XBMC verses Meedio / MeediOS - what is the XBMC attraction that makes it so popular?

Customisable menus coupled with the UPnP server would be incredible, serving your own browse tree to any other device. I'm so fed up with everything on the market just offering Artist/Album/Genre with no intelligence in that structure at all.

MeediOS promises to offer separate UIs etc, but as far as I can see it's slow progress and things are not materialising, there isn't even a basic video player yet or music jukebox functionality to match that of the original Meedio.

Just to show what he is talking about this is my current MeediOS test install (showing the video menu).



Notice the separate menu items for Movies, Trailers, Music festival DVDs, Live Music dvds, Standup Comedy Dvds, Sports DVDs. The possibilities are infinite. My music group menu has about 10 different kinds of music such as OST's, VA, Music videos, Comedy audio, singles, CDMs, DJ sets ect. All of these menu items are separate databases/libraries which can have different imports, views and configurations.

I don't necessarily think XBMC should go the way of individual libraries, just have a better way to categorize and link to different types of media. The recent Singles "hack" is a good start but the program is going to have to make some fundamental changes to ever challenge MeediOS on that.

And see my Meedio demo on Youtube!

It's funny seeing all of the Meedio guys up in this here thread. I switched over because Meedio couldn't do the fancy-pants skins that XBMC could, and I was tired of various metadata importers failing and having to tinker with them. When I switched I sacrificed quite a bit of customization and WAF. It's better now that we've been using it for a year or so, but at the first the transition wasn't great.

I still keep up with MeediOS, checking into the forums every once in awhile to see how things are going.

I just want the best of both worlds, I don't care which product that occurs in first!

If we could tag DLNA/uPnP serving to Meedio's library together with a uPnP Control Point and Media Renderer to its plugins then that would be perfect.

So would adding Meedio's library functionality to XBMC!

csimon Wrote:So would adding Meedio's library management functionality to XBMC!

Fixed. It's the one BIG thing I miss from Meedio. Being able to easily open the library and make adjustments, even if it's a simple Find/Replace or manually adding tags so that entries show up correctly. Given, in a perfect world I wouldn't even have to do this, but having built in separate libraries allows you so much more flexibility, like Zag was saying.

Just wanted to point out this multiple libraries workaround to all you ex- Meedio(s)? users.
Sure it may be considered a hack, but that should be easy for you tinkerers, even if only half of what I hear about the software is true.
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=61779

ECEC Wrote:Fixed. It's the one BIG thing I miss from Meedio. Being able to easily open the library and make adjustments, even if it's a simple Find/Replace or manually adding tags so that entries show up correctly. Given, in a perfect world I wouldn't even have to do this, but having built in separate libraries allows you so much more flexibility, like Zag was saying.

There is a nice xbmc web media manager developing over here that might be of use in those situations. But I think XBMC must be careful not to go too much the way of MeediOS and sacrifice usability or its ease of setup.

It's been a while since I used Meedios, but the one thing I like is the ease of use with XBMC. There is much more configuration with Meedio and seems like the plug-ins would break often or you have to update them all the time.

To me Meedio is great if you want to constantly work on it, but XBMC just works. Not counting all the great XBMC skins. I just did my first XBMC update since last November and it was a breeze.

I haven't given the new Meedios a shot. It may have some great new features.

dhrandy Wrote:It's been a while since I used Meedios, but the one thing I like is the ease of use with XBMC. There is much more configuration with Meedio...

Well, I've just downloaded MeediOS (I've only used Meedio before now) and the configuration is quite simple. You just go the Library tab, select Music, go to the Import tag and point it at your media folders just as with XBMC and let it scan your media. The library is set up with default views which give the standard by Artist, by Genre, by Album, Artist A-Z, Album A-Z etc menus. You can customise them if you wish but you don't have to. The menu and view configuration is all done by a simple explorer-type tree structure, you just add nodes and pick tags from drop-down lists etc just as with the original Meedio. It's a myth that it's hard to set up. It provides for an out-of-the-box solution as well as for those who want to tinker a but morewith customised browse trees. The database even comes pre-populated with internet radio and cocktail recipes! I was up and running within 10 minutes of downloading the software, and most of that was scanning the library! I would even say that it was easier to set up than XBMC. The default theme isn't too elegant, but it also comes with the Vision theme which is amazing. I really urge XBMC developers to take a look at the MeediOS library to show that it's not difficult to use. And I just wish MeediOS developers would add in bits of XBMC like the uPnP functionality and get the whole thing past Alpha stage. It would be nice if the two projects could merge...