Wow, I've owned MC for almost 2 years and I had no idea you guys didn't provide an email for your registered users to email you! I would complain about that except, your product has worked well enough, that I have never needed to look for a support email before
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I just wanted to give you guys some feedback on a avenue for revenue that, while you have probably considered, maybe I can nudge you to reconsider. I bought J River Media Center 10 because there was this great plugin for Meedio that supported it. And, at that time, Meedio's music system was horrible. I have, of course, since paid for the upgrade license for MC 11 and enjoy using it even outside of my HTPC enviroment. However, I would never have bought MC, till this day, if it wasn't for the need for it in my HTPC system.
No question MC is a great product but there is also lots of other products that do the same which are as good, better or just slightly inferior which are free or cheaper. Products which I was using previous to my need for MC in my HTPC setup and some of which I am still using. For example, the yaadb or whatever system is not really that good for tagging music. Yes, its ok for mainstream stuff. But its useless for my Chinese music or for most of my non-mainstream music. And even for some of my mainstream stuff that is not encoded exactly like a song that was previously submitted to yadb, it will fail. I have submitted far more tag info to yaadb than it has provided tags for and have since stopped using it. This is just an example, I am sure there are others where other music jukeboxes are better.
My point is that there is an untapped market where J River could become dominant. That is the HTPC space. I am not sure how many lisences you have sold because of your Tivo integration but, while Tivo is a widely sold product in the US, its users are generally 1) not technically knowledgeable 2) not interested in spending time (and money) making their tech better 3) located only in the US (besides some Canadians and Oztivo people). The opposite is true for us who use HTPCs. Even Microsoft Media Center (MCE) users, as a percentage. But it is almost universally true of the HTPC market that dosen't use MCE. Heres another simple fact, every one of those other HTPC programs has a lousy music interface (especially compared to the features that MC offers). For some reason, it just seems to be the most neglected element of all these softwares. Lastly, no matter what you do to your theater view, it will never be what HTPC users will use because it is not integrated into their HTPC software. BTW, the UI of theater view is terrible. Some users have made beautiful skins but that doesn't effect the UI functionality which, as I said, is terrible.
So what do I suggest? Send an email to dhill -at- theaterwave.com. He created the perfect integration between Meedio and MC and work something out with him. Then, personally, I really want SageTV (
http://www.sagetv.com/) integration as do many users. SageTV has a large user base (its not cheap either so you know their users have money and are willing to spend) and they also have deals with OEM vendors as well as a Linux version of their software. Also, as do almost all HTPC software, it has a plugin system. Oh, BTW, if you didn't already know, Meedio was bought by Yahoo and is being released as a free Media Center so, I would guess, that means a huge user base. But the clock is ticking. SageTV claims it will have a revamped and good music system in their next release. I doubt it will be as good as a MC inetgration can be though but, this is true accross the board. Every package is improving their music now that the HTPC market is expanding.