A long list of ideas
Posted: Tue Feb 23, 2010 12:14 am
I dont want to come off sounding like I dont like this software, because I use it, but there simply is no media server software (atleast that I have used) that meets my requirements. When you first go into Wild Media Service you get four choices (movies, music, photo, and service). In comparison to my other requests this one is insignificant, but I have a lot more video files than just movies. I think the movies option should be changed to video. If not video, then there should be a seperate library for tv shows like there is for movies, music, and photos.
Before I switched my primary settop box to a wdtv, I was using a old xbox and xbmc. After using xbmc for many years nothing really compairs, and for a while I used xbmc as my upnp media server. If xbmc would allow you to view media not in the library I would still use it, it has great scrapers. Im not saying you should build scrapers for your software, though it would be nice, all I am asking for is better thumbnail support. I just dont have the patience to individually select every single thumbnail when I have an 8TB media server, but in every movie folder I have the cover and it is called "folder.jpg". Maybe you could make it so when it scans the folders if it finds a certian file name in the folder it would use it as the thumbnail. It would also be nice if the folders inside "watch folders" could have its own thumbnail. I use a program called Tvix to grab these thumbnails, this program also grabs movie information, actor information, etc and places it into its own photo. I believe these files are called movie sheets, each one of my movies has one of these movie sheets in its folder called "movie information.jpg". It would also be nice if Wild Media Server were to find one of these files in its folder it would display it as an option along side the movie.
This suggestion also comes from xbmc, and I have two ways to possibly solve it. As I already mentioned I have a very large media server, and both my movies and tv shows are spread out over sevral different hard drives. I want to be able to press tv shows and just see all my tv shows, not figure out which drive what program is on. In xbmc you could link multiple folders to just one choice. It is kind of similar to your collection menu, but the collections menu does not update as watch folders do. So what I propose is to either have the collections folder update when it does a normal scan or to be able to create a virtual folder within watch folders that have multiple paths. I prefer the second option.
My last request is both my least favorite and most favorite feature of your product. Transcoding needs to work more like TVersity. If the media file is not encoded in a format the player can play or it does not meet the users profile then it should automatically transcode it from the normal menu. The wdtv live will play 99% of files I throw at it, the reason I use the transcoding option most of the time is to strech older tv shows that are non-widescreen to widescreen. Disregarding the fact that you have to constantly switch in and out of the transcoding menus, the transcoding menus are very chaotic.
Before I switched my primary settop box to a wdtv, I was using a old xbox and xbmc. After using xbmc for many years nothing really compairs, and for a while I used xbmc as my upnp media server. If xbmc would allow you to view media not in the library I would still use it, it has great scrapers. Im not saying you should build scrapers for your software, though it would be nice, all I am asking for is better thumbnail support. I just dont have the patience to individually select every single thumbnail when I have an 8TB media server, but in every movie folder I have the cover and it is called "folder.jpg". Maybe you could make it so when it scans the folders if it finds a certian file name in the folder it would use it as the thumbnail. It would also be nice if the folders inside "watch folders" could have its own thumbnail. I use a program called Tvix to grab these thumbnails, this program also grabs movie information, actor information, etc and places it into its own photo. I believe these files are called movie sheets, each one of my movies has one of these movie sheets in its folder called "movie information.jpg". It would also be nice if Wild Media Server were to find one of these files in its folder it would display it as an option along side the movie.
This suggestion also comes from xbmc, and I have two ways to possibly solve it. As I already mentioned I have a very large media server, and both my movies and tv shows are spread out over sevral different hard drives. I want to be able to press tv shows and just see all my tv shows, not figure out which drive what program is on. In xbmc you could link multiple folders to just one choice. It is kind of similar to your collection menu, but the collections menu does not update as watch folders do. So what I propose is to either have the collections folder update when it does a normal scan or to be able to create a virtual folder within watch folders that have multiple paths. I prefer the second option.
My last request is both my least favorite and most favorite feature of your product. Transcoding needs to work more like TVersity. If the media file is not encoded in a format the player can play or it does not meet the users profile then it should automatically transcode it from the normal menu. The wdtv live will play 99% of files I throw at it, the reason I use the transcoding option most of the time is to strech older tv shows that are non-widescreen to widescreen. Disregarding the fact that you have to constantly switch in and out of the transcoding menus, the transcoding menus are very chaotic.
