The time has come... (1 Viewer)

[mshorthose]

:sorry:
Hi guys & girls,
I have finally done it – I have hit the Shutdown button on my MediaPortal machine and bought a WhatHifi Best Buy Samsung PVR.
Having stuck with MediaPortal for the past five years, reinstalled it, tweaked it, upgraded it and so on, I have now given up. It has always been temperamental, requiring restarts and the occasional reboot but has only once been what one might consider “stable” for a period of time exceeding six months. By “stable”, I mean doing what it should without any expert intervention – being wife-proof in other words!
Things didn’t start too well when I bought a Hauppage TV card and after weeks of trial and error discovered a mismatch between the card and the chipset on my HP Quad-core workstation on which I have always run MediaPortal. Having replaced the card with a much cheaper Pinnacle card, I set to and managed to get the remote control working too.
I have never like Vista as an OS but that is what came on the machine and so before Christmas 2011, I got out my bank card and performed a wholesale upgrade.
After five years, the data HDD was looking old so I replaced this with a 2TB unit and the system HDD with a 500GB drive. A new installation of Windows 7 (32bit) went on next. The graphics card was replaced for one with an HDMI output which could also cope with HD and finally a new BlackGold DVB-T2 card. Kerching! A brand new Onkyo 609 AV receiver completes the lineup.
So it all worked perfectly?
No.
Whenever the TV is turned off for more than 10 minutes, when it is turned back on, MediaPortal is in a window rather than at full screen – with no apparent means of maximising it without restarting MP. On odd occasions when it does remain at full screen, I have sound but a frozen picture – and again I have to use Task Manager to close MP then restart it. I was living with this pending posting a query on this forum when something else broke – I can navigate to the EPG but then everything freezes when I click on a programme to watch. If I leave it long enough, it flashes back to “My TV Series” which I don’t use. You might notice that I say “click on a programme” because having changed the TV card, the remote of course doesn’t work again and I am back to my Bluetooth keyboard! I retuned the TV and am reduced to watching that now without any MP at all.
So tomorrow, a Satellite Dish Fitter comes and wires up a dish so that I can plug my new PVR into Freesat. This will hopefully do all I need on the TV side and the Onkyo receiver can stream music, pictures and video direct from a server – so the faithful HP will be just that from now on. MediaPortal has to stay until I have watched everything I had recorded and burned anything for keeps onto disc but after that I will be saying goodbye to it and saying hello again to all those hours I seemed to put in to fixing it. I can also say goodbye to listening to my wife “tutting” when something she wants to watch is interrupted by me fixing on the fly.
I would like to say in closing that I work in IT – I’m not a programmer or anything, but I know my way around and can delve into SQL if I need to and can certainly fix the majority of problems, given time and the occasional pointer from experts on here.
MediaPortal is a great piece of kit – if only it would stay that way and stay consistent. I think that rather than keep developing it for more and more features, some huge effort should be put into consolidating what is there now and getting it to work properly. I now work for a software house and I know that developers would much rather work on a new project than go back and fix something niggling from a piece of code they wrote four or five years ago.
Thanks everyone for your invaluable assistance over the years and for all the hard work which continues to go into MediaPortal. I will come back at some stage and revisit it, but for now I have reached that time in life when I cannot be bothered any more!

Cheers guys

Funny - It seems I joined this forum in 2009 so I cannot have been using MediaPortal for five years as I suggested. Curious that it seems that long!

 

[mm1352000]

Hi mshorthose

I'm sorry to see you go but I do have a few comments in response.

First, by the lack of posts in recent times it would seem like you've been struggling with problems alone, or at least not reporting them here. If things are as bad as you say then for heaven's sake why not ask for help and/or report the problems? If you don't ask for help or tell us about problems how can we be expected to fix them?

So it all worked perfectly?
No.
Whenever the TV is turned off for more than 10 minutes, when it is turned back on, MediaPortal is in a window rather than at full screen – with no apparent means of maximising it without restarting MP. On odd occasions when it does remain at full screen, I have sound but a frozen picture – and again I have to use Task Manager to close MP then restart it.

In case you hadn't realised, *many* people struggle with that problem which is caused by an intersection of issues with HDMI, Windows, video card drivers and possibly some MP thrown in for good measure. There are many workarounds if you'd only asked.
Windows 7 & half fullscreen - MediaPortal Forum

I was living with this pending posting a query on this forum when something else broke – I can navigate to the EPG but then everything freezes when I click on a programme to watch. If I leave it long enough, it flashes back to “My TV Series” which I don’t use.

Problems that are not reported can't be resolved.

You might notice that I say “click on a programme” because having changed the TV card, the remote of course doesn’t work again and I am back to my Bluetooth keyboard!

Blackgold don't provide details for their IR implementation so we can't support it. Regardless, MP supports many widely available remotes. A MC remote that is very well supported is relatively cheap, especially compared to a Blackgold tuner. Why not buy one of them and be done with it?

...but after that I will be saying goodbye to it and saying hello again to all those hours I seemed to put in to fixing it. I can also say goodbye to listening to my wife “tutting” when something she wants to watch is interrupted by me fixing on the fly.
I would like to say in closing that I work in IT – I’m not a programmer or anything, but I know my way around and can delve into SQL if I need to and can certainly fix the majority of problems, given time and the occasional pointer from experts on here.
MediaPortal is a great piece of kit – if only it would stay that way and stay consistent.

If everyone does what you seem to have done trying to fix and work around the problems themselves then of course they will spend a lot of hours. From our perspective it certainly doesn't help us improve the reliability of MediaPortal - I hope you can understand that. We don't expect people to be IT pros to run MP but we do expect them to be reasonable and report problems so that we have a chance to deal with them.

I think that rather than keep developing it for more and more features, some huge effort should be put into consolidating what is there now and getting it to work properly. I now work for a software house and I know that developers would much rather work on a new project than go back and fix something niggling from a piece of code they wrote four or five years ago.

I think many people including the team would agree that stability is critical. If that is the impression you get about how we work then I at least believe you are sorely mistaken.

Good luck with your PVR/receiver.

mm

 

[mshorthose]

Thanks for your responses to my many points.
All of these are valid provided it is always considered that MediaPortal will always be a 'work in progress' and never a product which can simply be downloaded, installed and left working perfectly.
I am aware that to suggest that this should be possible is very ungrateful considering the amount of time, effort and resources that you developers put into the product, and perhaps my expectations are unreasonable - particularly as the software comes without charge.
This is the key difference between a product that might be purchased off the shelf and MediaPortal - MediaPortal is not (and probably will never be) "shelf-ready".
If launched commercially, you could never afford the support costs!
My new PVR was plugged into the new satellite dish yesterday afternoon.
When powered on, it asked for my postcode.
It then searched for and found all available freesat channels, prioritising those broadcasting local news, based on postcode.
I then tweaked the picture settings on the TV to account for the different colour balance of the new box and sat back and enjoyed.
I recorded a programme, watched it and deleted it - rewinding and pausing along the way.
Last evening I went into the menu and pointed it at my network shares and it now pulls in music, videos and pictures from that box too.
It only accesses YouTube from the internet, but then again, the receiver will stream content from other sources, so this is no great loss.
The point is that after maybe 10 minutes of searching for channels and setting up - everything works!
I have had no need to contact Samsung support, configure cards, reprogram remotes and so on.
Bonuses are that the PVR also triggers the TV to pick the correct AV input and the remote also works the TV.
Result.
OK, so MediaPortal does so much more - it does things with fanart, everything is customisable, I can have weather and news feeds, I can change skins etc etc.
If these things required hours of work to get to grips with, then that would be forgivable if it did the basics that I have described the PVR doing, out of the box - but it doesn't.
And the real benefit - smiles from she who must be obeyed!!!!!!
She can drive it without calling me at the office to ask what to do because the screen has frozen again.

In conclusion and not so much a moan but a heads up...
With these off-the-shelf boxes such as my Samsung PVR, Smart TVs and even AV Amplifiers now streaming from the network and internet - you have to get MP STABLE, otherwise it will become obsolete. You have done sterling work in having led the way which all these producers of 'smart' goods are now following. Perhaps without the example of MediaPortal in showing what is possible, Samsung might not be producing the product I now own - and for the same cost (£200) as my new graphics card and TV card alone.

Martin

 

[powermarcel10]

Hi mshorthose,

I'm sory to hear..

I'm using Mediaportal for like a year now, and in my case it's very, very stable.. While I have a lot of plugins and skinmods installed.. I need to say; I spent a lot of time to it, and posted a lot of posts in the last year, but the result is very nice..

Also for playing live tv, I have no single problem anymore.. (using fortherecord, did you tried that one also?)

Mediaportal is so nice to tweak and since a while also very stable..

I hope you will try it for 1 time, and ask for help to the community, because Mediaportal has by far the most nicely, helpfull and friendliest community I ever seen..

You can do so many fantastic things with it.. I have so many fun with it.. Even my girlfriend thinks it's awesome, and know how everything works..

So, keep your self together, start with a fresh mind, and do what you have to do!

Do you want to let me make a youtube video for you to inspire you a bit??

 

[Caesium]

You don't mention which model Samsung PVR you have exactly, but I'm guessing at the SMT-7800?
Samsung SMT-S7800 500GB Freesat HD TV Recorder: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics

Glancing over the reviews, it doesn't seem to be a silver bullet, there's plenty of people reporting bugs and issues. The higher model seems to suffer as well:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-BD-D8500-Blu-ray-Player-Freeview/dp/B004S5ZR6K

Recent firmware updates to them seem to have solved most of the problems but not all. So it seems even the hardware manufacturers can't get it completely right. MediaPortal has to cope with a very wide range of hardware whereas the set top boxes have just one combination of hardware to work with - the box they're sold in

That said I do agree with you, MediaPortal isn't a finished product and I spend at least a few minutes a week sorting out issues that crop up with it. I too suffered from the resize-after-TV-off problem, but there's a fix for it on these forums which worked for me. I also found the MP TV Server a little too unreliable so switched to FTR and have been quite a bit happier.

Anyway I think it boils down to you can either wait for Samsung to fix the problems and push you a firmware update (which may never happen) or ask MediaPortal devs to fix the problem and push a new release (which may take some considerable time to happen or just fix it yourself in MediaPortal (granted few people could do this!).