Global feedback on reliability of features you use in MP (1 Viewer)

[wawa79]

I am in a period of doubt concerning MP: I have been trying to use it for years (since 2007) and when I look back, I have not had one single week without issues on basic features.

That would be great if I had enough time to make MP troubleshooting a hobby. But MP is supposed to be the masterpiece of audio/video entertainment at home and despite great improvements since 1.0, I just expect the basic features to run reliabily which is still not the case for me.
And it is a real source of conflict at home: TV freezing and missed recordings (fixed: a hardware issue), MP not going to standby properly (a recurring issue for me: again not working since I moved to MP1.3 and Win7), erratic resume (blank screen, screen resuming on a freezed view of last standby, no sound or no resume at all), codec puzzle to get smooth video playback and non-crashing DVD menus, days of work to get reliable unresampled audio playback with pureaudio, 5.1 audio on TV/DVD and blu-ray (thankfully fixed with LAV for DVD and BR, but still not handled properly for e-AC3).

And what to think about all the great plugins that add great features to MP but that generally also add more unstability so you uninstall them with frustration after a short period of hope...


Last but not least, change of OS, motherboard, video card (4 times), tuner cards (3 times), soundcard... Sources of incompatibilities and and issues are endless.


When we switch on the AV system at home, in 50% of cases, it does not resume as expected and in 20% of cases, it requires more than a simple PC hard-reset. I have stopped counting the evening when we initially planned to watch a movie all together and that I ended up alone, troubleshooting MP in the living-room.

I run an home automation system based on Homeseer and many heterogeneous plugins. I even developped small ones in VB to drive custom devices or interact with other systems. All this is used intensively (lights, doors control, temperature, access control, alarm, AV on/off control). Everyone using Homeseer knows the implementation is just not well structured, nor organized nor as rational as MP seems to be. My system is not perfect but this aggregation of newbie coding is finally far more reliable than MP: it has been running since 2007 and the only issue I got was a PSU failure. And the system is continuously being modified and improved without impact on existing features.

I am a little ashamed of not being able to contribute to MP improvement and still experience so many issues with it after so much time spent to dig into MP setup, tweaks and workarounds.

What is the situation for you? What are you the most upset of?

 

[Bernard]

Hi Wawa79,

I've been using MP for about a year full time, and before that I just tested it while it was on some version 1 a long time ago.

I have noticed that you should not play around too much with plugins, they cause a lot of the stable issues. Also working with a slow network connection (to your media), or broken files can really crash MP in a heart beat. Because I spend 5 seconds on the MP core, and the other 2 hours a day on the Movie and TV Series plugins, I cannot say that my problems come with MP Core, but rather the plugins.

Since 1.3.0 Alpha which was full of funny surprises and bombed out sometime (but expected of a Alpha). All the issues I had, was resolved in 1.3.0 beta. But it is still beta. But since I upgraded to 1.3.0 beta, I have had NO problems with the parts that I use... and that would be: the main menu, the settings, sound control. I don't use the TV option which is part of the core. So I can't really tell you anything about that. My movies and tv serries plugin can do with some refining, in regards to weird delays sometimes, and I have to press play twice on some (or all) movies. (A bug I should report).

I had worse issues with the core of 1.2.3 (or whatever was before 1.3.0) and find the 1.3.0 better to work with. For instance the startup of 1.2.3 was like hell, I had to switch the system on 10 minutes before I wanted to use it, so that it can boot (something to do with plugins loading). This problem is now gone in 1.3.0 and I have more plugins on it than before. So just that was a big upgrade to me.

Lastly I just want to say, I'm also a full time coder, and I have no idea how these guys can get so much time to actually sit and develop such a big system. And all this commitment for free! This goes for the plugin developers as well, and in most case they are one-man-shows, so they have to do everything themselves.

I'm really donating money once I won the Lotto! These guys deserve it! But until then, I'm struggling to keep my head above water myself, with lots of overtime.

 

[wawa79]

For sure these guys are doing a great job: just compare MP with any other Mediacenter and it leads in mostly all features. What is frustrating is that the whole Mediacenter system (PC + Win7 + MP) just does not work FOR ME and I do not find a way to troubleshoot properly the system.

For example this week, the system did not enter standby when shutting down with the remote in 3/5 evenings. And in the 3 cases, the PC looked to be frozen: no way to get the screen on or to connect via VNC, I had to reboot. And when restart, no idea of what had happened, neither in the MP logs, nor in the Windows logs...
I also got a sound issue: the SPDIF started outputing at 44.1kHz audio on digital tv despite it is configured for 48kHz. After a reboot, all came back to normal, but again, no log to investigate what happened...