2014-09-12, 05:08
I've been looking into Kodi/XBMC for running a media center PC, and I like a lot of its features, but the interface is a bit confusing for me, regardless of skin. Is there a Metro or Windows 7 Media Center - style interface available that makes everything incredibly easy to use?
I know exactly what I want the media player to do, but it's just hard for me to navigate many of the XBMC skins.
For me, I'd like to see XBMC open, and present me pivots across the top for home, tv, movies, music, games, books, social, and settings. Under each pivot, overview what's new, unviewed, top shows or episodes, what my friends are watching, that kind of thing. Then, say I go to TV pivot, and it shows me a DVD-cover style sorted alphabetically, where there are sub-pivots for title, genre, airdate, year, rating, station, and cast+crew so I can go find all my sci-fi or all stuff that was aired today, or everything that has Chris Pratt in it. Ditto Movies; music would have album, artist, genre, release date, and playlists; games would let me view all my ROMs by title, system, year, or genre. I could right-click on anything to edit its metadata, or assign subtitles to video files, or force a re-check of metadata if I think it's wrong. It'd take remote control input from a media center remote, and use the color buttons to go to tv, movies, music, or games, and use the # buttons as T9 so if I typed 223, it would accept anything [abc][abc][def] so a TV show with 'bad' or 'baf' could show up in search results.
Apologies for the paragraph above, it might be a bit of a ramble. But I like the idea of XBMC, but the implementation seems a bit...not-user-friendly. I build my own computers, so technology isn't my problem. I know how to make good interfaces, but not how to program them.
I know exactly what I want the media player to do, but it's just hard for me to navigate many of the XBMC skins.
For me, I'd like to see XBMC open, and present me pivots across the top for home, tv, movies, music, games, books, social, and settings. Under each pivot, overview what's new, unviewed, top shows or episodes, what my friends are watching, that kind of thing. Then, say I go to TV pivot, and it shows me a DVD-cover style sorted alphabetically, where there are sub-pivots for title, genre, airdate, year, rating, station, and cast+crew so I can go find all my sci-fi or all stuff that was aired today, or everything that has Chris Pratt in it. Ditto Movies; music would have album, artist, genre, release date, and playlists; games would let me view all my ROMs by title, system, year, or genre. I could right-click on anything to edit its metadata, or assign subtitles to video files, or force a re-check of metadata if I think it's wrong. It'd take remote control input from a media center remote, and use the color buttons to go to tv, movies, music, or games, and use the # buttons as T9 so if I typed 223, it would accept anything [abc][abc][def] so a TV show with 'bad' or 'baf' could show up in search results.
Apologies for the paragraph above, it might be a bit of a ramble. But I like the idea of XBMC, but the implementation seems a bit...not-user-friendly. I build my own computers, so technology isn't my problem. I know how to make good interfaces, but not how to program them.