What feature would you like to see in the next xbmc version?

Some more random ones I thought up while using xbmc today:

- In music party mode provide a way to mark awesome tracks so I can go back and listen to the whole album sometime.
- When the import music popup shows, make it nicer to look at. Maybe a faded history of the last 3 items would be nicer than the current method
- When importing music normalize the data. Something like "Above & Beyond" and "Above and beyond" should really show together.
- List of first letters down the right hand side to browse music quickly like the new iPad app feature
- Remove the "Songs" category for browsing music. Isn't it pointless?

(2012-03-26 16:07)zag2me Wrote:  I guess with trakt.tv and last.fm features these days its not such a priority. I have movie plays linked to facebook now and always get a few comments from friends about if the movie was any good or not.

I always did think it would be nice to make more of a feedback loop for media though.

Just playing tvshows or movies isn't really what home theatre should be about, it should be more social.

Maybe I'm missing the point, but I don't understand. Perhaps I just don't see the use case, so bear with me (and admittedly, I'm not a huge proponent of social media). What did you envision here? Do you want to post to twitter and FB what you're currently watching?

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(2012-03-27 07:54)bossanova808 Wrote:  Abstraction from specific file names/paths - moving to using the logical entity instead.

So Donnie Darko (2005) or Mad Men S05E02 - but not tied to the actual path/file so that if you change serving methods, move files etc, it can just re-jog the reference to where the file is, without having to re-do/scan all the metadata/watched statusses etc. This means you could, for instance, fairly easily try NFS vs SMB vs FTP etc etc. on different platforms and avoid the fairly significant perfomance penalty that seems to come with path substitution...

I'm a big fan of this idea. Would definitely help when you decide to reorganize media, provided you don't change the filenames.

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I would like to see a 'server' install of XBMC so that we could have a single shared database for all XBMC 'clients' that connect and share the same watched status, recently added, counts, updates, etc. If you only have one locations, the install would be both.

Byte Size of the file in focus. Hook for an external editor (like notepad++) to edit the folder .nfo, I'm always editing it.

My top features:

1) Clean up and be more rigid on the thumbs and fanart standards.
It's flexible right now, which many see as a good thing, but with that comes more code, and more confusion over 'how it should be' and what could be wrong when stuff isn't found.

2) Make the Sources 'virtual' so that when media is scanned from 'My Movies' (C:\movie files), the database KNOWS it's in "My Movies", thus allowing My Movies to be remapped to a different path without breaking the DB. Right now, they act more like shortcuts, but the moment you move media around, things break (unless you rely on O/S drive mapping / symlinks)

3) Whichever way you look at it, TV Tuner support is something any complete home media system would have. The complexities of handling differing tuners etc is a different issue, but on the face of it - TV tuning and PVR end up being something folks would ideally like. It doesn't seem quite right to bury heads in sand and try to figure a way in which TV support 'isn't media playback'.

4) Music Videos is a mess. There's a distinct number of users who have to classify concert videos as a Movie, or hack things to make it look 'ok' as a Music Video. There's a similar argument for Documentaries and mini series. .... what to do with the videos that aren't a movie, and not quite a tv series. I think this needs a lot of thinking about, but could be solved.

5) I'm worried that there's a lot of push for technical features, and less emphasis on 'back to basics'. When something has been around as long as XBMC it gets VERY hard to look at things in a new way. Watch a friend or partner using XBMC, or worse still, trying to set it up - things just aren't as intuitive as they could be.
It's a great great product, but it could be fantastic.

(2012-03-26 13:12)zag2me Wrote:  So what features would people like to see in the next xbmc releases?

I hope that 5 pages in, this may still be read...


I have two suggestions:


1) A "safety warning" for cleaning the local DB

If you choose to clean the DB, have the solution check to see if the various sources are available and online.

If not, return a message like: " (nas source) not available... do you wish to continue?"

I hate that surprise when something "disappears" unexpectedly.



2) Modification to how profiles work

Profiles are a great tool. I have set up many for many reasons (Example: main, christmas, party, excercise, zombie, educational, etc.)

Now, the way that I believe that this works (now) is that you can either have profiles ON or OFF. If you choose to display / use profiles, then it displays a list of ALL profiles at the start.

What I would like to do is have the choice of only showing SOME of the profiles at the start. (ex: Why have christmas up there all year long?)

It would be useful in the profile setup to have a toggle to allow a specific profile to be displayed or not.

So... if guests drop by, I could just quicly remove the zombie profile option and still have main, party and excercise there on startup (with christmas & zombie hidden).

I hope you give that some thought. If you like it, I can put that into trac.xbmc.org

v.

I just want some some better library and menu management. I would like complete control of what menus like movies, videos, etc. contain without the need for smart playlists.

@zebraitis:

Profiles is designed to be used by users, not by use. In other words, people logging into XBMC. It sounds like you're using profiles to sort things that most of us use playlists/smart playlists for.

No I dont use profiles at all. Example, on my server I have directories for movies, hd movies, kid movies, etc. Would be nice to just set corresponding menu items, instead of seeing hd movies grouped with movies. Thats all I'm saying, and from reading these forums, it seems to be a common request.

(2012-04-09 16:17)Me23 Wrote:  No I dont use profiles at all. Example, on my server I have directories for movies, hd movies, kid movies, etc. Would be nice to just set corresponding menu items, instead of seeing hd movies grouped with movies. Thats all I'm saying, and from reading these forums, it seems to be a common request.

Sorry, that was directed at zebraitis :)

Regarding your request, that is indeed something that is being looked into. Some kind of dynamic system that would allow for any number of custom-type entries to the home screen that aren't just a playlist, but an actual "type" or filter. I don't know if something like that will be ready for v12, but there's big interest in improving that part of XBMC.

I would love native live tv/pvr support on both windows/linux