1. Improved Theater View to make more usable and consistent for touch devices with accepted touch paradigms and gestures, and/or develop a Windows remote for handheld devices. It also needs a lot of attention as a 10' interface, I think navigation is awkward for use with a remote control and presentation/attractiveness could be much improved with regard to eye candy and display of metadata. It is very much a product of several years ago and does not match current Plex and XBMC standards. [
Earlier discussion on Theater view usability issues]
2. Database to be held on a central server, e.g. convert to mySQL/MariaDB so it can be put on a NAS or any other server a la XBMC, therefore there would be no need to load remote libraries and sync things from client to server and back again - all clients connect directly to the database server for their libraries so changes are instant and don't need to be synched. This would also help people who would like to run a network/multi-client system at the lowest possible power comsumption by running the database on a low-power NAS and not requiring two complete PCs to be buzzing away just to play a piece of music. Clients include both players and library-maintenance.
3. Allow ripping of CDs on a "client". The
workaround is really not acceptable by now.
4. Convert to a "server, controller, renderer" structure so that there is only one server in a MC network, which is what all clients connect to, and you can control any renderer on the network without having to also make it a server and having to connect to it separately. (At the moment, your client/server structure is actually a peer-to-peer network with synching between them - which of course requires "listener" (server) and "instigator" (client) processes on both sides, therefore servrs can also be clients and vice versa, which is where I think your terminology has come from, but it's not "client/server" as a network topology [
ref]). Please think about how DLNA does it - DLNA renderers do not have to be turned into servers just so that you can push media to them. If an instance of MC is participating in the network, all its zones should appear on all other clients automatically (i.e. all clients that are connected to the same server). Servers shouldn't actually be players, they should sit there serving. Servers are providers, clients are consumers. If your server machine is capable, then a renderer can also be run on the machine. If your server machine is capable, then it can do server-side conversion. But these are logically separate functions, not mixed up in the same program as with a peer-to-peer system.
Once there is separation of the logical functions, it paves the way for multi-platform servers and clients, for example installing the server components only (library server, DLNA server, database server) on a NAS which is what many people are asking for [a NAS is designed to be an always-on server together with managed expandable storage, in a small neat box], library maintenance on a PC maybe, player and renderer components on a Mac, controller components on a handheld device or a 10' interface...(2, 3, 4 may all be part of the same thing, and 5 and 6 below may or may not be relevant if these were done.)
5. Allow control of active zone on a remote instance of MC, whether using a client instance of MC, a DLNA controller, or a touch-device remote, otherwise it's impossible to remotely control video if you have multiple zones. At the moment, it is up to the "client" to change the active zone on the "server" and some touch-device remotes already have functionality to do this, but DLNA controllers won't and currently MC clients don't, therefore it needs to be a server-side thing (i.e. the device that is doing the playing, aka player/renderer) and shouldn't be up to the client (aka controller) as the client has already told the player what zone to play in. I understand this is so that you can set a concurrent audio process going in the background without interfering with the current active zone, unfortunately this has the effect of undermining the video side of things as Display View won't work unless it's the active zone. I think this really needs to be addressed and some happy medium of making both work.
6. Notify "clients" when the "server" changes its zone due to Zone Switch , or otherwise provide an easy mechanism for "clients" to interrogate or find out when this happens, otherwise it's impossible to control an item that has just been queued but has invoked a zone switch rule.
7. Provide "zoning" for video, e.g. multiple video cards and video "paths".
8. Optional captions for video, so that you can start a music video playlist and have the song title and artist appear briefly on the screen at the start of each song.
9. Better method for folder-level images, e.g. artist images, which currently at the moment only work when you're using the specific Artist field, and doesn't work for Album Artist or a custom sort artist or expression or whatever, and make generic so that it could work for genres, boxed sets, and custom categories that you like to sort your library by (vinyl, podcasts....etc). XMBC uses "folder.jpg" but I'd like MC to be more flexible than that. I've suggested before that in the view/category setup, there would be a parameter for specifying what image to display for each value of that category, e.g. default thumbnail that MC generates, or get the image from a file called <path to image directory>\<value>.<ext> where <value> is the current value of that category, e.g. an icon for Blues music could resolve to \\NAS\Category Images\Genres\Blues.jpg, or an image for Abba could be found at \\NAS\Category Images\Artists\Abba.jpg, and an image for the Alien Quadrilogy box set could be found at \\NAS\Category Images\Movies\Boxed Sets\Alien Quadrilogy.jpg. For an album category, this setting would remain at Default MC Thumbnail.
10. Ability to use DSP for DLNA.
11. More development of Gizmo - make it more attractive, easier to use, and all the facilities of Theater View. Basically, it needs to be a handheld version of the MC player. (Same goes for the Theater View revamp and Windows Remote). Could there be one generic player/controller app that can be ported to multiple platforms with relative ease, in a similar way to how MC is being ported to Mac and Linux at the moment? One Gizmo that runs on Windows 7 & 8, Windows 8 Metro, Android, iOS, Windows Phone...
There may be more...
