i hope someone is listening (1 Viewer)

[kasper]

Hi,

this is my first contribution to this community. Sorry for my English.

First i like to congratulate everybody for to great work to make Mediaportal stand out. But i still have not find the real mediaprotal.

It all started 2 years back when i build a new kitchen in our home. I looked all over the net to find a easy program to make my own mediaportal. I saw this (mediaportal), i saw meedio and i saw xlobby. I tried them all but no one was good enough for my needs.
The problem is always the same....to hard to program.
Oke what do i need for a mediaportal.
1. I need to see pictures
2. listen to radio
3. see television and the television listings.
4. surf the net
5. email
6. communicate with msn messenger and skype
7. listen to my mp3 collection.
8. play some games
9. and know the weatherforcast.
10. some recipes for the woman.
11. play some movies

i'm no programmer, so it wasn.t an easy task for me. So i looked to standalone programs that i could startup in my portal.

At that time meedio was the only one that could make a sort of startbuttons in the screens. So i made
my own first screens, and under every button a link to start up a standalone program. And yes,
it worked well.

I used meedio and for the easy needs it was good enough
1. pictures...oke was good in meedio
2.radio oke was good in meedio
3. television...now the problems begon. I had an wintv go card at the moment. So i've read every line on that forum...nope it didn't worked. I had to know every in or out and codec and videoformat of everything. just to play some television. Strange..when i go to buy a new televion. I just stick it in the wall and push to search button and i have every channel cristalclear.
So to make evrything as simple possible...i made a link to startup my wintvgo program itselfs. Ontop of the portal. Television listing...damn...JXMLTV..webimport..etc..sorry guys..i tried it..but it didn't worked..so no tv listing automaticly. Just a plain online webpage of a tvguide.
4. Surf the net ...problems again...nothing easy to find...so there was a german bloke who made an easy
standalone browser just 340 kb big..something liked a url that ends with htm...and starts internet explorer without the buttons ontop..with just 4 buttons on top...back..forward..refreh and stop and screenshot.
5 email..nothing to find
6. nothing to find
7. music mp3 collection..oke this was in meedio at that time but not for touchscreen users. All the buttons where to small...just like now in mediaportal...so i looked further and yes i found a very nice
skin for the windows media player that i could use....so again i had to make a button to start up an standalone program.
8. i used to small german browser (see above) to play some nice online games
9. weather..again i ued the browser..just made a link with the url to that weatherpage i needed. And the small browser started up with the page
10. recipes...one to my own cooking videocollection that i made in just plain html page. Just clik the link on the html page and my windows media player with to touchscreenskin started up.
11. play some movies ...damn that was almost impossible for me to. All that programming to see the pictures of the movies and a brief explanation. So i just made and html file with al the movies. Just one link under eachother. and every movie had a number i've wrote on the dvd or cd.

So this is a story of some guy who wanted to make something beautiful in his kitchen but he was no programmer or had no time to become one.

So far..my kitchen setup is doing what i want it to do. Not everything but most of the things.

Now i want to remake my livingroom..and yes i have a second 12 inche tft touchscreen somewhere..so i want to do it all over again for my living room.

So for the second time i looked at all the free programs available..and to my big suprise..it can not
find it..the problem is always the same.
The icons are to small for my fingers. And no one is easy to master. I,m looking at this forum for weeks now trying some new stuff out and it's still way to difficult for me. Maybe i'm stupid. But i think that most users have problems to master it.

Then i saw this http://www.xlobby.com/files/badabing/mov/badabng_hi.html

Now thats what i call a mediaportal. It's very simple to use..with big icons. Even now i don't understand
why everybody is using those small Icons....the future is touchscreen for mediaplayers..see the ipodplayers..see the proffesional livingroom mediaplayers...everything is with a touchscreen. imagine i have a wireless keyboard with a buid in mouse...yesss..i will be much easier to clic a big button then a small one.
And when a start a mediaportal, i want to have a full view of the possibilities. Everything in one eye sight.
I don't want to scroll through everything to find what i need.

I know that the person who build the mediaportal in the video was a programmer but it's the concept that
counts. So i imported the skin (it's free) in xlobby and i tried some things out..some works and other don't. But the simplicity of everything is the best i've seen in years. Music works great and pictures is based on a module of picasa (google). Now that's what i call easy making..and it works perfect.

The future is simplicity. So why is it still so sifficult to import your own movies or other movies in mediaportal. Like tv guide..it's almost impossible to make it work here.
When you look at the movie..he just make small thumbs of all channels..clic on a thumb and television starts..that,s the way it should be. You have a quick overview of all the channels for fast viewing.

I don,t want to say that mediaportal is bad..cause i know how much hard free work went in to it but it's still based on the first idea to build a mediaportal. I saw it with meedio to..first the build something like
mediaportal and then most users complaint that it was getting to difficult to master and then they made things easier with big icons and very simple with big overview pages and then they sold it cause the big boys saw it was almost ready for most people with nog programming experience like me

So please try to think in a other way and make mediaportal simply the best on this planet...don't see it like a programmer who build something..see it like an end user like me who want it simple.

Btw if someone can build a skin like the Badabing xlobbyskin for mediaportal,,i will kiss him/her

Thanks for listening
i have some pictures of my kitchen setup but i don't know how to show them here[/img][/list]

 

[kasper]

i found a way to post the pictures

http://kasperjr.blogspot.com/

if someone would like to comment on my idea's above.
you're always welcome

 

[zswman]

I didn't read every word of your post, but I did watch the complete xlobby video and was very impressed. I agree with you, what really should be worked-on in MP is navigation and being able to easily manipulate your media and control the features for presenting it. What seems to be worked is ADDING features, some of which are (IMO) non essential to what a media portal should be about (e.g. chatting tools).

That said, I think MP is the best thing I have tried, including my own custom applications for manipulating the media over the web using my Audreys as touch screens. I disagree that "the future is touch screens;" I used to think that too and was basing my applications around that paradigm. What I have found w/ MP is "the future is a hand-held remote control and a TV-like interface," just like what most people have now through their onscreen program guide, or the features of their DVD player, etc. I don't want a separate screen to manipulate my media, I want it on the same screen I am viewing the media (because much of it IS visual, including visualizations when playing music!). For my money (and I have contributed $$ to MP), I want to see better support of remote controls, like being able to assign any functions to any keys, more consistency across the applications, etc.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[Inker]

Kasper, interesting feedback.

TBH though with the exception of Skype every single thing on your list is supported by MediaPortal. I think the only thing missing to make MP accessable to you would be a touchscreen skin, or at least a skin suited for small screens.

I believe *most* users are looking not in the direction of having a touchscreen in their kitchen, but are looking into having an HTPC in their living room, on the biggest TV they can afford.

You say your are not a "programmer" and I would say you defenitly dont have to be in order to use MP. You describe the way in which you make all those points on your list work before, some quite complicated it seems, so I'm not sure why your having problems configuring MP to do all of these things.

Perhaps you could give us an example of what your having problems with, and we could help you with that specific item. Frankly I don't know how much easier it could get to, for instance, set up MyWeather. EPG Data also seems very easy today nowadays with webEPG (you don't need xmltv anymore), etc.

So don't give up, ask specific questions and we can help you. You still might have the problem of too small a skin though.

Inker

 

[kasper]

let's hope..some things make life easier

Thanks for the comment so far.

zswman : a remote is like a touchscreen..just buttons and a screen. Just mine is a bit bigger. Imagine that every skin was designed for a touchscreen...everyone could use it. Not just a pc-user but a carpc user and a touchscreen user to.
"the future is a hand-held remote control and a TV-like interface," :a touchscreen just a little smaller

Inker : thanks for the points made. The problem is that i don't want to make such a big effort to make everything work like i did 2 years ago. Then i always sorted the problem out with an html page and a light version of a browser
My idea now was that 2 years later everything was easier.

What i look for these days:

weather module is very good.
pictures module : look at the movie above : he has a quick overview of all his pictures and imagine you have really a incredible big picture archieve..he has a easy search engine with a big keyboard
Perfect for everybody.In mp..i can see the pictures in 4 differend ways..as pictograms, thumbs, files etc..i don't need that..i just want a big overview.
music module : the same..all differend possibilities.. i don't want that..just an overview and a search engine...i think you can use the same searchengine for every module.
Tv module : i'm pleased with that..it has a big range of support for almost every tv card..a big plus for this. But the same idea here...just an overview page first of all the channels en then when you clik on a channel you get a second page with the tv going in a small windows and more option for recording, full view, and tvlistings etc

all the other things works fine if a take weeks to configure everything to my needs.
And yes i know that i will find most solution on the board here and yes i will search for them.

If i read your answer, i an answer that a programmer would give..give me your problems and i will help you....oke my problem is the layout..it's not that there is nothing that works..it does..only it's not logical enough to do something like viewing a picture of playing a song or watch a movie or television.

my only 2 suggestions are:

-try to make a nice overview page for every module
-try to figure out how Badabing made the spiderthing ...imagine you have a new movie and you copy en paste the imdb page of it in a movie directory you've made on your harddisk. Then with the spider thing just clic on the pagelisting and it's taking up in your database. Same with the picture of the movie..imagine you copy and past the moviepicture in a directory on your harddisk where al the moviepictures are in. Then start the spiderthing and assign the picture to that movie.

i know..its a differend view on things.

Thanks for listening.

 

[samuel337]

Hmm... that sort of stuff looks very much like car PC interfaces. IIRC, there's some effort going on to develop a CarPC skin here.

With regards to an 'overview' mode, that could possibly be done through skinning, leaving out the options you don't want to display on screen. Otherwise, I think you're asking for something in the opposite direction to what the vast majority of people want - features, features, features. I agree though, that in some places, there needs to be some effort to clear up the screens, but I don't think we'll be seeing an interface as simple as the one in that video, simply because I think for MP's main audience more features beat big buttons. I mean, the current interface isn't unusable at all using a remote.

That said, I'm going to embark on a Car PC project of my own soon, so I'll be after what you're looking for too (simple interface, big buttons). Still haven't decided whether to edit MP or to try out some of the other frontends available, especially the Car PC frontends.

I suggest if you don't find what you're looking for here, check out the www.mp3car.com forums for some of the car PC frontends there. Not sure if there's one that supports TV and is free though.

Sam