see them - is this feature just not added yet? I see that I can choose the "Sharpen" shader but that's pretty old by this point AFAIK and there are much better options out there. This, and a centralised film/TV server database, are the two biggest features I'm looking for from MP2 so I'll have to seriously consider switching to another media centre program if they aren't both included. :(

Text boxes are pretty dodgy. Sometimes I click on them and I can type, other times it brings up the on-screen keyboard and I can't. It also doesn't support basic things like Shift+Home or Shift+End to highlight text. This is the danger of using your own GUI controls and having to reinvent the wheel, in my experience.

I went into OnlineVideos and tried to play something from iPlayer. I chose a video, then chose 720p Level 3, and it briefly showed a "No media item" error at the top of the display, then did nothing. After this, nothing happened whenever I clicked on any other video until I pressed Escape to go back. I then tried to use 720p Akamai and the same thing happened. Looking a the error detail shows "Resource.... not found". I don't think this is an OnlineVideos provider problem since iPlayer is working fine within MP1's OnlineVideos plugin at the moment.

I restarted MP2 and tried to watch an iPlayer video again. This time there was no error but the loading icon just remained for over a minute after I clicked on a video. The video never appeared. Even after going back to the Home screen the loading icon was still there. Had to restart MP2 to get rid of it.

I finally watched a local video file just to test that (no TV available without a server). Worked fine, although the interface was clunkier than MP1's and didn't seem to work well with a keyboard/mouse control - e.g. can't click on the seek bar.

So yeah, I thought I'd give it a try and see how viable it would be in my home setup. Currently not close enough to being ready for me, there are quite a few issues to be looked at and polishing to be done but it looks like it'll be quite nice once it's ready. Keep it up lads! :)
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Top Bottom