My HTPC has two monitors, the primary one is the 7" touch screen on the htpc case, the secondary one is the TV. When I'm listening to music I only use the 7" screen in theatre view mode to choose the music and the display view to show the track info visualization; when I'm watching a video, I detach the visualization window and make it full screen on the TV, while MC stays in the 7" screen. To control MC I only use a remote, and some of the buttons are associated to scripts run by AutoHotKey to perform some complex tasks (I also use the MC commands messages in some of them).
Some improvements I think would greatly improve the MC experience:
1. When I'm watching a video or dvd, I'd like to have some useful information shown on the small screen and make it like a powerful display of a dvd player.
Currently you can have MC in Standard mode (but it's too small and not much suitable in this context), in Theatre view (only really useful for navigation) or in Display view mode, which only shows "The display is detached. Double-click here to bring it back". I think it would be a great improvement if the Display view window could be used to display informations like title, duration, elapsed time, a progress bar, etc... while the video clip is playing on the TV.
2. I'd like an option to force the detached window to always open on a preferred monitor (unless it's disabled), and to always stay full screen.
Currently if I press stop during a video clip and MC is in Display view mode, the detached window is restored to a small window, and make it again full screen with a remote is really cumbersome (as a work around I wrote an AHK script to automate it).
3. When I'm listening to a song and I change the song rating (I have the keyboard shortcuts associated to the 0~5 buttons of the remote), I'd like the Track Info screen to automatically reload to show the change.
Currently you have to switch to another visualization and then back, to force the update. I couldn't find a MC message to force this update through an AHK script.
4. I'd like to have an option to disable the visualization in the Playing Now screen of Theatre View.
Currently I edit the xml of the Theatre View skin every time I update MC to disable it, because it cuts away half of the screen, which is already small by itself.
5. I'd like to be able to choose which files are imported using the Library Sync feature.
I tag music and videos with my work pc and then move them to the htpc in the living room. I want to keep the htpc library as clean as possible, so I don't move anything unless it is properly tagged. I use the library sync only for videos, because they can't have the tags embedded into the files. The problem is that MC imports all the new files, so I need to fix in advance all the tags for all of them if there's something I want to watch.
A good compromise would be a secondary file with only the tags in it.