I just bought MC20 last month and so far I like it, but there are a few things that would improve the experience for me. Some are relatively minor and others probably not. One of the things I have observed in the forums is that J River seems to be very responsive to customer input and will at least evaluate comments like this, so here goes.
Hiding channels needs work. It might be easier with a pop up dialog similar to the one used for grouping. A check box next to each channel and the ability to use the shift key to select a range of channels.
The EPG setup can be confusing. I ended up with about 15 "profiles" before I found the registry hack mentioned in another forum post to delete them. I deleted ALL and started from scratch. The EPG still didn't seem to load correctly for me. I use ZAP2It under the XMLTV option and while it runs the command to create a new XML file, it doesn't seem to load the file specified. Not sure what was going wrong, so I ended up removing the download command, setting the download up to run as a windows scheduled task and then created an XMLTV profile that just loads the XML file.
While on the EPG, I use ZAP2IT because I want season and episode numbers. None of the other options seemed to get me this information. The down side is ZAP2IT only has 5 GENRES and that is annoying. I wanted to set up a view for upcoming movies based on multiple GENRES that are not in the ZAP2IT guide. An improved EPG source would be helpful. Or perhaps a utility to add season and episode numbers to some other guide.
The season and episode numbers are properly added to file names for series programming
, but also seem to be added to movies. ?
The Guide display in Theater View is a bit weak. There are a couple things that would improve it.
- Navigation - When scrolling down the guide, if it comes across a row with an odd timed show which has already ended, it focuses on the show that is current, but it also shifts the whole guide instead of just moving the cursor. Randomly the cursor focuses on a show at a future time.
- Channel Logos would be a nice touch
- In Theater view the ability to highlight different types of shows by color would be a nice; sports, movies, news, comedy, etc...
- Fewer rows in the guide - On a 1080 display there are 8 rows. Makes the screen too busy. Reduce the number of rows and increase the row height.
- Jumping from live show to the guide always takes me back to the top of the guide. It would be nicer if it jumped to the guide at the channel I was watching. Same thing applies to stopping the show.
- Key for jumping to the guide. Let's assume I'm watching a live show and hit the key to jump to the guide. It would be nice if pressing the same key while in the guide would take me back to the show I was watching. (I like to look through the guide during commercials, or just look for more interesting programs.)
- Theater View - commands to jump to a specific item such as the guide should not be tied to the default "out of the box" menu system. If I create a new "Television" top level menu item and move the guide under it, the command to jump to the guide should still work. The current implementation quite simply breaks the awesome power and flexibility of the Theater View interface.
- Theater View - To Be recorded. For subscribed shows that are scheduled to record on a specific channel, the shows on all channels are still displayed as if they are also going to be recorded.
It appears that if I use "Get Movie & TV Info" on a TV show that has been recorded, MC looses track of the fact that I already recorded the show and schedules it to record again. This behavior should be improved so that MC keeps track of the show.
Only one recording location is a limitation. An improvement would be the ability to specify multiple locations and load balance simultaneous recordings.
More features to support comskip during playback. Comskip is great but not perfect. The ability to jump back to the skip "start" point for premature skips and the ability to jump to the next skip "end" point for late "start" points. Displaying the skip areas in the playback progress bar would also help.
After I wrote all this up, it occurred to me that I should have added a section about the things I liked about MC and maybe I will at some point, but in the meantime, the thing that hooked me was how customizable and flexible both the standard view and the Theater views are. They allow me to get the files displayed the way I want without being a programmer. That is a big plus!
