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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.
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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.
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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!
Posts: 101
Joined: Jul 2006
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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.
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I just downloaded MeediOS and tried it out. I'll resist from posting my experience, as I don't wish it to be seen as a criticism of the developers - the guys working on it have clearly put a huge amount of time and effort into it, and I can certainly see the potential. I'm sure the user experience will be much better than this when they get a bit futher along.
I like the idea of an arbitrarily configurable library. Beyond using things like smartplaylists, however, arbitrary layouts are rather difficult to do well using a simple user interface that is doable from the main application interface while sitting on the couch. MeediOS doesn't offer any UI suggestions in this regard, other than highlighting how complicated it is, and perhaps suggesting that a separate app is required to do it.
I want XBMC to be really simple to setup and use. It's too difficult as it is, and we're looking to simplify it further. Some of that necessarily means that you can't do arbitrarily complicated libraries. I think you can, however, have some flexibility (more than we do currently) while still making it easier for the end user.
For those that want these arbitrarily complicated libraries, then I think a UPnP system might be the way to go - let the front end be taken care of by XBMC (and other systems) and develop a really all-inclusive upnp library server that's mouse driven and fully configurable. Perhaps MeediOS is the answer to that server?
Cheers,
Jonathan
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I tried Meedios before trying xbmc. I never got the movie library to really work. Besides there are several different tv and movie plugins it is really hard to figure out which one to use. Quite complicated and confusing to setup.
I like the standardization of the plugin repository and integration with Meedios, I hope some day xbmc will have this, but the openmaid repository is a little bit of information overload.
In the end, I was really looking for something I could run under linux and therefore not need multiple windows licenses. Meedios won't run on linux.