Ive been followering LinuxMce for a while now and so far these are my experiences with the project:
Installation:
As long as you select recommended hardware everything goes without a hitch. Thanks to the AVwizard setting up audio and HDTV resolutions is much easier than manual ways. Kinda wish sometimes this tool appeared in standard distros. Only downside is the ATI problems, although this i believe is related to the driver from ATI itself.
Functionality:
Very good, having most devices plug and play is definatly good. Being able to use my remote straight out of the box is what i want from a media center. UI2 is also quite plesant and fancy to people. Only improvement I would particulary like is a way to turn flikr off if i don't want it. I have hundreds of my own pictures that I like appearing on the screens around the house, its just disappointing when your mum walks in and some raunchy pic from flikr shows up or a picture that dosnt display well comes on.
Javamo: Now this is a uber cool app which friends really enjoy. Being able to control the media center from a phone seems really only do-able from linuxmce. And im enjoying seeing this develop.
Event creation: this has two halves to it, on one hand i find it easy to use if i want basic things like lights down at sundown. Which is good. However say i want my outdoor lights on at sundown but want my lights inside my house to come on an hour before sun-down as the house gets dark around that time. I find i can not find easily locate such abilties in the event creation tool although im convinced people have done it.
Media final organisation: this is where i feel Linuxmce lacks behind abit. For movies this feature works very well and happy. I just click the file, search for it on amazon and volia. Only problem occurs when a film dosnt exist on amazon but does on IMDB. Like Operation Takedown. It would be useful if there was a manual feature to just type in an IMDB number (like in Mythtv) when i struggle auto-searching for a film and get it to pull down data that way.
and the biggie: TV shows.
This section provided me alot of problems. I have alot of tv-show sersis. And they are all stuctured nicely by Program name-Season-Episode. They appear in the video file window much trying to get information about a show is terrible. If i auto search on amazon it cant find (which is wernt expecting it to find individaul episodes). And trying to manually type in info is a laborious task and i have yet to be able to find a way to do it properly for the attributes. Atm i run a sql script that recursively sets some default values to seperate movies from tv shows. If there could be someway to get this part to work i would be eternally greatful. As at the moment i enter videos from a MD and i get hundreds of non-human readable file names of my shows (24 6x22) which isnt very user friendly. Then a few clicks to change the filter to movies and volia what i like to see. Just wish my tv shows could be the same. Also it might be an idea to default the video screen upon entry to Movies. As when you have TV shows there will always be many more episodes to films, which fills up lists quick and kills my Javmo
. Alternatively TV shows could be organised in a tree like manner so i can select Stargate and it then shows the Season, Episode etc. Rather than just putting the file name in the linuxmce video tree. Obviously the reason why this isnt working at the moment is due to the way tv-shows are currently organised by the sync tool. I can set the tv-shows tag and this allows them to appear in the tv-shows filter but this is as far as it goes.
Features that would be sub zero cool- Voice control and Voice response. Now if this could be there goodbye any other media center. Think something like SARAH from In A Town Called Eureka. Although my girlfriend might be a little un-nerved by a 'Good-evening Professor Falcon, Would you like to Play a game of Chess' but i would find a chess playing house very good. :p
Raid: more of an off-topic one. But i have a raid 0 array of 3 drives. I add it to linuxmce my editing the mdadm conf file. I then add a device to linuxmce as an internal hard drive as it dosnt pick up the raid device and i specify /dev/md1 say. It then does set up the device and appear. However theres data on these drives already but sorted into the linuxmce structure. It dosnt add symlinks in for me, but if i add them manually they have a tendancy to disappear. Until i remake the sym link then rerun a media sync. Any ideas what could be causing this?
Other than that i find linuxmce a very promising project and would like to contuinue using it.
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