- April 24, 2011
- 7
- 3
- Thread starter
- #11
Hi All,
Just thought I would post a little update on this. My area in the UK went digital which marked a period of channels swapping frequencies on the local transmitters. I got fed up with Windows Media Centre and randomly appearing channels, and started down the DVBLink road. Just so happened my first use of DVBLink was the release day of their version 4 - which was about as stable as a house of cards. I persisted for a while, but then thought I'd give MediaPortal another chance.
I installed it about 2 weeks ago on a test PC with a single TV card and found the Avalon skin. Avalon installs Moving Pictures and the TV Series plugins so my first experience this time round was with these plugins running. As a comparison to my last adventure the difference was like night and day. Moving Pictures and TV Series are slick, now that I understand the concept of using Media Portal configuration to get things running rather than trying to do anything within the Media Portal client - things were more straight forward (although I fear this area is going to get blurred again with lots of plugins starting to offer configuration direct from within the application - would be good for Media Portal to provide a steer for once and for all on the vision of how configuration should be achieved and make it either all in or all out).
I still jumped through a large number of hoops, but was satisfied enough to put it on my main HTPC and let the Mrs have a test. I can say that 2 weeks later I now have a fresh build HTPC on Win7 with just Media Portal on and its working great.
I think this is testament that Media Portal is heading in the right direction, I've found myself becoming an avid forum reader and look forward to future releases.
The things that still puzzle me, although I'm sure time will clear a lot of them up are:
Why are there two different home pages (classic and whatever the other one is called) - this created a huge amount of confusion. If one is legacy, it would be great to drop it and put it out of the way where it won't confuse new users.
Forum pages for plugin releases are a pain in the ass. It looks like this is slowly getting better with the Extension installer (why isn't this part of the Media Portal configuration utility!?)
Default behaviours in the Configuration utility are bizarre. For example, the most common thing I do in configuration is to go to the plugins and choose configuration on Moving Pictures. Therefore I'd expect double clicking the icon to do this, but that toggles enable and disable (are people really enabling and disabling their plugins so often that it warrants the double click status!?). Also what is with the hover to select. I find myself clicking a plugin and then taking the mouse on a bizarre path to get to the config button so that I don't accidentally hover over another plugin on the way! I know you can right click, but its far from intuitive!
Not sure why Moving Pictures and TV Series are not the defaults now with Media Portal, they are so far ahead of the built in services. I know the videos section is getting a revamp - I've seen some of the screenshots in the forums and it does look like its heading in the right direction - but the others are there now and supported in every skin I've looked at.
Why are you sticking with the default blue skin? It makes it look like Windows Media Centre, which is horrible! You should have something that stands out and is distinctly different to build on a Media Portal brand! I really wanted to try and leave as many things as vanilla as possible to save on hassle - but I just couldn't live with that skin.
SAF is such a life saver, it should be more highly advertised. I spent hours messing with codecs, finding HD channels didn't have sound, problems switching between them, bitstreaming not working, stuttering playback etc. SAF just fixed pretty much everything in one go. If I were a new user, I'd be wanting this as one of the default options on the installer (I know people are sensitive about Codecs, but some people just want something that will work!)
Anyway just thought I'd share my more recent experiences in case anyone is in a similar position!
Looking forward to the 1.3 release and really hope this can become more accessible to a wider audience as it is a great product! Also really hoping there is more work on remote streaming via web. Have a couple of laptops in the house that are not under my administrative control and being able to get live tv streaming to them (without the headaches of remote access and VLC) would be great!
All the best,
Spanner
Just thought I would post a little update on this. My area in the UK went digital which marked a period of channels swapping frequencies on the local transmitters. I got fed up with Windows Media Centre and randomly appearing channels, and started down the DVBLink road. Just so happened my first use of DVBLink was the release day of their version 4 - which was about as stable as a house of cards. I persisted for a while, but then thought I'd give MediaPortal another chance.
I installed it about 2 weeks ago on a test PC with a single TV card and found the Avalon skin. Avalon installs Moving Pictures and the TV Series plugins so my first experience this time round was with these plugins running. As a comparison to my last adventure the difference was like night and day. Moving Pictures and TV Series are slick, now that I understand the concept of using Media Portal configuration to get things running rather than trying to do anything within the Media Portal client - things were more straight forward (although I fear this area is going to get blurred again with lots of plugins starting to offer configuration direct from within the application - would be good for Media Portal to provide a steer for once and for all on the vision of how configuration should be achieved and make it either all in or all out).
I still jumped through a large number of hoops, but was satisfied enough to put it on my main HTPC and let the Mrs have a test. I can say that 2 weeks later I now have a fresh build HTPC on Win7 with just Media Portal on and its working great.
I think this is testament that Media Portal is heading in the right direction, I've found myself becoming an avid forum reader and look forward to future releases.
The things that still puzzle me, although I'm sure time will clear a lot of them up are:
Why are there two different home pages (classic and whatever the other one is called) - this created a huge amount of confusion. If one is legacy, it would be great to drop it and put it out of the way where it won't confuse new users.
Forum pages for plugin releases are a pain in the ass. It looks like this is slowly getting better with the Extension installer (why isn't this part of the Media Portal configuration utility!?)
Default behaviours in the Configuration utility are bizarre. For example, the most common thing I do in configuration is to go to the plugins and choose configuration on Moving Pictures. Therefore I'd expect double clicking the icon to do this, but that toggles enable and disable (are people really enabling and disabling their plugins so often that it warrants the double click status!?). Also what is with the hover to select. I find myself clicking a plugin and then taking the mouse on a bizarre path to get to the config button so that I don't accidentally hover over another plugin on the way! I know you can right click, but its far from intuitive!
Not sure why Moving Pictures and TV Series are not the defaults now with Media Portal, they are so far ahead of the built in services. I know the videos section is getting a revamp - I've seen some of the screenshots in the forums and it does look like its heading in the right direction - but the others are there now and supported in every skin I've looked at.
Why are you sticking with the default blue skin? It makes it look like Windows Media Centre, which is horrible! You should have something that stands out and is distinctly different to build on a Media Portal brand! I really wanted to try and leave as many things as vanilla as possible to save on hassle - but I just couldn't live with that skin.
SAF is such a life saver, it should be more highly advertised. I spent hours messing with codecs, finding HD channels didn't have sound, problems switching between them, bitstreaming not working, stuttering playback etc. SAF just fixed pretty much everything in one go. If I were a new user, I'd be wanting this as one of the default options on the installer (I know people are sensitive about Codecs, but some people just want something that will work!)
Anyway just thought I'd share my more recent experiences in case anyone is in a similar position!
Looking forward to the 1.3 release and really hope this can become more accessible to a wider audience as it is a great product! Also really hoping there is more work on remote streaming via web. Have a couple of laptops in the house that are not under my administrative control and being able to get live tv streaming to them (without the headaches of remote access and VLC) would be great!
All the best,
Spanner
United Kingdom
