I've been casually watching MC11 progress before I consider an upgrade. There are certainly some nice new features mentioned along with some stuff that doesn't seem to fit in a Media Center program or doesn't add a great deal of value. I don't remember seeing much in the way of Theatre View improvements though but maybe I missed it. The lack of work in MC9.1 or 10 on this unfinished aspect of MC was a major cause of frustration for me and led me to investigate other products. Thankfully a NetRemote interface into MC came to the rescue so I no longer care whether Theatre View gets properly finished, and I think that's probably just as well.
I totally agree with JLee on this. I have now decided to move for my HTPC and will not upgrade to 11. Although I got 10 for a great upgrade price over 9.1 there wasn't too many changes that worked for me and I can see the same thing happening with 11. MC is still a great media management app and I will continue to use v10 for the task. For what its worth here is a list of features that MC is missing as a MEDIA center (I think MC is still very much MP3 centric.)
Better control over video/DVD codecs such as codec selection, adding ffdShow etc. The freeware Media Player Classic has all this.
Theatre View should not mirror Standard View. I don't want 3 audio folders (Artist/Album, File Type, Disk Location) AND a list of Genres (because it's in my initial Audio Scheme) all on one page. (Add 2 tick boxes to the Scheme edit page, one to 'Show in Theatre View' and one to 'Hide from Standard View'.
Please tweak theatre view - for example, add a back button and lose the 'left cursor back' (its not very good for new users)
Allow us to choose any codec we like when recording TV programs. Maybe add an encode later function for slower codecs like Divx 5.
Can we please add proper DV use for TV viewing and Timeshifting. Lots of people now use DV Convertors to watch TV as the picture quality is much better than any TV card.
TV Guide maybe.
Better HotKey/Button/Remote support. I want to be able to choose how a song is added to playing now when a press a button. Although you have 3 different play options, you have to change them in the settings window. I dont always want to replace what I'm listening to and I dont always want to 'add to playing now'. Also I still have to right click to record a TV channel.
Anyway...sorry for the little feature moan. Basically I think MC needs to decide if it's going to be a file manager (document support!?!) OR media player (HTPC, feature rich Video playback etc.) I know you cant please all the people all the time but at the moment I feel you almost wasted your time adding video/dvd playback and theatre view because I dont use any of them. Unfortunately I would still rather play a video in MPC (Quicker), play a DVD in MPC (ffdShow), record TV with iuVCR (select my codec).
Thanks Guys
Vic