Jump to content

Is MBT the poor relation?


johnhb

MBT priority  

84 members have voted

  1. 1. Is MBT being given the development priority it should?

    • NO - Please give some love to the HTPC users!
    • YES - It works great!


Recommended Posts

The current version of MBT is looking very promising, however, after months waiting it's STILL missing key support in so many areas - Music, Photos, DVD/BR playback, not to mention stability in terms of removing the need for 3rd party tools for decent/stable playback...

 

 

 

Despite this sub-forum being in the top 3 for posts, it's been months since we received a release. Development as a whole seems focused on the (far less popular) components of MB3 like the Win 8 metro app and other peripheral platforms. In the meantime the core population of users (which I'm sure is derived mainly of ex-WMC users) is being left with a half (third?) baked solution.

 

 

 

Isn't HTPC the bread and butter for MB3? Uncompressed HD video playback, bit perfect audio playback all via a classy GUI?

 

 

Has MB has forgotten its roots? Please use the poll to vote!

Edited by johnhb
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Logos302

As I understand it MBT is going through a major rewrite which will make it easier to move forward.  And for me the roots are MBC and not MBT, MBC at this point is very polished and has nice themes and so on.  So I don't think they have forgotten about MBT I just believe that its being reworked for the future and it's taken a little bit of time.  

  • Like 4
Link to comment
Share on other sites

We are working on MBT and hope to have substantial releases out in the near future. I do understand that the lack of significant updates can be disheartening. I am currently working towards finishing off the home screen and item details/child item screens on the new architecture branch, which hopefully we'll be able to demo soon.

 

babgvant has been doing a lot of work recently on improving the internal player. MBT is targeted as the high-end in video quality, and we understand how critical it is that our internal player works flawlessly. It does, however, also need to be balanced with the need to require little to no user configuration in order to work well, and to be resilient to conflicting software installed on the user's system (like codec packs). As such, our player does a lot more of the DS pipeline setup and configuration itself than most media players do. It is difficult to get the player functional and stable when we only have one developer working on the internal player, but I have trust in babgvant's ability.

 

As always, new developers will always be welcome.

  • Like 9
Link to comment
Share on other sites

yardameus

It'd be great if there were more developers to help with moving MBT along. I don't think developers are being moved away from MBT to Windows or android apps, they are just developers who have taken it upon themselves to develop additional projects.  I still use an HTPC primarily, but more and more people are using mobile devices, so I don't think priority is an issue, just need more developers.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't want to put down the devs, so please don't take this as a personal attack or let it demotivate you. The MB3 team is adding a lot of cool stuff and has come a long way in a short time.

 

But MBT is def the black sheep in my experiece, from a user perspective it seems like a hack work of a code. 

 

First thing I notice when I installed it beginning of the year is it will not minimize, it just hides 95% of the gui down in the bottom left corner, still the same today. 

Second thing I notice is gui is extremely slow, sluggish, stuttering. (Win8.1 app is supersmooth).

Third thing, it's a resource hog, it's as bad that I have to close it when idle or other media players will have problem. I had issues with playback of Live-tv in VLC it was stuttering bad, tried different settings but nothing worked. Closed down MBT and everything was back to perfect.

Forth, it crashes quite often.

Missing features... yes, but please, stability and good core before adding features.

 

Also I find the GUI to be more focus on eyecandy than userfriendly, but I guess that is personal preference. I prefer KISS and Less is more approach. But for me MBT is just a dead client sitting on my screen and playing the media I choose in the browser (using play to feature) I use the web page to control MBT. For me Chromecast is the perfect kind of player, unfortunatly it doesn't change hz and requires transcoding, and android app also has stability issues with CC so it's not working out as planned. 

 

I'm still searching for the perfect MB3 client, both for my cinema and my living room..

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Beardyname

Sounds like nit-picking ;) (kidding don't take it personally)

 

on a more serious note. While we wait for all them goodies, have you tried xbmb3c ? if not i would suggest you try that out.

 

For me MBT is smooth as f**k, and i will not be switching away from it any time soon. (for comparison skype uses more memory than my MBT instance does)

Edited by Beardyname
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Latchmor

These types of threads and polls are pointless. Do the MB team have unlimited resources/devs, no. Are the current devs working hard in the background, yes. You can see these facts in many other threads. We'd all like things to work yesterday but sometimes it's just not possible.

 

Just let 'em get on with it  ;)

 

(yes I did get out of bed the wrong side this morning :P)

  • Like 4
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sounds like nit-picking ;) (kidding don't take it personally)

 

on a more serious note. While we wait for all them goodies, have you tried xbmb3c ? if not i would suggest you try that out.

 

For me MBT is smooth as f**k, and i will not be switching away from it any time soon. (for comparison skype uses more memory than my MBT instance does)

 

I assume this was directed at me ?

 

yes I have tried xbmb3c, I've used it before on my cinema computer and I just got a NUC to do some testing. Currently it has Openelec running with xbmb3c, and I find it slow to navigate and it crashes, not only does xbmb3c crash but it also manage to crash the server. I've done very little testing on this because I don't have the time currently, but yesterday I tried a Helix snapshot of Openelec so I will see if stability changes. Linux/xmbc is under heavy development when it comes to graphics these days, you can see big changes in updates. Very exiting time for graphic driver development and ofcourse the wayland/mir display server seems to bring linux a giant leap forward.

 

For MBT beeing slow, I think it may be related to Intel IGP, it might not be capable to handle the graphic hog that MBT is, although as I said Metro app is fine. The computer is rather top specced Haswell i7 with 16GB of ram, should be plenty fast and way overkill for a mediaplayer. Still doesn't stop MBT from blaming out of memory and crashing.

 

The good thing about MBT is the the MadVR support, it's the main reason I don't use XBMC. I'm a big fan of MadVR.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Redshirt

Have you guys seen the blog post Aphid did a while back showing some of the UI changes he was planning. http://mediabrowser.tv/community/index.php?/blog/1/entry-75-media-browser-theater-preview-1-the-item-list/

 

I realize that the date on the blog may help punctuate the point being made, but the content of the post should hopefully remove doubt that MBT is still being worked on. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I thought about this question for a bit while I was cutting the lawn. Do I want MBT completed now? Yeah, who doesn't. However I would rather wait until a rock solid, easy to use application is ready for release than to get something that is broken more than it's working. I found a good interim solution while MBT is being re-written, xbmb3c works well and the Titan skin looks great. 

 

From what I understand the devs are all volunteers doing this in their spare time out of love of their craft, not money. The rest of us are benefactors of their hard work. 

 

The folks creating all of this software and allowing me to use it for FREE have my deepest gratitude.

It's a rare occurrence in life that someone willingly allows their creation to be used with no expectations of anything in return.   

  • Like 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites

elshagon

I see progress being made, but it's hard for general users to keep track of the progress besides the occasional blog posts clearly detailing new builds and features.  For the average user it may help to have a general timetable laid out for what the end game is and dates/goals for when various features are to be added.

For me MBT runs pretty smooth, but I need to turn MadVR off even though it works fine using mpc-be it stutters in MBT.  I assume this is due to lack of Exclusive Mode for playback.  Even though I've seen this discussed I have no idea if it's being worked on.  If I knew it was coming with a goal of the end of the year I could then keep going as is.  However I may be more inclined to use mpc as a third party video playback option within MBT if I could see the goal was for sometime next year.  Point being the way things are now I have no idea when this or other features are being implemented or what the dates are for goals being set to add them in.  

I understand the developers are doing the best they can to move things along, and I appreciate the job they're doing.  I like the simplicity of MBT compared to MBC.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's the video tearing and judder that stops me from using it in it current state. Smooth playback is a must for any home theater. I know others get tearing but I don't see many replies as to the cause which is frustrating.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What are you using? 

 

I have an integrated A10 amd and mbt works fine for me for video (refresh rate issue being worked on aside). I dont have anything to powerful

However babgvant has discussed why mbt requires more power. 

 

http://mediabrowser.tv/community/index.php?/topic/9652-stuttering-with-i5-2415m-4gb/page-2&do=findComment&comment=125282

 

"MBT is built on WPF, these other applications are not. WPF makes it easy for developers to draw the nice UI and animations (which IIRC are rendered as video via the EVR), but that isn't free. It adds load on the GPU and other system resources."

 

I think for those with low powered systems the team maybe in the future can discuss user options to disable some of the features that use  system resources, or perhaps the team can discuss a clear vision that mbt is simply geared toward high end htpc's. 

 

The way i look at it now mbt is geared more to good/reasonably powerful htpc system (I personally prefer this as i like things like bringing up an osd during a movie having chapter images, cast information, i love the eye candy ect..) Some people probably have low powered systems who cant handle it, and maybe dont care about this stuff.

 

I cant handle madvr in mbt with my A10 right now, i can in mpc-hc because mpc-hc is a player with zero features and extremely low system resources. Babgvant mentioned I should try a dedicated graphics card if I have one (I have a 5770 in my desktop) and mbt + madvr worked extremely well. And again i dont mind spending a bit more money because I have always wanted madvr  + a nice user interface. I realized it would never come resource free. I realized this when madashi came on the xbmc forum a few years ago and the talks broke down over smooth playback and the nice UI. 

 

Also I dont know what improvements we may see with aphids changes. 

Edited by Ghostm
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Beardyname

I assume this was directed at me ?

 

yes I have tried xbmb3c, I've used it before on my cinema computer and I just got a NUC to do some testing. Currently it has Openelec running with xbmb3c, and I find it slow to navigate and it crashes, not only does xbmb3c crash but it also manage to crash the server. I've done very little testing on this because I don't have the time currently, but yesterday I tried a Helix snapshot of Openelec so I will see if stability changes. Linux/xmbc is under heavy development when it comes to graphics these days, you can see big changes in updates. Very exiting time for graphic driver development and ofcourse the wayland/mir display server seems to bring linux a giant leap forward.

 

For MBT beeing slow, I think it may be related to Intel IGP, it might not be capable to handle the graphic hog that MBT is, although as I said Metro app is fine. The computer is rather top specced Haswell i7 with 16GB of ram, should be plenty fast and way overkill for a mediaplayer. Still doesn't stop MBT from blaming out of memory and crashing.

 

 

 

Odd I'm running openelec and it is quite stable :/ though it's slow on the PI but that is totally understandable.

My machine is kinda the same, but i'm not using a built in chip for rendering graphics so that might be it. Should not the haswell be using Intel HD grahpics though ?

Edited by Beardyname
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Interesting to see some debate on this and (though by no means statistically significant) the current weight of opinion.

 

Just to be clear, I'm certainly in the camp that hugely appreciates the time the developers dedicate to MB overall. The pretence of the post and poll was firmly around a perception that MBT in particular should be the core product and focus (behind only the server) but in terms of features and release patterns it lags disproportionately behind the other ventures.

 

I have tied xbmc3, but it was a messy solution and the GUI of the compatible xbmc skins looks amateurish compared to the elegance of MBT.

 

I have seen the updates, but was very disappointed to see no mention of music or photo support.

 

I think the metro app is what makes this so frustrating, as it is so much further ahead at this point in time. I'd happily pay double for the native SW if it had the same features, but without the need to transcode (we need the all important bit perfect payback for music and proper support for blu-ray and dvd backups for serious HTPC use).

Edited by johnhb
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Cheesegeezer

Just to give you all some info and to hopefully put your minds at ease...

 

Almost Daily the Devs are committing to MBT repo on github, which means there is plenty of work being carried out.

 

You can see for yourselves how much work is going on behind the scenes by looking at this link

 

https://github.com/MediaBrowser/MediaBrowser.Theater/commits/master

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 11 months later...

Sorry to bring up an old thread. It's been a year with not much progress on MBT released publicly. I was looking at the github link from Cheezegeezer. The developers are steadily working away. I admire the commitment. A couple of years worth of volunteer work. When I get home tonight I will send another donation your way. Please go buy yourselves a brew and thanks for your hard work. Hopefully MBT will be as reliable as MBC has been for me this past year. Thanks for your monumental efforts.    

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

bret1958

Just getting a Video player out stable would be nice then all the tid bits later down the road...  Video play back... pure and simple for the HTPC owners for the very reason we signed on many years ago... Like before music, tv and all the bling as add on components.. heck charge more for each add on... my pocket book is open any time this is ready, I am a paid life time and yearly and would pay many times again.. but need to see at least the app.. As i take it MBT is dead in its current version and so I understand the lack of progress in its current form. If the the new MBT development needs $ start asking.. You shall receive.

MB3 is no longer an option its slow clunky and needs a never updated and totally ignored media center that is now dead.

MBT on win 10 is smooth and uncluttered and feels good. Just to darn buggy..

But yet I consume it features every night hoping for the Promised update....so on with the show we wait.

Edited by bret1958
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

WarrenH

My humble opinion, and with greatest respect to those who do dedicate their time and efforts to MB; there seems to be much emphasis on all sorts of aspects of MB Server that probably benefit a minority of users (google drive, selectable accent colours, WTF) with less interest on the usability of media through MBT or the still-not-as-good-as-MB2-for-effectiveness Win8 App for example, or maybe I'm one of the minority that still watches their media through a PC connected to a TV.

 

MB3 for example doesn't offer the ability to drop WMC for those who use live TV and recording currently without having to learn a third party plugin that doesn't quite work, and as I'm in the UK won't provide guide listings. So I'm stuck with Win7 because of MB3?

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

MB3 for example doesn't offer the ability to drop WMC for those who use live TV and recording currently without having to learn a third party plugin that doesn't quite work, and as I'm in the UK won't

provide guide listings. So I'm stuck with Win7 because of MB3?

 

I'm not sure to what you are referring when you say "MB3" but I don't see how you can blame the industry's lack of a full replacement of Live TV functionality as it existed in WMC on us...?

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Koleckai Silvestri

It is a shame that Theater hasn't progressed at all in the last 18 months. If it has, there is nothing visible to the end user and without release notes no one even knows what is happening. The Web Client is the most advanced client that I use now which is sad in a way.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

jasonwilliams

Personally I think the approach they've taken is spot on.  Initial efforts were focused on getting the back-end right and the team released a basic HTPC client for us to use while that was taking place.  Now that the foundation is in place, efforts are focused on the front end.

 

If the new Emby Theater progresses anywhere near the speed the server was, we'll all be watching holographic movies this time next year.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

To the above comment, I don't think there's anything sad about using a web app full time, assuming it's a well built one. In fact, I think we're going to start to see an industry shift back towards web technologies, and recent developments from Google are evidence of this. They are building new native api's for web apps that are going to offer the same 60fps in the UI as java android apps. In fact, the web client is beginning to use many of them although the reason you don't see a major tangible result yet is because it also has a large code base that will have to gradually move to the paradigms. You guys don't even really know what's coming but I can say it's going to surprise.

 

Now, back on topic, the new Emby Theater is seeing heavy active development, but the code won't be public until it sees it's first release. So that's why you're not seeing the activity on Github that you're looking for. And that's simply because I want to be able to control the unveiling rather than just have people go grab it off of Github and start displaying it before it's released. In the meantime I guess I will just let @@Xzener convey his excitement.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Koleckai Silvestri

I hope your right. The current downloaded version is so bad that I simply had to remove it from my machines. Flickering and stuttering video, poor subtitle handling, poor keyboard and mouse control were all factors. Just seemed to get worse and worse with each version. With no user facing development progress, it isn't even worth it to report bugs.

Edited by Koleckai Silvestri
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...