[xiii]

Let me start by saying that I love XBMC and I'm grateful for people who put their time into making it better.

That being said, I can't help but wonder why the development team keeps adding relatively useless features, when the software itself still has lots of problems and bugs. I have been using XBMC for several years, but the same problems seem to be present on every new update. I'm talking mostly about random crashes to desktop and library updating problems. I always use the newest stable version and mostly use the default skin, but XBMC crashes quite often, and the library updates are very unreliable, meaning I can rarely find the new TV shows or movies from the "recently added" thing on the home screen or even from TV Shows or Movies folders, which use TVDB/MovieDB.

Sorry for the rant, but I just keep hoping for XBMC to become wife friendly (stable, simple and logical UI and menus, reliable) but it hasn't happened yet.

[spiff]

it all depends on whether or not you get around to sending those patches.

[flekz]

If you ask me, its pretty stable and most importantly its FREE!!

[TugboatBill]

XBMC crashes? What's wrong with my XBMC clients! I want this fixed! How am I supposed to be happy if my installs don't crash!

[Ned Scott]

The problem with assumptions like this is that people don't stop and think about the insane number of combinations for software, hardware, environment, and more, that XBMC is expected to run in. For me, some platforms feel more problematic than others, while some are perfect. Those same platforms, in a sightly different situation for someone else, might totally change. There's so many hardware venders, possible software conflicts, etc, all that is outside of our control.

I can't help but wonder why the development team keeps adding relatively useless features, when the software itself still has lots of problems and bugs

That right there is almost a guaranteed that your comments, constructive or not, are going to be ignored. You don't go call someone's hard work useless, and it's very arrogant on your part, too.

XBMC is not a company. No body is forced to fix something before they are allowed to add some new feature, unless adding the feature creates some kind of burden on the other developers. In other words, people work on what they want to work on. I can't stress this enough: preventing new features will never increase the amount of bug fixes made, and will most likely have the opposite effect, causing developer interest to dwindle. So get it out of your head right now that somehow a new feature is preventing someone from fixing your issue. You couldn't be more wrong.



From a search of your posts, you have a few issues going against you. One, you are using a Hackintosh, which is asking for trouble. Two, every thread you've posted about has some corrupted rar or zip file that you downloaded, something you can't really blame XBMC for freaking out on.

[xiii]

The problem with assumptions like this is that people don't stop and think about the insane number of combinations for software, hardware, environment, and more, that XBMC is expected to run in. For me, some platforms feel more problematic than others, while some are perfect. Those same platforms, in a sightly different situation for someone else, might totally change. There's so many hardware venders, possible software conflicts, etc, all that is outside of our control.

This is kind of what I mean, I would love to see XBMC polished up and completed on just one platform first (Windows?), before starting work (and spreading resources) with iOS, Android, rPi etc.

I can't help but wonder why the development team keeps adding relatively useless features, when the software itself still has lots of problems and bugs

That right there is almost a guaranteed that your comments, constructive or not, are going to be ignored. You don't go call someone's hard work useless, and it's very arrogant on your part, too.

I'm sorry, that was a poor choice of words. Many add-ons can be very useful to many people, but I think everyone can agree that the core part of the software and its reliability is the most important.

XBMC is not a company. No body is forced to fix something before they are allowed to add some new feature, unless adding the feature creates some kind of burden on the other developers. In other words, people work on what they want to work on. I can't stress this enough: preventing new features will never increase the amount of bug fixes made, and will most likely have the opposite effect, causing developer interest to dwindle. So get it out of your head right now that somehow a new feature is preventing someone from fixing your issue. You couldn't be more wrong.

From a search of your posts, you have a few issues going against you. One, you are using a Hackintosh, which is asking for trouble. Two, every thread you've posted about has some corrupted rar or zip file that you downloaded, something you can't really blame XBMC for freaking out on.

In this post I didn't mean the problems I had posted earlier about, I have been using Windows 8 for quite a long time now, and the real problems I now wrote about are 99% library update problems and random crashes.

[saitoh183]

You cant expect Dev to focus only on one platform and leave the rest of the users base out in toe cold. As for your library problems, I have had XBMC for a few years and any library problems i have run into over the years are often because of how files where named or because the site from which it was scraping from was problematic. Those things have nothing to do with XBMC itself. As Ned stated everyone's hardware is different so crashes are always going to happen for someone no matter how polish you make a multi-platform software like XBMC.

[Ned Scott]

This is kind of what I mean, I would love to see XBMC polished up and completed on just one platform first (Windows?), before starting work (and spreading resources) with iOS, Android, rPi etc.

This does not spread resources. We have more devs now than we've had before, and they work on what they want to work on. Our cross platform nature actually makes it easier to bring features to multiple platforms without having to do individual platform work. Just like the features, if you tell a dev that they are not allowed to work on iOS because Windows has bugs, then the iOS devs will leave.

iOS/Android/ARM improvements have actually been folded back into the desktop platforms, making them run faster and use less resources. A prime example of this is dirty regions (wiki), which was originally done on a BegalBoard, and outside of the XBMC organization. BegalBoard was the mentoring organization, though the work was done on XBMC. Google paid for it. Everyone gets the code.

Devs are not as "universal" as people think, either. Just because you can program doesn't mean you can program for every platform, or even within specialties on the same platform. You can study a lifetime on software that handles energy on a powergrid, for example, and still not know everything there is to know about that one specific area. Stopping devs from working on one area will not improve the other. Computer science just that massive, and it's constantly changing too.

[newstuart]

Not sure if it helps and ill be the first to admit I'm no computer whizz however ,

I have moved from wmc to xbmc with 4 htpcs around my house all running windows 7 and i kept having a lot of stability issues which were causing headaches such as random crashes, stuttering etc

I kept hearing about how great xbmcbuntu is but i still needed windows 7, i have since set up each machine to dual boot but automatically go to xbmcbuntu after a few seconds if no intervention on boot up. Each system is now totally perfect with no issues whatsoever

[sapper6fd]

I've had very few issues with BMC on my system in the past and those I have had were as a direct result of Windows. I will never go back to Windows because of it.

I think most people blame XBMC for problems when in reality its Miro$ofts programming of taking over the main focus of the display for a pop up, or driver support from hardware manufacturers which has been installed on a system that doesn't support it (or is the wrong driver for the hardware).

[Prof Yaffle]

Is it troll season already?

I record TV shows via XBMC daily. I add them daily, along with frequent BR and DVD rips, and the odd CD rip. They all add, albeit with the odd lookup failure on thetvdb.com or theaudiodb.com which I then log in and fix in true web 2.0 fashion.

I use it. The babysitter uses it. My wife uses it (okay, she has a PhD, but...). My five- and seven-year-old switch it on and watch stuff. They navigate it, search, and find. They pause, skip over adverts, back up again to re-watch bits. Then they shut down. I have to intervene once every few weeks when perhaps things boot without an IP address (for example), and that's it - far less often than I have to do something to fix, say, Flash games on a Windows system.

XBMC allows me to watch movies on my 'phone, my tablet, my Windows laptop, my Linux PC. They all work find for me. Addons work most of the time, but I accept that - when they don't - it's normally due to something the BBC or similar has changed.

I throw MPEG2 to HP H.264 at them all, from stereo MP3 to HD audio. Frodo 2.2 is the most stable XBMC yet, and simply doesn't crash for me - to be honest, Chrome or Win7 are more likely to crash as I type this. When XBMC struggles, it's always the hardware (e.g. old Android systems without hardware acceleration or CPU oomph to drive it).

The one exception is if I leave it idling on my server with no input for extended periods - and I know that I need to gather information, collect repeatable logs and post that to help the community and developers track down the bug and fix it.

So, I'm afraid I don't recognise the software you're talking about.

[Martijn]

I've had very few issues with BMC on my system in the past and those I have had were as a direct result of Windows. I will never go back to Windows because of it.

I think most people blame XBMC for problems when in reality its Miro$ofts programming of taking over the main focus of the display for a pop up, or driver support from hardware manufacturers which has been installed on a system that doesn't support it (or is the wrong driver for the hardware).

Don't forget all other OSes as they are at some point equally or worse.

[natethomas]

Don't forget all other OSes as they are at some point equally or worse.

See OSX for network sharing, Linux for audio, iOS for lockdown, and Android for myriad things like external hard drive loading.

[sapper6fd]

I've had very few issues with BMC on my system in the past and those I have had were as a direct result of Windows. I will never go back to Windows because of it.

I think most people blame XBMC for problems when in reality its Miro$ofts programming of taking over the main focus of the display for a pop up, or driver support from hardware manufacturers which has been installed on a system that doesn't support it (or is the wrong driver for the hardware).

Don't forget all other OSes as they are at some point equally or worse.

Agreed, but having run both OpenElec and Ubuntu I haven't run into any usability issues. I currently run Ubuntu 12.10 and as far as I am concerned, for the desktop / XBMC experience its the only way to go - just my personal opinion of course, I'm sure others disagree

[kerlin219]

Been using Xbmc for 18mths or so on a htpc running windows 7 and have to say it is awesome.
Dont ever seem to have any issues with crashing or streaming so i would say thanks to everyone
here for providing a great product free of charge keep up the good work guys.