There's quite a bit more that's missing and a lot of it revolves around capabilities to setup scheduled recordings using searches / wishlists / series recordings. One specific example I've been using is the ability to record hockey games for my home team, something that can be easily done in Windows Media Center, but is currently not possible in JRiver without getting a LOT of extra recordings that I don't want.
The reason that WMC does this so well in America, and not everywhere else by the way, is that WMC has access to a very good Electronic Program Guide (EPG), with very good, consistent data. Without that quality of data, WMC fails in exactly the way you describe.
Here in Australia I am sourcing my EPG OTA, from the broadcasters. It is not very good data, and is completely inconsistent.
For example, I record MotoGP races. All season the program title has started with the term "MotoGP 2014", until the race came to Australia, then it was something like "Phillip Island Race" or similar. No year mentioned. I don't think it even said MotoGP in the title, which is what MC, and WMC use to select a program to record. To add insult to this poor performance from the broadcasters, rebroadcasts of the race typically had completely different titles, so often they got recorded as well. MC couldn't identify them as repeats/reruns.
In your example
every game you want to record would have to have the term "NHL Hockey Boston Bruins At" in the title. The probability of that happening in Australia is about zero.
But also, each game would have to be tagged with a category of "Sport" and a sub-category of "Hockey." The only sport that gets a category in my EPG is one fishing program. It gets "Sport" and "Fishing." That's it, and we have a lot of sport on our FTA TV.
Recently a few of the broadcasters started putting both the Title and Subtitle in the Title field, plus the Subtitle in the Subtitle field. So each new recording became a new series according to MC, as it had a series name of "Title: Subtitle." That is not MC's fault. It is poor EPG data. I have had to spend far too much time cleaning up the mess this EPG data creates. I could fix this, but I would need complex equations in the recording tagging section on each recording rule to make it happen, and I haven't had time for that.
So if you have that data in your EPG, you are one of the blessed. A lot of people don't get that data.
I can buy an EPG in Australia with better data, for about $100 per year. It is a curated EPG, with the data cleaned up and extra information added. The EPG provider also provides a range of value added services, but they only work on hardware that has been modified to use the services, and on WMC, although only on WMC because they wrote an application that loads WMC specifically. All the work is done outside WMC, and programs to watch are loaded into WMC.
Would you pay $100 a year to ensure that your hockey games get recorded correctly? Well, I used to, when I used WMC and before that a PVR, because they could use at least some of the extra data.
Yeah, scheduling, series' link etc. are all mega important too.
Series Link functionality is a different thing all together, and almost always depends on the EPG having a unique Program and/or Series ID. Of course the software or device doing the recording needs to understand and be able to use the Program ID, and at the moment MC can't do that. Even in America some hardware manufacturers provide custom EPG to their users with the Program ID added, to enable Series Link functionality to work. JRiver isn't in the game of providing EPG data, and shouldn't be.
The $100 EPG I mentioned above did include a Program ID, but it was a proprietary numbering scheme added by the EPG provider, as there wasn't a suitable alternative which included Australian content.
However I agree that JRiver should do a whole lot better in their identification of programs in the EPG, and use of the data that is available. MC should be able to look up programs on thetvdb.com (and maybe other sites) by series name and episode title for example, and having that information, add tags such as Season number, Episode Number, Category, Sub-category, Program ID, Genre, Rating, etc., probably even allow the user to define which tags get updated and which don't, maybe even how they get updated. (For example Australian Rating values shouldn't be overwritten by American values.) Then it should be able to use that data for selecting programs to record. But all of that depends on the data being available somewhere, and it isn't always available for new programs, or "once off" programs like sport events.
IMO, this is actually more important than redoing the initial setup.
While this is true for me as well, I understand that the only way we are going to get more features and better support for such functionality is if JRiver has more, lots more, MC customers. If 80% of the people who try to set up MC give up thinking it is just too hard, then this isn't going to happen. So making the setup much easier is the first step to getting more users, and hence better functionality.
