Much of the work I have done over the years in managing a Media Center library has been dealing with the creation of custom tags and complex categorization systems to work around certain UI behaviors etc.
Modern media platforms have none of this; search is the way that you interact with your media library.
Media Center's search function is basic, and limited to the current view. (it has also become very slow on my system now, and there are no tools to diagnose this)
Search should become the main interface for Media Center, not a static library.
Rich search results and context-aware actions for those results is the way forward.
- If I search for an album name, selecting it plays the album.
- If I search for a TV series, it picks up where I last left it, and queues up the rest of the series.
- If I search for a director or actor it will take me to a list of their movies etc.
If I subscribe to Spotify, I can play any song or album in seconds. If I subscribe to Netflix, the same is true for TV shows and movies.
If I buy Media Center, I'm setting myself up to become a librarian.
Now I absolutely understand that there are people who want to deal with this, and I'm not saying that browsing should disappear - there are times when it's still useful. But it's becoming less and less appealing as time goes on, as everything else moves towards search-based interfaces.
Search should become the primary interface, with browsing/management having less of a priority.
This is particularly bothersome on mobile clients.
Management of views for Gizmo/DLNA clients or Theater View is even more frustrating than normal view management is. It takes far longer to set up and test a view for them.
This would not only be a modern interface for Media Center, it's also how you build a touch-friendly interface.
Moving to a search-based UI may help alleviate many of the issues that Panel currently suffers from as well (being very slow for manual browsing).
The subtitle renderer needs work.
It cannot handle complex subtitles, so it ends up covering the screen in garbage and dropping frames whenever a subtitle is displayed.
Every other media player that I have tried - even free iOS clients (since video playback has been broken in JRemote for years now) - has had no issue rendering these subtitles correctly.
The entire way that Zones are handled needs completely overhauled, but you clearly think that it's fine, since the solution to many of Media Center's problems is "add more zones!" as if that isn't making things worse.