I started out as a user of the music functionality of Media Center with HEAVY relieance on Theater View. Like most people, I originated from the MCE2005 camp. At the time, MC was in it's 11 or 12th revision, still unusable for my purposes. MCE2005 was BY FAR the smoothest GUI and succeeded in being the jack of all trades. It's ability to handle TV Tuner (playback/recording/TV Guide), Music, DVD Playback/Rip, Videos... basically all my needs through the comfort of my IR Remote as unparallel. While Music is what I use my HTPC 85% of the time, without the other features, it would be a dealbreaker. The simple reason is that, as a HTPC user, a media center that IS NOT all-in-one / universal means that in order to play another media type outside the scope of the current media center requires the user to switch to Mouse and Keyboard controls to manually access the Windows Interface to switch to another Media Center. This is an UNACCEPTABLE characteristic for an HTPC. Medio, Media Portal, Linux MCE and many others that came and went on my HTPC, each had various deal breaking issues, ranging from bugginess, missing features, poor usabilty (ie: 3 feet Remote Interface), poor configurability. MC12 was certainly the best in the music management, but the deal breaker for me was subpar 3 feet Remote Control interface, namely MC's Theater View, and buggy TV Tuner and limited tuning features working in Theater View
While it showed promise, I decided to keep it in the HTPC Internet BookMarks but stayed with MCE2003 because it was the only one that could meet my minimal requirements (albeit not exactly acing with flying colors)
With the arrival of MC13, there finally came a true alternative to MCE2005 and Vista MCE. Its 3feet Remote Control Interface, the Theater View was no longer just a marketing gimmick, but a full feature Interface, in many respects better than Microsoft's MCEs. The theater view front end finally closely paralleled the playback of all features of the actually JRiver Media Center backend. I was delighted to find superb configurability of the Theater View. While the activation of the TV XML Info wasn't seamless, the TV Tuner finally works properly for me. With these new features, I finally switched to JRiver MC (jMC).
After Months of enjoying satisfying Music management experience with MC13, I finally decide to experiment with the Video feature of jMC. I have a 4TBs of Video files and have always been a long time user of the plain old mplayer, but these videos were always off limits to my family members who were a little less computer savvy. After experimenting with MC13's video management, I was satisfied. My family members found the ability to access our movies based on fields like Genre, Series, and Type from their Remote Control via Theater View, much to their liking. In parties or get together, the Theater View full of properly organized Movie poster titles is always a delight to show off to friends and family. Gone are the days of endless embarrassing browsing from a folder to folder of cryptic names containing movie files. Movies are now attractively accessible to everyone including computer dummies.
One thing that I believe prevents people from taking complete advantage of jMC's features is that, jMC isn't quite user friendly enough for people to comfortably explore beyond their perceived safety boundaries. (jRC’s interface friendliness is certainly no iPod/iTunes) I had a hard time configuring the Video Management to the way I want. There are still a few things I want, but don't know how to do. Once there is a basic step by step Wizard encouraging people to do more with less effort, I believe people will start taking advantage of the extra features available in jMC. For example, WMP practically automates everything for you, even without your command. All of a sudden you see your images and videos organized there in WMP Library and in MCE, and you can't help but click on them to see what happens. This kind of automation and user friendliness is what leads people to seamlessly and naturally take advantage of new features without even noticing it. This is but just a small example of the kind of seamless integration possible as jMC grows into the future. So far jMC while powerful, as still very manual, especially in its Video Management. Additionally, much of the requests about separating jMCs Videos and Music features; I believe stems from the lack of integration between its components, ie: Videos, Images and Music. Currently, these features are designed with little dependencies and interaction between each other. It is almost as if they are acting as separate programs. If there could be some integration between these features people would see the value and synergy possible only from an all-in-one package, for example,
1.) the ability to identify the names of soundtracks, artists in each movie, with options to rip the sound segment to the music library from the video and/or buy the sound track.
2.) the ability to associate photo albums with music albums during slide playback
3.) the ability to identify the movies that is associated with each song, and vice versa (this one is probably next to impossble to do)
4.) the ability to provide the option to download images, sound effects, and soundtracks relevant to each movie in the movie library
5.) a search box that searches across all media, movies, music, images
Above are just some example for better integration I whipped up, off the top of my head, surely there are many better ones to be thought of given the will and effort.
Given the ever increasing storage capacity of HTPCs, I believe we will be hard pressed to manage anything manually by ourselves in the near future. Music will hardly be the only thing we require our media centers to manage. Local media centers of tomorrow will hold everything from our commercial entertainment to our most precious digitized moments; an external memory storage for the brain. At least until cloud computing becomes available and next to free.
With improvements along these lines, people will be much more welcoming of jMC's expansion efforts since they will actually be able to effortlessly take advantage of it.
Other Features I would to see (in no particular order):
-fix the currently broken CUE file conversion to separate music files when exporting to a handheld device
-automatic TV XML Info based on location, no more need to go to 3rd party site to download something
-Much Improved Help Documentation, both in content and in navigation.
-rip media on HTPC LAN Clients connected to a jMC Server (and have the data sent over the LAN to be stored on the server location obviously)
-rip media from Theater View
-import of Video details from IMDB
-Continuous improvements Theater View features and GUI user friendliness (very important) (the 'feel' is still far from that of MCE, like unpolished Windows Mobile 6 VS iPhone GUI)
-Ability to work properly in all MC functions (ie: rip, convert) CUE files
-Video: Better handling of Filter functions, ie subtitles
-TV Recordings: ability save in a more portable format, instead of a bunch of jriver proprietary files
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Topic: Tangible improvements in the core product (Read 22837 times)