#1 As it is now, only items, series, seasons, albums and artists can have a cover. If I want to group my movie library by genre with a nice display of all genres like
here, I hit the Not-Possible-In-MC-Wall.
If i want to have a good looking Theater-View that does
more than
displaying just text in the upper levels, I hit again the Not-Possible-In-MC-Wall.
This isn't some exotic feature. This is a basic feature I expect from every MC-like application and according how often I have seen this feature request, other people seem to expect the same.
I don't expect JRiver to provide covers for tags like genre, media type, sub media type, etc. although it would be nice. But I definitely want to have
the ability to add covers myself by placing them into %appdata%/J River/Media Center 21/Cover Art/<tagname>/<tagvalue>.jpg for any tag, even custom ones. I can't imagine that this is so difficult to implement, since it has been done 4 times already and must just be implemented in a more generalized way.
#2 Everyone like to have his movie library sorted correctly. As it is now, there is no easy way to do this if movies have sequels. I have several movies where the name prevents clean ordering like: Alien, Alien:Resurrection, Alien3, Aliens. The second and fourth should be swapped to get the correct ordering.
I would like to select those movies, right click, choose Library Tools-->"Add to New Universe" so that a new window will pop up where I can configure universe name (e.g. Alien) and the correct order of all selected titles.
This movie should be linked together and appear one behind the other even if other movies would intersect them alphabetically.
E.g. somewhere in my libray there is the movie "Alien vs Predator: Requiem" which is the second part of the AVP-Universe. Fiveteen movies later there is the movie "AVP: Alien vs Predator" which is the first part. Note that these unideal naming was not my idea, but that of TMDB.
After specifying that they are in the same universe and configuring the correct order the movie "AVP: Alien vs Predator" should appear at the same position as before (at the alphabetic correct position). But the second part "Alien vs Predator: Requiem" should not appear at the alphabetic correct position, but directly after "AVP: Alien vs Predator".
Of course there should be an option in the "Customize View" menu to enable/disable this behavior.
#3 Automatic scraping of tv-series and movie information is an important part of any MC-like application. Unfortunately MC has fallen back behind its competition.
For series information, where TVDB is used I would like to be able to
select other languages as well, if they are available. Ideally it should be possible to configure a default language and use English as fall back language if the default language is not available. I have seen this request multiple times (and it is very easy to implement it)
TVDB also provides different orders (
Aired Order | DVD Order). Some series have different orders, e.g. Firefly. The aired order of Firefly is the incorrect one and will result in a lot of confusion. This order was created, because the original pilot was too boring and the tv-channel wanted the first episode to be more exciting. Unfortunately MC grabs the aired order from TVDB. The user can't do anything. He can either live with the wrong order or with the wrong info attached to the episodes. I think it should be possible to choose an order.
For movie information, it should also be possible to select a preferred language. Additional TMDB provides most times several cover arts. MC always chooses the one with the best critic score, but I think the user should be able to choose any of the available covers when retrieving the information of a single movie. This selection should be remembered, if the same movie is scraped again.
#4 It is still not possible to jump/pause/resume with DLNA when MC has to transcode the video. Without these basic controls the transcoding feature makes almost no sense.
If this problem is solved, selecting subtitles and audio streams should also be implemented.
It doesn't matter if DLNA supports it, you can always hardcode the subs while transcoding and sending another audio streams without informing the DLNA Client.
#5
This oneRight now the treshold that is used to choose wether to scale down the original image or to scale up/down the thumbnail image is configured too big.
This means by changing a single value this problem could be fixed.
I would like to have some feedback on this feature request, wether the can/cannot/will/won't be implemented and where the problems are if they exist.
I'm using MC now for 2 iterations and have only seen 2 useful improvements (new more modern icons; season cover art). Especially the improvements in appearence and scraping are almost non-existent.
The last version of MC was feature-wise very poor, maybe because of the improvements in the linux and mac versions. I hope this behaviour changes with version 21 or it will be my last.