I suspect I am in the minority here, but animated .gif support in the images section would be useful.
I don't really use Media Center for viewing photographs, because I already have Lightroom for my photo editing and library management, and I don't see Media Center replacing that any time soon.
But I'm thinking that Media Center might be useful for other collections of images, and something few other applications have is support for animated .gifs - most will just display the first frame and treat them as a still image.
It would be even better if Media Center could display the animations when viewing a grid of images in thumbnail view, or perhaps on mouse-over if that's too taxing, rather than having to view a single image in isolation.
I also wondered about a similar thing for videos on mouse-over when browsing your library rather than using static thumbnails, unless they have cover art associated with the file.
I would like MC to automatically resize the aspect ratio of a detached window to match the AR of the video being played. I find my self constantly resizing the window to get rid of the extra black space around the video. This is especially true because it seems to change when I move the window, for some reason. Sometimes when I move the window up, it gets much wider after the move, not always, but often enough to be annoying.
Yes, this would be a really nice change.
Something else that this reminded me about, that was a problem in MC18:
I have a video series with about 160 episodes, and every single one of them is 4:3 video encoded to a 16:9 file, with bright borders on the edges. I don't know why they decided to do this, but I find it very distracting.
And to make matters worse, when adding the borders they also compressed the video slightly so it's not quite 4:3. If you were to simply mask off the sides, some of the bright border would remain.
It looks something like this:
With other video players, such as MPC-HC, you have independent horizontal and vertical stretch controls, so you can stretch the center portion out to fill the screen, cropping the borders.
You can then override the aspect ratio of the video to be 4:3, which means you are only displaying the center portion of the video with black borders, and it's now in the correct aspect ratio rather than being slightly compressed.
And another change I would like to see, which
that reminded me of: I'd really like it if the "crop edges for DVD video" option not only applied to DVD discs, but also DVD rips. i.e. any files which are 720x480 or 720x576.
The "crop edges for non-DVD video" option applies to everything, including HD video, so that's not really a good alternative. It's really only DVDs where the edges of the video are a problem. Anything else - even if it's lower resolution - seems to avoid that problem.