Now that Ceton InfiniTV support is available in MC18 (albeit, without support for copy protected programming), I decided to take another look at the TV functionality in MC last night. While it has improved a lot since I last looked at it in MC17, there's still a non-trivial amount of functionality that's missing. Here are some examples:
1 - When setting up series recordings, I didn't see an option to adjust start and end padding for each series. While there's a preference for this that applies to all recordings and this can be adjusted for individual recordings, it's important to be able to do this for each series too. The reason being that some channels tend to have more variation than others and (the more important consideration) for shows that are on the same channel that football games are on there's a need to record an hour or more beyond the scheduled end time to ensure that the show actually records as football games frequently go long and screw up the schedule that follows for the rest of the evening.
2 - I didn't see any capability to set up a keyword search that could be used to record all shows that match the keywords. For example, in WMC, I have a keyword search setup for "Boston Bruins At" that records all of the Bruins games that are of the form "Boston Bruins at XXX" or "XXX at Boston Bruins". In addition, this search type would be able to apply additional filters, such as only looking at listings categorized as Hockey Games.
3 - Similarly, I didn't see any capability to set up automatic recordings for shows that contain a given actor, director, etc.
4 - From what I can tell, the guide data that's used doesn't contain a lot of the metadata that would be needed to implement some of the more advanced recording functionality - for example, I recorded a test show and there didn't appear to be a list of actors. Are there plans to get more complete guide metadata?
5 - In the Theater View guide, I noticed that when moving up and down through the guide, the highlight would switch to the next or previous half hour section in odd ways when passing over shows that are longer than a half hour. If I click on a show that starts at 7:30PM and move up and down through the guide, the highlight should stay on whatever show is on at 7:30PM until I use the left / right keys to pick a different time. But I found that it would sometimes jump to 8PM or 7PM.
6 - I'm not sure if this belongs here or in the general MC18 thread, but it would be REALLY nice if you MC would add support to read metadata from WTV files for shows recorded in WMC. I don't want to have to play around with renaming files to trick MC into going online to get information that's already contained in the files and doing so would presumably cause issues going back and forth to WMC during any transition time.
7 - A lot of the recording related functionality doesn't appear to be accessible in Theater View. Adding the ability to access ALL TV related functionality other than initial setup type stuff (such as setting up the guide and tuners) is essential to consider switching from WMC.
8 - Adding support for copy protected content from the Ceton InfiniTV cards is a very important consideration. I currently use FIOS and nothing in my service tier is copy protected at this time, but that could easily change with little or no notice. I'm definitely hesitant to tie myself to a TV solution that could be easily crippled by such a change.
I've been using MC a long time as my music player and have switched to it (from TheaterTek) as the software I use for video / DVD / Bluray playback when I'm using the PC for that purpose (I'm a beta tester for Oppo, so my Oppo players get a lot of use for DVD and Bluray especially). It would be really nice if I could get to the point where it's my software of choice for TV recording and playback too.
