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[JimH]

We're sometimes told there is a need for better documentation.

Here's a challenge.

Post a question you or another user might have.  I think the documentation is there, but it's not found.

[BigSpider]

Searching endlessly through forum posts isn't what a modern user wants to do. Give me the set up details and I'm a happy bunny is today's approach.

[JimH]

Getting Started is in my signature.  It's in the email we send with the license and other emails.

[BigSpider]

And it is very good Jim, but people like to have something to read, which isn't a footnote url. I am quite happy to dig and delve and spend time to get a system to do what I want it to do - but the modern human seems to be - I want this to work without any effort on my part! You have to cater to the needs of the multitude if you want to expand the userbase I'm afraid.

[JimH]

For moe,
At the risk of seeming (or being) defensive, there is extensive documentation on MC.  The problem users seem to have is finding the right information.  A Google search will almost always find it.  Try JRiver Setup, for example.  (I haven't, but I'd guess it will find a load of information.

We can't know what you want to know.  A Google search will usually work unless the question is too esoteric.

And a _lot_ of people don't read.   I answer most of our inbound emails,  and about 1/4 of the questions asked are answered in a link in the email that people have replied to.  That's not something I can fix.  Better documentation won't fix it.

I think information, in general, is now much more loosely organized and that's because search is so effective.

[Awesome Donkey]

And a _lot_ of people don't read.

Yeah, a bit of the understatement in general with a lot of products. Even with documentation or a user's guide, a lot of people don't read it.

[mattkhan]

Post a question you or another user might have. 

I don't understand this thread. Isn't this the point of the whole forum? Many (most?) Qs don't appear to be answered by referencing some existing documentation or require navigating through >1 thread, each of which contains some partial solution.

IMV one of the big problems, both with the wiki and with referring to old threads as docs, is the stale content.

[Absinthe]

IMV one of the big problems, both with the wiki and with referring to old threads as docs, is the stale content.

+1, here's an example.  Under the Function Index for expression language, the List Manipulation Functions show a function called ListLimit(…) but when you click that function, its not provided in the details.

In general, I agree, people aren't willing to invest the time to read, research the answers to their questions first and would rather just ask.  The problem is they never develop those researching skills because its just "easier to ask" a member who already knows.  Jim is good at directing questions to a particular WIKI, or forum post rather than just answering the question, perhaps we should all learn from that example?? 

[JimH]

We can fix that.

[jmone]

I too struggled at first and really craved a "manual" so I empathise with new users..... but keeping doco up to date where changes are made every week will be an expensive and time consuming task.

Over the last year I've been playing with 3D Printers, and find that (like with MC), there are a million various options that you can set, tweak, and change.  I find the approach of Prusa with their slicer very good.  Their approach is similar with:
- Blog Posts such as Short Getting Started: https://blog.prusaprinters.org/slic3r-prusa-edition-beginners-guide/ ... which is already out of date!
- Community support on a forum (but with far less interaction with Prusa staff than MC does)
- Initial Config Wizard

but.... they do a couple of things where I could explore more on my own without needing to dive back to the forum with a Q&A every time
- Modes: Select a "Simple, Advanced, Expert" that hides or shows various levels of settings (and these settings are coloured, so even if you have Expert selected you visually see what is a Simple vs Advanced for example. 
- Tool Tips:  Every single option has a tool tip.  Every one.  You can not only enter in your own values but can see and revert each one to the default.  Works well.  I guess you could even put in a link to the Wiki or Forum for relevant discussions on the tool tips.

In the attached screen shot (as an example), you can see:
- Green (Simple), Yellow (Advanced), and Red (Expert) Settings
- Good Tool Tips when you hover over the Name, and if you hover over the lock icon /  it will tell you if it is different from default and you can reset it

Thanks
Nathan
 

[Spike1000]

Wer,
Thanks.  I started a thread on documentation here:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,122288.0.html

How much documentation can someone write in a hour? How much useful information can be conveyed in 6 x 10 minute, single take, screen capture videos?

Do some tutorial/walk through/demo/sales/feature videos first the; difference in cost/impact/value for money is staggering. The 'pressure' of doing a live single take video is really interesting. You have to know what you're talking about and as it focusses the mind it reveals any clunkyness, poor interface, inefficient design etc etc

Then try a 'mock' video of competitor's products to see how their setup processes flow differs. Taking a different perspective on things can be really insightful.

Spike

[daveman]

Jim,

I have never understood your reluctance to develop a proper manual.  There are numerous features and options that i simply do not understand nor do I have the time to search for an hour by reading multiple threads.  Throughout the forum you can see questions that have never been answered.  I myself keep a file of specific issues because I have had difficulty searching for specific issues/setings that I needed to return to when setting up a new system.

You asked for an example... Options > Config DLNA > Advanced.  There are multiple options.  I have no idea what several of these are for and I simply chose the options that others said have worked for a similar setup to mine.  I would like to know what each option actually does.  I gave suggested having a manual or at the very least Tool tips (in which your hover over an item for further details).  I myself have shown MC to several people who said they would never be able to use it if there were no instructions.


while you say "I don't consider documentation "Big Picture"."  I would think that many of your users DO...

[JimH]

+1, here's an example.  Under the Function Index for expression language, the List Manipulation Functions show a function called ListLimit(…) but when you click that function, its not provided in the details.

Fixed.  Thanks.

[rec head]

I wish I could remember off the top of my head what they were but recently I tried looking up something in the wiki and there was nothing there.

Another problem is sometimes it is hard to google or search the wiki for an answer when you don't even know the name of the setting you need to change. In that case you just need to ask.

[Moe]

These two commands are not listed in the wiki either 

ListEqual(...)
ListContains(...)

Additionally, for ListLimit you can use negative numbers to return items from the end of a list.  Example

ListLimit([Actors], -4)

Returns the last 4 actors

[drmimosa]

I'm a fan of documentation in Read the Docs format.

For example, https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/intro/getting-started-with-sphinx.html

What would it take to build a "Getting Started with JRiver" web page in this format?

[jachin99]

The documentation for TV guide setup is detailed in some areas but thin in others.  I found that when I setup my guide it was fairly easy to get basic guide data in MC but the differences between various guide sources isn't well documented.  Getting movie covers or series images in the bottom right corner for example isn't possible with the Microsoft option but I only learned this through trial and error.  Channel logos make a huge difference in MC but some setups produce small channel logos, while others produce large logos that cover the entire guide cell, and are easily readable from a distance. 

The guide can look really good but I had to figure it out on my own through trial and error, and maybe showing an example of what could be added, and explaining how to get there would help sell things in MC. 

[mattkhan]

What would it take to build a "Getting Started with JRiver" web page in this format?

It takes just a few mins to setup a repo that readthedocs builds so most of the effort is writing the docs. I think it is possible to export mediawiki to XML and convert that to markdown and use mkdocs with readthedocs with existing docs as the starting point.

Not sure what the advantage to this compared to mediawiki is though? that a readthedocs site has a menu? i.e. isn't an apparently unstructured jumble of pages.

[blgentry]

Here's the crux of the problem:

MC is a big program that does a lot.  Some of it's documentation is very confusing because it's difficult to write comprehensive coverage of some features.  Take "media network" for example.  The documentation on Media Network really needs to be completely re-written into something like 3 or 4 separate sections with an introduction that points you to the correct subsection.  As it stands now, it's both confusing and missing real "meat".  It also includes several reference pages, like "examples", which are very well intentioned, but are really hard to comprehend.

I would estimate it would take 10 to 20 hours to really write a correct Media Network set of pages.  I would hope that would do it.

From what I've read from Jim, JRiver tried this at one point with a "professional" and felt like they wasted money doing it.  I've had similar experiences sometimes with focused specialists.  Sometimes the real point of the task gets lost in the details.

This is a difficult problem because, YES the documentation is obviously lacking.  But if you could magically have perfect docs appear, you wouldn't satisfy everyone.  Why?  Because MC is a big program and it is complex.  ...and, as mentioned, a lot of people do not read docs.  The forum is a nice stop gap.

For a business owner, this really becomes a judgement call:  How much money am I losing due to my documentation which is not up to par?  How much money would I have to spend to recover (for example) 80% of this lost revenue?  If the answer is less than the cost of hiring someone to fix it, then it does not make monetary sense.

MC has always been a "hardcore media enthusiast and geek" software product.  I think it will continue to be.

I like good docs.  I write good docs.  But I'm not sure if hundreds of hours of effort on MC's docs would really help JRiver as a company to produce more revenue and thus grow and improve the product and people's lives.

Holy cow.  Did I just agree with Jim?? 

Brian.

[JimH]

I didn't say that Lise's work was a waste of time.  Not at all.  She did a great job.

But MC's documentation is done on-the-fly now, in the wiki and in the forum.

Some things are impossible to document.  Take a look at what Bob just posted about multi-channel on the IdPi4:
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,121188.msg846357.html#msg846357

It's mostly about the quirky behavior of the Pi4.  By the time we document that well, the Pi4 may have changed.  It also affects very few people.

[wer]

MC has always been a "hardcore media enthusiast and geek" software product.  I think it will continue to be.

Brian hits on a point that I made in my post in the other thread, so I want to try and clarify further here.

There are some very knowledgeable and experienced users here, posting about what's the point of this thread, or that the information's out there or available, or that better documentation won't help, or that a simple forum search will answer most questions.

Those people just don't get it, and it's because they are knowledgeable and experienced users.

You have to start by thinking "Do we want MC to continue to be a niche product, or do we want sales to increase?"  If the former, then by all means keep going as you are.  If it's the latter, then you need to think about WHY prospective customers do not buy this product.

I have talked a lot to those people over the last few months, so I'm not giving you my view, I'm giving you theirs.

People absolutely CRAVE a whole home media server.  They love the idea of having an HTPC like I demonstrated to them.  "How can I do that?" they all ask.  They're crazy about being able to have all their audio and video in once place, and to be able to organize it the way they want, and to integrate with everything else they use.  They want a product that will enable them to do that.

And then the vast majority of them tell me MC won't be that product, because they just don't understand it.  A lot of them buy an AppleTV box, even though it's much more limited.  Because they can get it working.

MC has a ludicrously steep learning curve for people who are at the point of asking questions like:
 "How do I get my music on my computer?"
 "What is 'tagging' and how do I do it to my music and movies?"
 "WTF is a 'View'?"

MC, as capable as it is, is bought by tinkerers, techies, masochists, and people with the patience of a saint.  The other 98% of people give up on MC and look elsewhere.  And the reason why is known.

In order to understand and appreciate this, you need to put aside your preconceptions of what you think is important based on your own experience.  The people we're talking about, the people who DON'T buy JRiver are not like you, or me.  They would like for a new application to be simple and intuitive, but if that is not possible, either because the subject matter is too complex or because they want something powerful, then they are willing to compromise on something that is not simple, but is straightforward to learn.

MC is neither of those. 

Consider someone who knows nothing about tagging, nothing about ripping, nothing about databases and nothing about programming or "expression languages".  For those people, the "Getting Started" link that Jim frequently touts is absurd.  It's like giving someone instructions on what type of suture to use after removing a gall bladder, when that person doesn't even know what a gall bladder is.

A new user needs an introduction that tells AND SHOWS (via screenshots or a video) what all the different parts of the user interface are, what they do, and what they're called.  They need the concept of a view explained, with visuals.  They need a guided tour of the process of ripping.  They need a guided tour of the process of tagging.  They need a guided tour of getting their remote working.  THE ABSOLUTE BASICS.  The Getting Started link gives none of that up front.

In the Main Help page, under Using JRiver Media Center, there are exactly two topics, and they are both indices.  Are you kidding?  How do you think that presents to someone who wants to learn about "Using" something, and turns to that chapter, and instead finds an index?

One of the first sentences in the Getting Started page is this: "Import your music into your Library then complete Audio Setup so you can listen to it. Review Standard View to understand how to use the Media Center UI."  This is great for people who don't know what importing is, don't know what a Library is, and don't understand the significance of Standard View.  Yeah, you say, but click on the links and they find a lot of good information.  But they don't, because the first page is so dense and overwhelming, and so lacking in screenshots or introductory exposition, that new users get discouraged immediately.

Most users do not want, and are not willing, to click through 25 widely dispersed links, and try google searches (success being predicated on knowing terminology they do not know) and then sort through forum posts going back YEARS AND YEARS to try and find a correct answer (avoiding dead ends) in order to understand something simple.

They need an introduction, a tutorial.  It needs to be in one place.  It needs to have copious screenshots, or even better, videos.  And it needs to tell them: We're going to walk you through everything you need to know to enjoy using Media Center, focusing on the following topics:
1. Introduction to the MC interface.
2. Ripping: How to get your music on your computer
3. Tagging: Providing data about your media files
4. Organizing your media (storing, naming, and organizing your files)
5. Operating MC from a Phone, Tablet, or Web Browser
6. Getting your remote control working
7. Introduction to Theater View
8. Customizing Views and Sorting
9. Customizing Theater View
10. Networking MC to work with the rest of your devices
11. Where to go for more information and help

A new user needs this info up front.  If their first experience with an app is that they have to visit a forum, create an account, post a question and wait for a possible response just to get started, you've failed.  98% of users simply will not play that game.  Those of here talking about this are the other 2%.

A guy I know called me the other day, who was trying out MC. His very first experience was confusing, because upon installing the program, he was looking at the interface after the program had just launched, and all of a sudden it started doing things.  (MC was trying to be helpful, and scanned his computer for all his music).  But he was confused by this, because he didn't see the little inconspicuous countdown window.  He was further confused because he then saw multiple copies of a lot of his music.  MC had found the FLAC copies of his albums, but also found the MP3 copies that he made for his wife's phone.  He didn't like this, and wanted to know how he could get the extra stuff "out of the list".  A lot of the stuff was "recognizable" but he didn't like the way it was showing up in MC (because his tags were not great, and he didn't understand about tagging).

He said to me "I tried looking at the online help, but I couldn't really find anyway to fix this.  I thought I would be allowed to choose what I added to the system (meaning MC) but now all this extra stuff is in there and I can't figure out how to sort the wheat from the chaff to fix it."

So not a good first experience for him.

You all generally like the way MC works.  Documentation, be it how to guides or videos, is the answer to how to make something easier to learn and usable for NEW USERS, without totally overhauling what you've built or stripping out everything that makes it capable and dumbing it down to the level of AppleTV.

Consider it from the opposite angle:

Why WOULDN'T someone buy JRiver, compared to competitive products or something like AppleTV?

Well...
- It's not audio quality; MC is tops at that.
- It's not video quality; MC is tops at that.
- It's not media compatibility; MC plays everything.
- It's not flexibility; MC can tag, rip, organize, you name it.
- It's not too expensive; MC is nicely priced (although a remote costs extra)
- It can do audio, video, and images.  Locally on the PC, through a 10-foot interface on a TV, or remotely using something like JRemote.
- It can play more formats, and organize in infinitely more ways, than AppleTV.

AppleTV does come with a remote that works out of the box... It does easily connect to your home PC and online services.  Is that it?

What could it possibly be?  Could it be that people find MC too complicated, confusing, inscrutable, unapproachable, intimidating, and obscure, with no easy way to learn it or find out how to really get started?   Naaaahhhh.... Couldn't be that.

Some people complained to me about the look of the app, but they also said "It has different skins, so I guess it's ok".  Some people complained that their favorite streaming service wasn't integrated.  Some had other complaints; but none of those things were what kept them from buying it.  From all the people who talked to me about it after those demos, and it was many dozens, I only heard two main reasons why they weren't buying it: "AppleTV works better with my Mac" and "It's too hard to figure out without any guides and the help didn't help."

Listen, documentation for MC doesn't do anything for me.  Anything JRiver would put in the type of documentation new users need, I already know, just like you all do.  The only reason I am spending my time talking about this, knowing full well Jim doesn't care and is just looking for confirmation that his viewpoint is perfect, is that I want MC to be more successful.  I'd like it to be more widely installed with a larger user base, because that will lead to more development and a better user community, which benefits me and the friends and family I have that use MC.

I'd like it to be more than a niche product, sold to more than "hardcore media enthusiasts and geeks".  In order to do that it needs to be more appealing to the people who are NOT buying it now, without sacrificing what we all like about it.

-Will

[Moe]

Very well said Wer.

[mattkhan]

I'd like it to be more widely installed with a larger user base, because that will lead to more development and a better user community, which benefits me and the friends and family I have that use MC.

I'd like it to be more than a niche product, sold to more than "hardcore media enthusiasts and geeks".  In order to do that it needs to be more appealing to the people who are NOT buying it now, without sacrificing what we all like about it.

nicely summed up

The Q that I haven't seen asked in any of these documentation threads (is it me or are they getting more frequent?) is whether this is actually the (strategic) goal  Given that the general direction of the app hasn't changed in the years I've used it (a relatively late joiner having started at MC19) then it seems reasonable to doubt that is the case, quite possibly for the reasons  Brian stated (and hence the result is stalemate).

[rec head]

MC has a ludicrously steep learning curve for people who are at the point of asking questions like:
 "How do I get my music on my computer?"
 "What is 'tagging' and how do I do it to my music and movies?"
 "WTF is a 'View'?"

-Will

Great post. What made me laugh is that I've been using since 17 or 18 and I still only know what the Standard View and Theater Views are.

[dtc]

I would add Awesome Donkey's suggestion for adding Wizards to get the new user started.  The combination of better start up documentation per wer's post and startup wizards would be a big help to the new user.

[mattkhan]

 

By the time we document that well, the Pi4 may have changed.  It also affects very few people.

you have a content management problem in that there is no way to tag such "on the fly" documentation as applicable to a given "product" (whether that is a version of MC or an external thing), no way to mark that as obsolete and no way to link forum threads together over time via those tags.

Using google to search is not a substitute as google has no idea about that internal metadata.

other forums, and possibly other forum software (discourse, xenforo), do a better job at this

[Moe]

The following fields are not described in the wiki.

DateInRange(...)
DBLocation(...)
FileLookup(...)
IsDigit(...)
IsDriveMissing(...)
IsLowerCase(...)
ListContaints(...)
Literal(...)
NoArticles(...)
RatingStars10(...)
Row(...)
StackCount(...)
Translate(...)
URLify(...)

The following fields are in the wiki, but are not linked to on the Function Index

ListEqual(...)
MoveArticles(...)
Rand(...)
UnmoveArticles(...)

[JimH]

I would add Awesome Donkey's suggestion for adding Wizards to get the new user started.  The combination of better start up documentation per wer's post and startup wizards would be a big help to the new user.

You and others say this, but do you have any evidence that it's so?

I'm influenced by a couple of past experiences. 

The first one is testing that Best Buy did, showing new users the software we had developed for them.  We were behind a mirror and watched the users and a coordinator stumble through setup and first use.  It was astounding what stumped them.  We made a number of small changes that helped.  Without that testing, you can't be certain how users will react.

The second is a new version we did of a previous product.  Our sales and marketing guys gave us a list of features that people were begging them for.  We spent months and months adding them and documenting changes.  The new product sold no better than the old one and some of the special features created special problems.

I'm not closing the door on changes in setup, but I think we need to be very cautious or we could easily go wrong.

Thanks for all your ideas. 

[RoderickGI]

I'm a fan of documentation in Read the Docs format.

For example, https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/intro/getting-started-with-sphinx.html

What would it take to build a "Getting Started with JRiver" web page in this format?

Oh wow. I just had a look at that. Dropped me straight into the Linux and Python command lines! Really, if that is the best they can do documenting Sphinx, using Sphinx, then I wouldn't touch it. I'm sure there must be better tools with good GUI interfaces.

It takes just a few mins to setup a repo that readthedocs builds so most of the effort is writing the docs. I think it is possible to export mediawiki to XML and convert that to markdown and use mkdocs with readthedocs with existing docs as the starting point.

Not sure what the advantage to this compared to mediawiki is though? that a readthedocs site has a menu? i.e. isn't an apparently unstructured jumble of pages.

This. MediaWiki is a bit quirky, particularly the formating, but it works fine. The content is the issue. However, the menus, opening page, and so on could be made a bit easier for new users to navigate.

[dtc]

You and others say this, but do you have any evidence that it's so?

I'm influenced by a couple of past experiences. 

The first one is testing that Best Buy did, showing new users the software we had developed for them.  We were behind a mirror and watched the users and a coordinator stumble through setup and first use.  It was astounding what stumped them.  We made a number of small changes that helped.  Without that testing, you can't be certain how users will react.

The second is a new version we did of a previous product.  Our sales and marketing guys gave us a list of features that people were begging them for.  We spent months and months adding them and documenting changes.  The new product sold no better than the old one and some of the special features created special problems.

I'm not closing the door on changes in setup, but I think we need to be very cautious or we could easily go wrong.

Thanks for all your ideas.

Most complicated software and hardware (with UIs) come with some sort of guided installation procedure. Very few simply dump you into a non-functioning program and just sit there.  The learning curve for starting up MC is pretty high. It really seems like MC could benefit from simplified ways to get started and many others here seem to agree.

A startup procedure could check to see if this is a new installation and only launch the wizard if it is new. Or the instructions you send to new users could clearly spell out that you can either follow your hardcopy instructions or launch the wizards. You could launch the wizards from Tools or Help if you do not want a separate header. As others have suggested, there can be separate wizards for separate tasks - for example, audio startup (including a sound test), video startup (including a video check), importing and building the initial library, media network, customizing/creating views. It does not have to be one all encompassing process.  If people want to use the current methods they can. Or they could use the wizards. You could start with a simple startup one and add from there.

I really think new users would appreciate getting to hear music or see a video right out of the gate, without having to go to various menus to set things up.  The audience here is not the typical computer expert but rather music/video people who are not real computer experts. Of course, that raises the question as who your target audience is. Wizards are not for geeks, but even the geeks often like an easy startup procedure.

You could take it slow, but this type of approach is regularly suggested by many experience users here.

Do I have research on how MC users will respond favorably? No. But an awful lot of companies seem to think startup wizards are useful. And wer's observations are useful datapoints.

[mattkhan]

one other thing to bear in mind is that MC makes it basically impossible to share (snippets of) configuration or provide any way to interact with that except via the UI, this prevents any community effort around this from ever taking off.

If it were possible to share such a portion of the config tree and show a delta between your current config and what happens after you apply it then there would be a way to give people a quick start without needing to write a wizard. The closed nature of MC makes anything like this impossible though. 

This approach won't appeal to all but I mention this in a documentation thread because IME many people prefer live executable examples to docs

[~OHM~]

from a thread today.....

Oh my, I'm so sorry! I just skimmed over it. Thank you.

[rolf_eigenheer]

Experienced in relational databases, Using MC ist not complicated to me. I usally do not read often manuals. Especially when they explain things like 'Save File' does save a file.
What I'm really interested in is the concept behind. It is a database. It holds Metadata to the referenced mediafiles. How were they built ? From filetags, filenames or manual input. What are views, the concept of filtering (one or both ways) ?
Why should one want store this information also in the filetags ? and so on ...

When it comes to database programming, where field names, functions and syntax are necessary, then I expect to find them all explained in detail in one place. Sorry to say that, it's true, there really are some blind spots.

[JimH]

Split Initial Import

[DrKNo]

I don't think the documentation is bad (or even lacking) - but it is distributed and geared towards the technically savy and towards experienced JRiver Users. As a new user, you spend quite a lot of time to finding out what keywords you even have to search for. A new User that looks for a web interface will not search for "Panel" and someone that wants to use REST won't search for MCWS. I think It would be a big step forward to have a landing page that does the following:

1) Have a beautiful diagram that shows the JRiver ecosystem (JRiver, Audio, Video, Pictures, Engen, Cloudplay, ARM Installations, MCWS, Panel, Gizmo, JRemote and whatever all I am forgetting) and how they form a complete home media solution. Give names to those thing
2) Have a concept overview Article that explains the high level concepts without going into detail (What is it for what is the benefit of using it, where do you find further info)
3) Have an overview article on the business model and development cycle
4) Have an overview article on where to find help in general.

That is high level stuff that will not take continuing caretaking, but will have a huge impact in new users.

I honestly don't think that any single one of your new customers actually understands what JRiver is actually capable of and how powerful it is. I sure didn't. In my unqualified opinion, this will help your conversion rate.

I do scientific communication material, and I will happily provide feedback if that is even necessary.

[wer]

Concrete examples were requested.  Here's another example, in case anyone is interested.

Wanted to help a new user better understand Views, and how to customize them, in terms of what is included and excluded in a view.

1. First I was going to refer them to the Wiki Article on View Schemes, https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=68960.0 but it is so old (MC12) that the screenshots do not match any current product. If the screenshots don't match what the user is seeing, it's game over.  Too confusing for a new user.

2. A google search for jriver customize view revealed this: https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Customize_List_and/or_Thumbnail_View  but there is nothing there about rules to include or exclude from the view.  Information is too widely dispersed.  If you want people to leverage search, make it discoverable by one search not five searches.

3. Found this, https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Media_Views which looked promising because it had a section on Customizing Media Views.  However, that section contained no actual information.  It just contained a tease that you could actually customize.

4. However, that same page, in a different section, had a link that pointed to this stub article:
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Standard_Media_Views   Why is something this short its own article, instead of being incorporated in something larger and useful?

(Also while looking at another article on Standard View, I came along this excellent page on Categories and Panes: https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Categories_and_Panes )

5.  That stub article contained a link to this: https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=68960.0  under a somewhat obscure name of "MC 17 View Schemes Guide"
A wonderful guide by Marko.  Absolutely excellent content.  Too bad it's not in the wiki.  Or linked to from a main article in the wiki.  Nor does it come up in the first 3 pages of a google search, because of how it's buried in the forum and titled.

I found this because I knew exactly what I was looking for, and because I knew the search terms, and because I persevered.  A new user doesn't find things like this easily.

Bottom line: Some of the documentation is missing, some of the documentation is junk, and oftentimes what is there is so dispersed it makes it really hard to find.  So obviously, perfect for a new user.

Having hundreds of small articles, each linked to by a two word entry in an index, is not a great way to organize.  Having a smaller number of larger articles, each covering a more expansive topic (in multiple sections on the same page), will make it much easier for users to find things.  Throwing loads of small individual super-narrow articles up there is only good for one thing: making it take as little effort as possible on the part of the person posting it.  No nasty integrating into someone else's article, or thinking about where best to put it.  No thought is given to the person who is trying to find and use the information.

Speaking of the index there is nothing in it at all about customizing views.  Zero.  There is also no "Customization" under C.  Try getting to Marko's article from the index, and see how you like it.  Better yet, have a friend who knows nothing about MC try it, and watch them.  How many false trails will they go down?  Will they give up before finding it?  Documentation that isn't being found has the same value as documentation that doesn't exist.

New users need better.

[glynor]

3. Found this, https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Media_Views which looked promising because it had a section on Customizing Media Views.  However, that section contained no actual information.  It just contained a tease that you could actually customize.

4. However, that same page, in a different section, had a link that pointed to this stub article:
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Standard_Media_Views   Why is something this short its own article, instead of being incorporated in something larger and useful?

(Also while looking at another article on Standard View, I came along this excellent page on Categories and Panes: https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Categories_and_Panes

That stuff, along with the much older View Schemes article, were all mine. I had a plan once-upon-a-time to revamp this entire section of the Wiki, similar to how I revamped the Expression Language and RMCF sections.

But, I got super-busy and frankly it is a ton of work to do for "unpaid/fun" help, and so tomorrow never came.

View setup and customization is absolutely one of the major shortfalls on the Wiki currently. It is just a major undertaking to fix it and consolidate and update all of the information.

[Absinthe]

Would it be possible to "farm" this work out to users on a volunteer basis.  My feelings are that at some point we have all requested help or personal hand holding and have received it either through the active members of this board or past users who have reached out to help with questions, concerns or adding features.  Perhaps its time we all "give a little back"?

[mattkhan]

Would it be possible to "farm" this work out to users on a volunteer basis.  My feelings are that at some point we have all requested help or personal hand holding and have received it either through the active members of this board or past users who have reached out to help with questions, concerns or adding features.  Perhaps its time we all "give a little back"?

writing decent docs for even a single subject is a lot of work, rewriting & collating existing docs along the way is an even bigger job. You need special permissions to delete from the wiki anyway IIRC

[glynor]

Would it be possible to "farm" this work out to users on a volunteer basis.

That is literally the entire point of the wiki.

[RoderickGI]

That is literally the entire point of the wiki.

Perhaps it's time to remind people that anyone can request, and will likely receive, edit access to the Wiki so that they can write all the documentation they want.

But, I got super-busy and frankly it is a ton of work to do for "unpaid/fun" help, and so tomorrow never came.

That's why I only do the Release Notes and small edits, fixes, and updates in the Wiki. If it was paid work I would rebuild it, but... Maybe if I win a few million on the "Pools" I will have a go. 

Mind you, plenty of other Wikies get a lot of love, including other Media Center software. I guess the JRiver community is smaller than those, or being a commercial product people are more reluctant. Or maybe it is more a control issue.


Nevertheless, if you have learned something and think it should be documented, ask for access and document it! Anything that is resolved through long discussion could be documented "permanently" in the Wiki.


PS: I encourage everyone reading a Wiki article to have a look at the History tab and see who has done the lions share of the work. Thanks Glynor, among others.

[terrym@tassie]

MC, as capable as it is, is bought by tinkerers, techies, masochists, and people with the patience of a saint.  The other 98% of people give up on MC and look elsewhere.  And the reason why is known.

In order to understand and appreciate this, you need to put aside your preconceptions of what you think is important based on your own experience.  The people we're talking about, the people who DON'T buy JRiver are not like you, or me.  They would like for a new application to be simple and intuitive, but if that is not possible, either because the subject matter is too complex or because they want something powerful, then they are willing to compromise on something that is not simple, but is straightforward to learn.

MC is neither of those. 

Consider someone who knows nothing about tagging, nothing about ripping, nothing about databases and nothing about programming or "expression languages".  For those people, the "Getting Started" link that Jim frequently touts is absurd.  It's like giving someone instructions on what type of suture to use after removing a gall bladder, when that person doesn't even know what a gall bladder is.

I was very impressed by wer's post above and thought it made some extremely valid points re MC.

I would like to just reinforce what he said from my own experience with MC.

I am a lifelong techie, I uploaded my first program(written in Fortran) from punched tape over a 110 baud (bps) dial up link to a mainframe 50 miles away. Computers were rarer than hen's teeth in those days. About the same time I was designing and building my own amplifiers and loudspeakers. I then worked in the electronics/computing industries for the rest of my working life until I retired. I am firmly in wer's 2%.
I love MC ...but I do remember really struggling with it initially and nearly giving up (trial period of MC16 finally bought MC17, upgrade every year now).

My wife is a very smart woman which is why Dr M has letters after her name, she conducts research into how children learn maths. She records lots of videos of children interacting in the classroom and needs to organise and replay them.

'Have I got just the program for you I cried! It'll organise and play your music as well'.
I duly installed MC20 for her and gave her a brief tutorial...her first question - 'Where's the help?' so I showed her the wiki, 'OK' she said 'I suppose someone like YOU might find that wiki useful but I'll have a go with it anyway'.

A few weeks later I happened by her office and she was playing a research video - on Videolan VLC, 'Why aren't you using JRiver MC?' I asked.
She replied 'I just don't have the time to wade through all the jargon, YOU think it is good because you understand all that stuff anyway, I'll stick with VLC and iTunes thanks'

Obviously I must take a lot of the blame as my MC tutorial obviously sucked big time but I still think it supports wer's point of view very well.

I really don't know what the best answer is (because I'm one of the 2% and don't understand what puts off the 98%) but it seems that MC just overwhelms non technical users and maybe some form of 'easy entry' simplified UI (with lots of tool-tip pop-ups) is required that hides some of the more complex stuff so users can get comfortable with it supported by some very simple user guides.

Terry

[glynor]

(Also while looking at another article on Standard View, I came along this excellent page on Categories and Panes: https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Categories_and_Panes)

By the way, this is just how MediaWiki works, and is supposed to work. If you mark any text in a wiki as a link (by surrounding it with double square brackets) and there isn't currently a page with that title, that's what it shows you. If you visit any URL on a wiki and the page doesn't exist, it shows you that. That's how you create new pages.*

So, for example, all of these are identical:
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/The_Great_Snuffleupagus
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Oh_My_This_Page_Is_Blank
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/And_So_Is_This_One
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/jfgkjregjqerkjgkrlsrkflqkwrlk

When editing a wiki, it is often convenient (and encouraged) to "red-link" to associated content that doesn't yet exist, but should. That's how the "framework" of the wiki gets built. As you are writing, or reading, an article, and you think more context needs to be made available for a particular topic referenced in a line of text in the article, you link it to the related article. If the article doesn't exist, then you click on the link you just made and make one.

There are special meta-pages when editing you can use to show lists of red-linked articles. These are basically "bookmarks" to let you know that more work is needed here. Sometimes you just go through and find the relevant pages and point the links to them (if the person who made the red-link couldn't find it, for example). If you find yourself doing this more than once, it should probably be a redirect instead, so that people find it by searching for those other related terms. And, if you can't find anything to use, then that's a "to-do" item for you.

I'm sure I made that red-link, if you found it somewhere on the wiki. As I said above, I was preparing to build a whole new documentation "section" on Media Views when I lost steam.

None of this matters. I was just explaining that a red-link like that in a wiki is not any kind of indicator of quality. They're the foundation of how a wiki is built.

* There is no other corollary to "creating a new document" in Word (without a bunch of customization). One of the most common "newbie" questions when people are learning how MediaWiki works, is "How the @#$!$!%$ do I create a new page?"

[jachin99]

In terms of documentation being a barrier to entry, I think tv setup is easy to explain and produces quick results.  Maybe once some of these new users get that figured out, they will see some utility in jrmc and explore it's other capabilities.  It might help push them past the I'm just stuck and totally frustrated point and build confidence. 

[Scobie]

There's also a couple of (old) installation/setup videos on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkgWfO1U9nQ

Would it be worth having a YouTube channel for some setup config FAQs etc as seeing and hearing a use case done properly can cut through the technofear. It could even be embedded as part of the MC install to pop up on the first run.

The YouTube page could also link to the relevant Wiki page for people to have more of a deep dive.

[glynor]

I haven't carefully read every single post on this subject on Interact (I should note: this time, of the many times this conversation has arisen over the years, sometimes with me leading the charge.) So at the risk that many of you above and elsewhere are already making this exact point, and I'm repeating other people like a crazy old person...

In reading (and sometimes skimming) some of the recent posts about this and related topics, I see a pattern of great points being made about how flexible and powerful MC is and it can do this crazy cool thing. Followed then by some version of "but...no one can figure it out". In many cases, like that of wer's points above about the Media Views, I smile and nod and think ahh, yes, that old chestnut. She's a devilish one.

What gives me pause is a drive to "simplify" the setup and customization options (again, I'm not suggesting anyone is advocating this) to appeal to a "new, regular user". First of all, they've tried this. A few times since I've been here on Interact. Secondly, I have serious doubts that, after all these years, those "regular users" aren't mythical. Those regular users who don't live with us nerds are using Spotify or Pandora or Netflix or YouTube. (Or, quite often, whatever weird crap they or someone else synced onto their phone two and a half years ago when they got it and set it up and they don't care enough to figure out how to change it.)

MC's strength is what it is.

I think any generalized effort to "wizard it up" to "make it easier for grandma" is doomed to failure because (1) wizarding it up is never as good in practice as it sounds in planning sessions, (2) because those users are gone and aren't coming back, and (3) because if you aren't very careful you'll just end up ticking off the people you already have. If there is a market, it is a nerd market and a pro market.

I absolutely think documentation could help (and screencasts, and all the things). I think it could absolutely open new markets for them. But, as I said privately to wer and Absinthe earlier tonight, it seems to me that JRiver's priorities have been toward the product engineering, and they've left the documentation (largely) to the community. And it is what it is. I can't say they're wrong. 25 once-a-year-ish versions later they're still here, while so many other similar companies are gone. They're doing something right.

[wer]

Let me reiterate, in case anyone misunderstood, that I am NOT advocating that the product be simplified or dumbed down for new users. 

In fact, I said the opposite: Good documentation, presented in a cohesive and easy to access way, is how you make a product more accessible and easier to understand and learn, WITHOUT having to overhaul it or dumb it down.  In other words, don't change it, just explain it properly.

As I alluded to previously, some people won't buy something unless they can figure it out in five minutes.  Let those people buy AppleTV.  But there are many others, like those who provided me their feedback, who are willing to tolerate actually having to learn about something, as long as that avenue to learning is reasonable and approachable.  Good documentation/help will facilitate those people buying MC, because it will help them learn it before they give up in disgust or frustration.

[Gl3nn]

Example, which I believe I'd requested once before: simple step-by-step in setting up MC with a pre-existing whole house Sonos system.