quick summary of issues I'm having with MP2 (1 Viewer)

Ivan50

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August 16, 2015
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Hello folks.

I've been a long time user of Mediaportal 1.x. It has been a struggle getting my TBS 5881 card to work reliably, using the patch posted in the forums. Since MP2 has built-in support for this card I thought it was time to try out the summer 15 release. This is a standard client/server install on same machine, complete reinstalled on a newly installed Windows 10.

Positive news is that the TBS 5881 including its CI works very well (with one caveat, se below). That being said I'm very surprised about the amount of bugs I've already found after about 1 hour of using MP2.

First of all, if I understand it correctly, there is no longer any separate MP configuration tool. You have to do all the client side configuration inside of the MP client, right? In that case, I'm very confused about that lots and lots of essential configuration options are missing. I also find the interface extremely hard to use. I have to constantly switch between keybord and mouse just to be able to navigate, and it's often not graphically obvious if you've checked or unchecked a checkbox and so on. It feels like Windows 8 allover again, where the interface tries to be usable using keyboard, mouse and touchscreen at the same time. The result is that it's not user friendly using any of the interfaces.

An example of something I'm missing is configuration of the keyboard shortcuts. I need this to be able to use my remote control, which sends keystrokes that I can't change on the remote control side. Also I'm not sure if it's still possible to install the old keyboard shortcuts plugins which I found very useful. I'm very confused that basic functionality like keyboard shortcut configuration has been removed?

How do you change which items are shown on the start screen? I've tried all the different skins and themes but I can't find this configuration anywhere.

As I said the TBS 5881 card works with one caveat. I have to press the "stop" button (to stop live tv) before changing channel. If I watch one channel and just select a new one to watch, the behavior is pretty much random. Sometimes I get the spinning wheel for about 10 seconds and then it starts to play the previous channel. Sometimes after the spinning wheel MP hangs, some times the screen gets black. Sometimes the spinning wheel closes and the interface gets pretty much useless (no respons from any other button). Sometimes I get a red circle with some weird error message (sorry, cant't remember what it said, something about some function name being missing I think). The tvguide shows only 7 rows by default, using only the bottom 1/3 of my tv screen. I changed the settings to 15 rows and I expected
this to show the tvguide on the entire screen. Instead, it still shows 15 rows at 1/3 of the screen, making it unreadable.

When launching MP2, the various icons shows up (TV, Videos, Utilities etc). After about one second, they are shuffled into new positions. For example when the interface comes up, the TV selection is at the upper right corner. When I'm about to press it, it magically changes to the Videos icon.

When selecting tvguide, it takes about 10 seconds to load. In mp1, this was instant. Same thing for a bunch of other selections, for example the Audio selection takes several seconds just to show "<No items to display>".

The "Playlist" option shows up in every sub menu under Settings. This seems like an error.

Live tv works great, but playing any recorded video makes the video and sound jump around and go out of sync. Playing the .ts file using VLC shows no issues. Files are stored locally on an SSD and I never had any issues with MP1.

Every time I play or stop a recorded video it seems like MP2 briefly changes resolution. This means that my TV blanks the screen and shows a welcome message for about 10 seconds. Kind of anoying.

Simple things like recording a program is not as easy as before, the record button has been removed from some menus where I think it belongs. Shift-R is not very intuitive or user friendly I think, if you use the keyboard.
Also there is no longer any indication about the ongoing recording in the GUI. If, and only if, you start the record from tvguide -> Record now, the tvguide displays the show in red. If you use Shift-R, the program doesn't even show in red. In Mp1 there was a nice red "Rec" button showin in the GUI when recording.

Stopping a recording was not obvious at all, but after searching the forums I found a post saying that "Delete schedule" deletes the schedule and stops the recording. This like these are extremely non-intuitive for normal users (try explaining your wife that Delete schedule means Stop recording). How do you stop live tv from showing in the background when moving around in the GUI? This makes the GUI sluggish, and the picture and sound goes crazy. The only setting I found was Settngs -> Appearance -> skin -> enable video background, but that is unchecked.

These are just some examples from about 1 hour of my first MP2 use. I realize that it is still under development, I'm happy that my tv card finally works (kind of) but given all the other issues I'm pretty close to uninstalling MP2 and go back to MP1 as my wife would never accept MP2 in its current state.

Any help to solve any of my issues would be much appreciated.
 

mm1352000

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  • September 1, 2008
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    Welcome and thanks for the feedback :)

    One question: are you using NativeTV 3.0 or NativeTV 3.5?

    NativeTV 3.0 is the default TV engine in the latest summer release. It is essentially the same as MP1's TV Server. It does not support the TBS 5881 any better than MP1's TV Server.
    Only NativeTV 3.5 has the previous TBS patch (actually, an improved version) included.
     

    Ivan50

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    August 16, 2015
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    Thanks, I didn't realize that. I'm using 3.0 then. Given I've only been using it a couple of hours the card hasn't failed me a single time yet though (except for the stop button issue). I will give 3.5 a go.
     

    mm1352000

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    You probably don't need to do that unless you're using the CI slot.
     

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