Viewing photos and music

[Gilrock 0]

I'm a brand new HTPC user having only setup my system about a week ago.  I have Media Center running on a PC with Windows 8.1.  I had a Plex server setup and working and then I heard about MB3 so I got that installed and running last night.  I know it's still a work in progress but I wanted to check on some of the behavior I saw.

 

1)  I loaded the plugin I believe was called MB Photos.  It seemed like when I was inside a folder I got a bunch of thumbnails on the screen I could scroll through and the background would change to the photo I was on if I stayed on it for a few seconds.  But I couldn't hit select and cause the photo to go full screen.  I tried hitting the play button instead but that produces an error message.

 

2)  So I installed the classic version that ran inside Media Center and I believe I was able to get the photos to show as a slideshow when I hit select.  My one complaint was that I couldn't advance through the photos by hitting the left/right arrows.  It seemed like I was stuck waiting for the slideshow timer to expire.

 

3)  In MBT the movie section looked the most polished.  When playing a movie I was seeing the mouse pointer on the screen and had to move it near the edge to hide it.  I found a post saying it was fixed but its not fixed in the version of the server I got from the Server download link yesterday.  I tried to change the update feature to look for beta versions but it said I was up to date.  Sorry I'm not at my machine to list my exact version.

 

4)  I was wondering if there were any themes to make it look nicer but all I found was the old MB2 stuff.  I see a thread today that indicated I need to look at the server pages to find where to purchase MB3 themes so I'll check that out tonight.

 

5)  I know the Live TV isn't there yet.  But looking at the list of shows I've recorded one thing I miss is nobody seems to show the season/episode or the episode name in the info for the show.  Even in standard media center the guide doesn't show that information.  I know a Tivo is able to show that info so it should be available.  I would love to see features where you could define shows to be recorded and they would automatically get stored in the folder format that all the media servers prefer.  And I'd like to be able to define rules for what to record like right now I want to record shows I know are running as reruns but I only want them if they are from Season 7.

 

Thanks,

Gil

[ebr 14960]

For #2 use the channel up/dn buttons to advance through the slideshow.

[Gilrock 0]

These comments all apply to the classic version:

 

I think the left/right arrows would be better since that is what everyone is used to with WMC.  The channel buttons aren't as convenient on my media center remote.  Can plugins use whatever buttons they want or is that defined by the main media browser app?  Since left/right doesn't seem to do anything couldn't it be programmed to let both sets of buttons work?

 

I've tried several plugins and they don't work well for photos.  Everyone could takes notes by looking at how the standard media center works for photos.  When I'm looking at all the photos in a folder and I click on one I want that to fill the screen...not take me to a page with info about that one photo as if it was a movie.  Most of the plugins take you to a page for that single photo with tabs like actors and gallery which aren't applicable to photo galleries.

 

Also most plugins I've tried don't display home movies very well.  Since there is no coverart for home movies it usually ends up with pure white boxes where you can't even read the titles of the folder.

 

And I have no idea what's going on with recorded TV shows.  WMC shows the first frame of the show whereas in media browser I'm getting cover images that don't make sense.  I recorded Monday night football and the image I get when selecting the show is a girl sitting on a horse.  In WMC the exact same show is displayed with guys on a football field.

 

I've really been trying to stick with MB3 because it has such a nice installation and good configuration screens.