krow Wrote:i agree. meedio was crap. mediaportal, on the other hand, was good. nice program, superior video quality over XBMC (sorry, it is)

krow Wrote:MP can read tags from your files, xvid, divx, etc, subtitles. no need to manually scan every movie with a 3rd party program.

krow Wrote:XBMC vs mediaportal. XBMC wins, although, there has to be a way to incorporate postprocessing methods into XBMC.

zag2me Wrote:- Internal system messaging (so plugin developers can easily interact with xbmc internals with a standard set of messages "music.play" "movies.pause" but for all parts of xbmc, not just media playback)
- Internal datafeeds so plugin authors can send messages to the user and GUI in standard ways. Also allows plugins to talk to other plugins.

zag2me Wrote:- External player support with conditions for video extensions, or filenames, or types. E.G. different players for youtube videos, or x264 videos.

zag2me Wrote:- Music jukebox (all music actions on one screen with no popups or need to go to a menu to browse music, works like a traditional jukebox)

zag2me Wrote:- Ability to launch external applications from a menu item (currently have to click about 5 times just to launch a games emulator or web browser)

Quote:Vision

Putting it into one sentence, the vision of Team-XBMC is to create the best cross-platform media center software there is, XBMC should always be the de facto standard that other media center applications are measured against, whether they are based on commercial or free open source software.

The XBMC manifesto

This XBMC ‘manifesto’ is Team-XBMC’s public declaration of the XBMC project members principles, philosophy, and intentions. This manifesto tries to outline the goals we aim and hope to achieve with XBMC, and sum up the XBMC project’s strategic direction vision for the present and the future.

User-friendliness is next to godliness

One major ongoing goal of Team-XBMC has always been to continuously try to make XBMC Media Center and its user interface feel even more intuitive and user-friendly for its end-users, based on the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle of simplicity, (which is to simplify, without dumbing down). It is our belief that usability is the most important aspect of a media center like XBMC. Many other media center projects make user interface decisions by developers, who often have little experience in user interface design. In contrast, Team-XBMC does its best to listen to XBMC’s end-users to learn how XBMC is actually being used and how we can improve the user experience. We also aim to do regular overhauls, improving existing features/functions, and scrapping outdated code and features/functions (as “too much stuff” adds unnecessary complexity and can thus also be a bad thing). Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

XBMC as a whole must…

• First and foremost be aimed at a large-screen (28″ or larger) 10-foot GUI (graphical user interface) for the living-room experience. Large menus, text/fonts and buttons that is before anything designed to be navigated by a hand-held remote-control as the single input device capable of performing everything in the GUI.
• Be focused around the main features of playing music, watching movies, recorded television broadcasts, streaming online content, and viewing pictures. XBMC may be capable of converging other areas of digital media as well but those things should never take over the main focus in the interface.
• Be easy to install, set up and maintain, so that our valuable end-users do not get fed up with it and quit. XBMC Media Center should always be designed to let users be up-and-running as soon as possible after the initial installation, no need to to fiddle around with settings to get started, XBMC should work straight out-of-the-box.
• Have an user interface that is simple and intuitive enough so that less tech-savvy people are not intimidated by it. Make common usage easy, simple Human–Computer Interaction (HCI), from the viewpoint of an ordinary user.
• Be able to play audio and video files that have been encoded using DivX, XviD, etc. directly out-of-the-box.
• Be able to organize audio and video files in an easy and user-friendly way.
• Use standards and be consistent, (the Music section can for example not use completely different controls from the Video section).
• Perform all and any actions in the GUI with as few ‘clicks’ as possible.
• Be aimed at an international audience, internationalization and localization by supporting different languages, timezones and other regional differences
• Require no non-GUI configuration for normal operating and very little no non-GUI configuration for advanced configuration (and all such non-GUI configuration should be done in just one file: advancedsettings.xml). There is still a little work to be done here, for example RSS-feeds configuration need to moved to the GUI.
• Last but not least, be beautiful to look at, after all, we hope you will be using it a lot!

Team-XBMC members should always strive to…

• Promote open source - XBMC is based on the ideas of FOSS (free open source software), licensed under the GPL and builds partly on other open source projects which we do our best to support. The GPL should be respected at all times. All code should be committed to the XBMC project’s SVN before any public binaries are released.
• Promote the sharing of knowledge and collaboration - Through the use of information sharing tools and practices XBMC is a collaborative environment.
• Understand that development is a team effort - Treating our users as co-developers has proven to be the most effective option for rapid development. Always strive to work as a team at all times. Actively promote discussion on new features and bug fixes, and respect others comments and criticisms with replies in a timely fashion.
• Apply the Law of Diminishing Return - The majority of the effort should be invested in implementing features which have the most benefit and widest general usage by the community.
• Try to make all code, feature, and functions to be platform agnostic - XBMC is a multi-platform software, thus any single platform specific features should be discussed with other team members before implemented, and software portability should always be kept in mind. All major new features and functions should be developed in a separate branch or committed in small increments so that other members have the opportunity to review the code and comment on it during development.

marcus d Wrote:I find XBMC :-

[INDENT][/INDENT]Far more user friendly - wife and kids agree here too.

[INDENT][/INDENT]More stable.

[INDENT][/INDENT]Has enough capabilities for our purposes