[warwon]

I've been a big HTPC fan since earlier 2005 (I know), not that long but hey back then I was using s-video

So my current HTPC is on the second generation hardware, it replaced a AMD 3200 FX+ (If I recall correctly), a 1 GB of RAM, 250 GB hard-drive, and internal video card (had support for Directx 9.0c).

So last year we replaced the system core with 1TB hard-drive, another 1TB networked, a quad core processor 2.6Ghz Intel, 4 GB of Ram, and a ATI 2600 HD (stable card, works great for blue-ray), and I believe the first blue-ray/HD DVD/DVD LG drive at the time.

As anyone can tell I’ve been through the hardware side a bit, flat screen SD TV, to a nice 1080i HDTV Samsung, upgrade computer hardware, and 5.1 DTS THX sound system.

Software side been a pain, we’ve gone through Beyond TV in the very start. That’s what started the whole setup, and then we wanted more. So it was a very early version of Media Portal and Beyond TV. Media Portal to handle the movie library, and Beyond TV to handle the recording.

Then I looked into SageTV and that it could handle both movies, and TV shows. What a nightmare that was, the amount of issues and time spent with it never ended. As for examples there were no scrappers for IMDB so all the artwork, movie info had to be download for every movie (my wife did that work), and at a thousand movies that took forever. Plus when Sage got patches shit overwritten and had to be redone from the start.

There was some work done by the Sage community for better theme support, but everything was so hammered and tapped together, I gave up and started to looking for a better solution as this was just a mess with so many bugs that even my wife was struggling to use the HTPC as it used to be more stable with Media Portal, and at the start Sage was good.

I then came upon a program called Meedio, a branch of there MeediOS project, based off the old Meedio open-source application before Yahoo bought it. The community behind this application was great.

But the configuration and setup was so difficult it took about fours to setup a working environment for movies, TV shows, music, pictures and the like. After using the default skin/theme for awhile we moved to Chrome, which gave us a beautiful interface that we are using right now.

The menu is vertical with fanart for each sub-menu being displayed in the background when moved over. The movie library pulls down information for cover-arts, fanart, etc.

It does have its flaws I can’t get a good working TV show library setup, lost in tags and configurations on that one. It’s very stable but things like CBZ don’t work, I have it set to use an external application.
They have a plug-in similar to apples movie view in front row, but it over heats my video-card so I turned that off. The music library is nice but it is unable to recover extra information, and there’s now a module that does online music streaming.

Now looking at XBMC and it’s new windows release, I’m starting to wonder if this is where everyone is coming too.

I’m going over the forums and features to find if can do what I need.

List of what I need from XBMC:

Movies:

1 .Ability to pull Fanart, Cover-art (clean covers would be nice), ratings, and all that good old movie information all at once (minus initial setup it should be easy from there, no one movie at a time crap like Sage)

2. Ability to display the movies in different views like by poster view, or fanart views.

3. Ability to edit and maintaining information with the structure of the program, like updating cover-art (my wife loves being able to do this)

Music Library

1, Ability to play music visualization – confirmed

2. Ability to organize library based on years, genre etc….

3. Cover-art support, maybe the ability to get new artwork that I’m missing?

4. Lyric support

5. Support for Shoutcast and Apple streams from within the application


TV Shows:

1. Ability to download all the information on a series simply put.

2. Fanart, banners, episodes information, all that good stuff.

Pictures:

1. Basic support for photos, including UNC stored stuff
2. CBZ support – confirmed YAH!

Core support from the product:

1. Ability to handle a large data base for music, movies, and shows
2. Ability to handle UNC, and know when shit’s offline and not randomly delete stuff from my database
3. Ability to be update and install new plugins from with the application
4. Ability to setup external to launch from within for Blue-ray playback etc.
5. RSS, Emails (gmail support?)
6. Watch online streams from youtube etc
7. Movie show times for theaters

This sounds like a lot I know, but this seems like a standard set of features. I’ll update this as I can confirm, I want to keep a log as I’ll be doing small tests of the actual application tonight.

Please reply if you have any suggestions!

[smcnally75]

I don't have time to answer your whole list, but I can tell you that I used to run Meedio from when it was once "MyHTPC" and kept with it up through MeediOS. I moved over to XBMC and couldn't be happier. It is, IMO, much easier to setup and runs nicer as well.

[timdog82001]

almost everything you mentioned is supported out of the box. I don't think it has the ability to find cover art you're missing yet (I think this is in plans for the future with the musicbrainz addition I would assume), and the lyrics support, for which there is a very well done plugin that integrates into xbmc and many skins even provide buttons especially for it to launch it from the music osd. I don't think it "knows" when your network shares are offline, but I think there's something you can enable to prevent it deleting stuff when you try to update the library with the share turned off...I remember reading something about it a while back, but sorry, can't remember any of the details. There are plugins now that allow you to download and install most of the best plugins, but support is supposed to be added natively to xbmc for this in the relatively near future. Same story for the external program launching. Possible now with a plugin, but will be added natively in the future. Scrolling RSS feeds can be viewed, but you can't do anything more than that unfortunately. There is no support for email, and honestly i wouldn't expect it. If you want to check your email you can of course just launch firefox or any internet browser from within xbmc. Movie showtimes are viewable in the apple movie trailers script (probably the most polished, up to date, and popular of all xbmc scripts). I think there is also a separate movie showtimes plugin or script. Lastly, there are a couple of great youtube scripts and plugins, youtube3 being the best at the moment I believe. And, there are dozens of other media streaming plugins and scripts that access other various sites across the web.

Now, that said, after writing all that, you probably could have fairly easily found all your answers by reading through some of the wiki/online manual, located in the support section of the homepage.

[azido]

I don't have time to answer your whole list, but I can tell you that I used to run Meedio from when it was once "MyHTPC" and kept with it up through MeediOS. I moved over to XBMC and couldn't be happier. It is, IMO, much easier to setup and runs nicer as well.

i'd say xbmc is the most complete multimedia solution i saw so far. it even plays hd content flawlessly without the hassle of installing any crappy codec packages (at least i did not have to install any) - and: i never saw a community for an application that is that active.

for the list: as flying over the text i tend to say xbmc supports 99% of the wanted features.

if they will be able to fix the screen resolution issues when using a tv as a second display on windows, it will be perfect.

[warwon]

Seems to support most of what I need. Rather worried about the state of Internet Radio through can't find much on it.

I understand that music area can play streams, but that means i have to manual save them, but I rather have a a list that always updated.

Also the scappers seem a bit concerning, as towards can it really get my 1200 movie database in order?

[azido]

I don't think it "knows" when your network shares are offline, but I think there's something you can enable to prevent it deleting stuff when you try to update the library with the share turned off...

it simply doesn't delete anything from the database unless you tell it specifically to do so by deleting single entries or telling it to remove non-existant media.

i've added a lot of dvds with mkv movies on them into database, and with only 2 active dvd-drives you can be sure they aren't online together. "update database" only searches for new media, it does not delete any. so as long as you don't use the option to remove all non-valid entries, you are on the safe side.

if you try to play a movie not currently online, it simple doesn't do anything. i'd like to get a "file not found" message in that case, but that is only cosmetics.

[warwon]

I can read and have been reading. But the information is scattared at best.

Better to get ideas from people who use the program rather then some info that was written as to how it would be.

I'm just don't want to spend the next four weeks setting this up lol.

[azido]

I can read and have been reading. But the information is scattared at best.

Better to get ideas from people who use the program rather then some info that was written as to how it would be.

I'm just don't want to spend the next four weeks setting this up lol.

i'm sure i'll spend that time for sure

over 2000+ movies and about 400 tv-series are waiting to get into the database

i guess you can call me an addict now

[warwon]

That sounds like I need to add.

With Meedio right now I have this broken TV series thing. Thats what I call it thing, cause it can't understand how to work.

Somtimes it shows the tv series I clicked on and then sometimes another series I didn't click on.

Damn thing.

I'll try xbmc in a test enviroment tonight, i guess

[timdog82001]

oh also about the internet radio, there's support in various plugins, including for the itunes radio stations and stuff, but there's native support for last.fm, which is a site similar to pandora if you haven't heard of it.

[warwon]

And this talk of scripts and plugins is starting to scare me

[timdog82001]

i'm sure i'll spend that time for sure

over 2000+ movies and about 400 tv-series are waiting to get into the database

i guess you can call me an addict now

400 series and 2000 movies I think your collection may be the first to outdo mine on the tv side of things. I have about 120 series in their entirety and that alone is a couple terabytes

[timdog82001]

And this talk of scripts and plugins is starting to scare me

they're very simple, no need to worry. plugins especially, they just act like another folder on your computer.

[warwon]

Is there a site or resource index for them, or am I hunting?

[timdog82001]

well you can look through the threads in the scripts/plugins threads in this forum. there's normally a site xbmcscripts.com, but its currently down. You can also find many of them in the xbmc scripting svn but you need an svn client like tortoise svn to get them. http://code.google.com/p/xbmc-scripting/

also http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=29911