2013-06-20, 17:23
Hi all. I've been using WMC/MediaBrowser since 2008. My goal was to have a setup that was very wife/daughter friendly. I've been loosely following XBMC over the years. I recently installed the latest version and was very impressed. Hardware acceleration, smooth interface, FF and RW with my remote...
Current setup:
* I have two HTPC's each with vertex SSD's to quickly get meta data cashed locally.
* HTPC's connected via gigabit lan to windows file server with folder shares
* Media: ~450 mkv movies I ripped from Bluray, home videos, and pictures.
* WMC has MediaBrowser, meta data collected before hand using MediaCenter Master.
* WMC interface customized with MediaCenterStudio, that seems to be breaking
* One box uses Gyration remote, other a basic MCE remote
* When the machines turn on or wake from sleep via a remote, they wake up my media server via a Wake-On-Lan utility.
* No live TV, no Netflix
Things I don't like about my current setup
- WMC is dieing
- FF and RW scrubbing a pain, need mouse or several 30 second skip presses
- Can't change audio tracks easily, requires minmizing, mouseing the ffa icon
- Never was able to get subtitles to work with DxVA hardware acceleration
- Genre filtering is cumbersome / clunky
If anyone runs a similar setup and has any pointers, please let me know. I have a lot of questions that the FAQ and Google has answered and I just need to play with the system. However, the answer to one question just isn't jumping out at me:
What is a good skin that can closely emulate MediaBrowser? I want my wife and kids to be able to navigate quickly through the almost 500 movies using the arrow buttons on the remote. A big grid of movie posters with labels seems to be the be the most attractive and efficient in our household. They won't like a linear list of text or having to navigate folder structure.
Current setup:
* I have two HTPC's each with vertex SSD's to quickly get meta data cashed locally.
* HTPC's connected via gigabit lan to windows file server with folder shares
* Media: ~450 mkv movies I ripped from Bluray, home videos, and pictures.
* WMC has MediaBrowser, meta data collected before hand using MediaCenter Master.
* WMC interface customized with MediaCenterStudio, that seems to be breaking
* One box uses Gyration remote, other a basic MCE remote
* When the machines turn on or wake from sleep via a remote, they wake up my media server via a Wake-On-Lan utility.
* No live TV, no Netflix
Things I don't like about my current setup
- WMC is dieing
- FF and RW scrubbing a pain, need mouse or several 30 second skip presses
- Can't change audio tracks easily, requires minmizing, mouseing the ffa icon
- Never was able to get subtitles to work with DxVA hardware acceleration
- Genre filtering is cumbersome / clunky
If anyone runs a similar setup and has any pointers, please let me know. I have a lot of questions that the FAQ and Google has answered and I just need to play with the system. However, the answer to one question just isn't jumping out at me:
What is a good skin that can closely emulate MediaBrowser? I want my wife and kids to be able to navigate quickly through the almost 500 movies using the arrow buttons on the remote. A big grid of movie posters with labels seems to be the be the most attractive and efficient in our household. They won't like a linear list of text or having to navigate folder structure.
