For me, TV is probably the most important aspect of MC. I have it running on three systems and use it every day. Every day, without exception, it gives me problems. Some of the problems have been reported but with no response or change. So why is this? Isn't TV important to J River? It doesn't seem so. I know Yaobing has done some great work to get us to where we are but there seems to have been no visible change in mc19. It's true that, once a TV program is showing, it works fine but selecting channels, navigating the guide, setting up TV from scratch, supporting multi-standard tuners all need more work.
Selecting a program or channel (click on watch) - there is often a significant delay before anything happens. I don't know whether the delay is in graph construction. It is certainly the case that graph construction regularly fails. The most common issue is that the program video shows but there is no audio. Selecting stop then re-selecting the program will usually be successful.
During this delay there is no indication of any response. The user is left wondering whether the selection worked. If you repeat the selection, invariably, MC crashes. I have never seen this sort of behaviour in any other windows app.
Setup - we have raised this several times before but there has been no improvement. The only improvement here has been the ability to use keywords for filtering channels but, this is a tedious workaround. In the UK, as in many countries, we have multiple carriers of TV including terrestrial, satellite, cable and broadband. Tuning satellite is particularly tiresome with hundreds, if not thousands of unwanted or encrypted and, therefore, inaccessible channels.
Other systems are capable of detecting and, therefore, automatically filtering encrypted channels. Why not MC? We have the same channels supported on multiple carriers and, therefore, appearing multiple times in the guide. I know that Yaobing has ideas for resolving this but it remains unresolved, leaving us with a very cumbersome guide.
Guide setup for multiple carriers - the current guide will only load one carrier's channel data. This means that for users like me, the guide must be populated manually.
We get crashes associated with radio channels which I reported recently.
Why does the guide become greyed out when the system is left idle for a while? In this state, the guide text can barely be read. Re selecting guide (using MCC) does not resolve this. It is necessary to use back then navigate back to the guide.
Could we have the guide update in real time with a vertical line indicating the current time?
Could we have commands to shift forward and backward through the guide a day at a time?
And why do the times at the top of the guide sometimes show 20 minutes past the hour?
MC should be the best PC based PVR on the planet but it falls short of that today.
Any chance of giving TV a bit of attention? Or perhaps Yaobing has some radical improvements in coding.
Nick.
