Yea but you're missing the point. People want, at least I do, ONE system that will handle absolutely all of their content. Right now, I am close to having a system that will handle all of the following:
1) FLAC Music
2) JPG Images
3) DVDs from Hard Drive
4) CD/DVD drive in HTPC that handles unripped CDs & DVDs
5) Security Camera viewing from the customizable web links in theater view
6) Weather -- again, I made custom web pages to view radar, etc, at 100% width with no ads.
The only things missing are:
1) VHS Video Tapes
2) Cassettes
3) Television
4) HD Discs
Well, lets forget 1 & 2 because I have already converted all my home movies to DVD. Cassettes are pointless to the modern generation. HD Discs are still brand new and I'm not so worried yet. Besides, I'm sure MC will add support as soon as possible.
Television is the problem! We can receive television via over the air, which is easy, but then you have Directv and other satellite boxes that can be problematic. In this case there are tricky IR blasters and they never work as good as an all in one system could. I'm personally kind of sick of TV in general. For television programming, I want to view it by SHOW and Episode. Not by channel and time. Even with TiVo, it isn't perfect because there is no easy way to implement it into your home of other computers. With MC, you can currently --kind of-- record to your central server and other computers will pick up the content as well! So that's really the ideal system.
I guess the next step would be to help keep TV shows in the TV section or their own category in Video...but that gets complicated.
If there was more focus on the server/client model as I wrote a long post about a few weeks ago, then it would be even better. We are moving to a more spread out media system, obviously, where people want their media in their home on their computer, on their televisions, in their portable devices, car, etc.
The BIG difference that really changes things is that once you make the switch to using a HTPC standalone with nothing else, then you've got major problems with other members of the family. Everything has to be simple and have some user abilities without lots of effort.
This is why I think MC needs more of a one-media-database with multiple USER accounts. Then, these users could be selected from theater view. When adding a library, you would select the checkbox: it would let you pick a USER by default. If no default user is selected, then the actual users would have to select a user. Reasoning is because on a computer with user accounts, the account can store what user you are. In a HTPC, you don't want to have to log off and on so MC need to ask for your user name and then timeout to asking for a username again.
Oh, and for security, just have a arrow password. Users would select user BEN. Then, it would say: enter password. The user would enter Arrow L R U U U D ...With each button push, MC would simply confirm that the button was pushed but not show what button. Then, there would be a minor security system in place for each user to protect their library, which could ideally be rated, number of plays, skip count (all updated), etc through theater view.
I'm going crazy with this system, honestly. It would be amazing but probably a complete revamp of MC.
I was just curious as to that the developers plans are really...
I'm always trying to figure this out. They are usually generally quiet about their larger plans. Yes, they confirm or deny some feature requests but I rarely get a yes or no to my endless feature requests.