Why I think I'm switching back to Media Center (2 Viewers)

[Marcusb]

2. I hate having 2 "home" screens. I don't know if all of the skins have them or not, but I find it really annoying when backing out or hitting the home key and I get taken to the "wrong" home screen. It is a minor annoyance, but one that should not even be there.

Yep, this annoys me too.
The simple solution is to find the basic home xml file in the skin directory of your choice and replace its contents with those of the home xml file. This way, if you accidentally call the basic home screen, then all you will see is the standard home screen and it will be seamless to the end user.

Just remember that any SVN's may revert that change if work has been done in the basic home screen.


As for disabling modules, I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but in the plug ins section of configuration you can disable any of that main plugins (MyTV etc) by right clicking and choosing disable.

Cheers,
Marcus.

 

[mlburgoon]

Yeah, I know about going into setup to do that. I was meaning being able to select those during the install, though, and just flat not install it. No files, no overhead, no nothing for that module. This would be for the "basic" modules.

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

No files, no overhead, no nothing for that module. This would be for the "basic" modules

I think you are looking at the future

 

[scirocco790]

I´ve been using MP for about a year now. And i can say it is the best mediacenter for my needs. The work of the programmers is impressive.
I had no problem with the setup, because im a very experienced user. But what was hard to understand were the masses of options and how they work. A tooltip with a small help would be a fine thing.
The usability is good. Some friends of mine, had seen my mp, and they took over the remote and some minutes and some questions later they used it without great problems.
But what makes me crazy are the bugs. Some fixed bugs appear in a later svn again. And i agree that there are not many big bugs but a lot of small bugs. But these are the things that make people angry.
The focus of the mp team in the next time should primarily go into the direction of fixing as much bugs as possible instead of implementing new features that are needed by 3% of the mp users..
I think this will be the right way, because the functionality that is integrated at the moment is great!

A big thank to the MP team from me!

 

[allanp81]

While I love mediaportal, I to tend to agree with some people that time should be focused on fixing existing bugs rather than implementing new features. I use mediaportal on a daily basis with the tve3 and 3 clients and it works great for me but there are stills things I have to remember not do that will cause issues.

 

[and-81]

A couple of new features (only small ones) have snuck in over the last few months, but not many. I would say that at least 90%-95% of the programming effort has been on bug fixing. If you look at the changelogs you'll see that new features are going into the TV Server (as they should) but that the MediaPortal client itself is only getting bug fixes.

 

[Spragleknas]

This might be off topic, but I agree on the "two home screens" not being the best solution.

Last couple of days I have been in MP-hell (I am normally in MP-heaven) due to LOTS of crashes, errors and prpably bugs. (Hey, I am playing around with SVN so...). For the time being I hardly use my HTPC due to these frequent and always new errors and crashes. (But I am solving them, one by one. Right now it is the EPG and a poor PQ and general slow TVE3).

 

[rsbrux]

Sure, there are a lot of annoying glitches in MP, and a lot of things that could be better, but I can't imagine why anyone would prefer MCE. For my purposes, MCE proved to be completely unusable. Here are a few examples from my experience with XP MCE (from what I've read, Vista MCE is worse, not better):
1. You can't switch from using cable or antenna input to video / baseband input without redoing the *whole* setup (and some people think MP configuration is a pain!). Having both options in parallel is just impossible.
2. The performance of the music DB is miserable! It is unusable for any collection containing more than about 10k MP3 tracks.
3. There is no alternative to the music DB (e.g. browsing the directory structure). Until you have tagged all of your music, you are SOL.
4. There are no alternative TV guides. You have *one* choice. If it's wrong, you may be able with diligent research and development of intimate system knowledge find a way to fix it. More than likely, you won't. If it's missing something, you'r screwed.

I could go on and on...

It's really amazing to me how a crew of part-time volunteers and hobbyists can produce something (MP) which is so much better, more flexible and powerful than commercial SW from the biggest SW developer there is!

Keep up the good work, and don't let the (well-intentioned) criticism get you down!

 

[mrkaras]

I would probably have to agree that 90%-95% of the SVN commit notes refer to bug fixes, but the new features must be winning as I think there are more and more bugs in MP. most of the bug fixes fix bugs that are not in the bug tracking system, according to that there are very few bugs, almost every day more than that are fixed (or at least noted that way I have seen apparently fixed bugs re-occur, but you'll always get that sometimes). an RC1 and RC2 should be equal feature wise and should be tested versions not simply a re-labeled SVN version.is there a target? Where will it be in one year?

the features section of the web site may need a review, or use it as a guide to any release versions, it says you can listen to FM radio but I am under the impression that has not worked for quite some time now (fairly sure it's not listen in the mantas either).

release versions need to happen more often, not to get beater versions out faster but to keep bugs under control. a release (fully tested) version should work and if they are reasonably often the number and complexity of the bugs could be kept under control. as it is at the moment you basically have a year or so to deeply embed bugs and make them very hard to fix. I'm not suggesting a version every week, maybe every 3 months, maybe longer but have some target and make it as short as reasonable.

 

[infinite.loop]

I would probably have to agree that 90%-95% of the SVN commit notes refer to bug fixes, but the new features must be winning as I think there are more and more bugs in MP. most of the bug fixes fix bugs that are not in the bug tracking system, according to that there are very few bugs, almost every day more than that are fixed

thats has a very simple reason.
the developers read the forums

so if they find a bug reported there, and if they are able to fix it, then they do.
or if some user uploads a patch to sourceforce for an issue we were not even aware of, then it gets added after testing.

the bugs in mantis are usualy "hard to solve" issues, which were reported by team members or users in the forums (and confirmed by a team member).

the features section of the web site may need a review, or use it as a guide to any release versions, it says you can listen to FM radio but I am under the impression that has not worked for quite some time now (fairly sure it's not listen in the mantas either).

as far as we know it works in the inbuild TV/Radio engine.

if it doesnt work for you, start an bugreport please.

release versions need to happen more often, not to get beater versions out faster but to keep bugs under control. a release (fully tested) version should work and if they are reasonably often the number and complexity of the bugs could be kept under control.

the reason why some issues are that hard to fix, or fixes cause other issues is mainly the structure of MediaPortal (code) + we do not have that many develpers and testers.

as i allready said in this thread, fixing bugs in mediaportal is like playing mikado. you fix one and maybe have 5 new.

there will be a "change" after 0.2.3.0 final release to get rid of that.