I've got a new HT computer on order. My current rig has some ghosts in it, and the family (and I) are at the end of our patience. We currently use Vista Media Center, but it's really not very good, so I'm considering alternatives. Now, sure, I could download the demo, set it up, and try it out...but let's just say that I only have time to set up the MC once, so if J River doesn't do it for us, well, I'm in trouble.
Here's what we use the MC for, in order of importance:
1. Movies: DVD (vob rips), Divx, Mkv, and soon-to-be BR rips on the new machine. We use the MyMovies plugin and like it a lot. And I currently have a database of all 350+ movies we own and have ripped to an unRaid server all ready complete. I could enter them again. If I really, really had to.
2. On line content - Hulu mostly. Pandora would be awesome if I could get to it in an easy to access way.
3. Music - I've got 100G I ripped from my CD collection, about 80% is FLAC. There are a few albums in APE, and there's about 20% mp3 content on there as well. We rarely listen because I have to have a separate folder in MP3 format just to get VMC to recognize the metadata, and I haven't really spent much effort scrubbing the converted files to make them easy to search. I also have no playlists in that format. I use media monkey as the core library manager...but I'm not really wedded to it.
Last. We don't have a tuner. I don't plan on getting a tuner. I use DirecTv and that stuff is separate. It's not a priority \. I might be convinced otherwise, but our D* units are RF, not IR - I'd have to give up one unit to the computer alone, or lease another unit and dedicate it for the HTPC to use in IR mode.
How easy is JR to use? Since the video jukebox is king in our house, is it Kaleidescope-easy? Mkv and BD rips out of the box, even if the mkvs hav multiple audio streams? Can it really do hulu and pandora from a standard WinMC remote? can I actually bring my music collection back to usefulness without doing backflips to get the !#@$ codecs installed and working?
So, is it worth it? If I were stuck with it, could I survive?