Where are the complete Media Centre solutions?

After a lengthy, ongoing, personal mission to find the perfect Media Centre software (or hardware-based) solution, I have come to one conclusion – there is not such a thing out there!

Those of you reading this, familiar with the current offerings of Media Centre software and hardware, will likely be thinking that the popular ones are great.

Yes, I will admit, some of them show great potential and are very close to what I would consider “complete”. But not one of them fulfill all the (very simple) requirements.

These requirements are not difficult, or awkward, as each one is implemented somewhere in at least one of the solutions out there. And I say this from a completely non-developer view. I do not feel out of place taking this view, as the examples of what to do are out there.

Enough waffle, what am I talking about?

A Media Centre should tick a few boxes to be considered a proper, complete solution;

• Simple to use
• Little or no obvious bugs
• Customizable
• Has the ‘WAF’

It has to be simple to use
No one wants to spend more time ‘tweaking’ their set up than they do enjoying it.

It needs to perform it’s functions with out any frequent bugs
There should be no excuses now for releases to be riddled with a list of irritating show-stoppers, especially if they require work-arounds from the user for something which was once simple. Where I work, we have test documentation we follow relentlessly after every new patch or release of software. This ensures that things which have been fixed in the past remain working after we fix something else. All these new releases with major bugs that are found after just 5 minutes of standard use is not on – there is just no excuse.

It should be customizable
I’m not talking about in-depth, code level tweaking here. Just simple GUI options, allowing the user to switch on or off certain aspects they don’t agree with. Like whether or not to see the year a film was released next to the name, or which order to list TV Shows.

It has to have the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor)
Nothing can ruin the feel of a Media Centre than the words of your partner complaining how difficult it is to navigate and asking why they can’t just put a disc in.

So where do the current offerings fall short?

Plex/XBMC
Technically Plex and XBMC are different apps. But Plex is based off the same code as XBMC, just refined to be Mac-only. The two are pretty much the same thing.

They offer wonderful eye candy and customization in the way of skins. Plex and XBMC do look absolutely stunning once they are set up.

But the developers are so busy increasing the level of wonderment to the eyes that the underlying functionality of the would-be perfect software is falling behind.

Adding Music and Photos to the Library is a breeze – the application reads the tags and adds the info to the library. (I’m pretty sure it could read more info from JPEG EXIF data, but there is enough there just now).

The level of plug-ins available is amazing too. If there is a web based service you use frequently, chances are there is a 10-foot interface version available for Plex/XBMC.

Video, however, is where they fail miserably. If you name your movie files or DVD rips correctly, the apps can ‘scrape’ the information from sites such as IMDB. But this does not always work as expected, far too often odd movies having the wrong info associated (it grabs information for D.A.R.Y.L. as “Droids”) or even nothing at all. And adding this info manually is a pain itself, with you having to add data to propriety xml-based ‘nfo’ files and separate image files renamed ‘*.tbn’ for the artwork/covers. Not something that can be migrated easily should you wish to change software.

Why do they refuse to add simple tag-reading to the movie part of the library?  One word – Piracy!

It’s so simple now to download files of the latest movies from torrent sites. They are usually in the archaic AVI container, encoded with the old, hacked, Xvid or Divx codec. This format is kept alive by bell ends such as the infamous “aXXo”.

Even DVD player manufacturers know the powerful pull of free movies in naff low-resolution quality. It’s hard to find a DVD player now without “MP4 video” support. They know full well that folk now have huge collections of avi files they want to plug in via Hard Drive or USB Stick. I mean, come on, how many legitimate companies out there actually offer services that would warrant support for these pirate-based format? Practically none! It’s not even “MP4 support” as they so freely term it – It’s support for Xvid and Divx in the AVI container.

The introduction of the open MKV container for HD video is thankfully eating away at the nasty AVI files, but even this is a complete mess due to lack of standards – you tend to find people encoding with it in a do-what-you-feel-like fashion.

Those like me, who like to encode their movie collection in proper standard formats, are stuck putting up with the above until the developers pull their fingers out.

We take pride in being able to add all the movie information you would ever need to the files themselves – Title, Directors, Cast, Release Date, lovely clean hi-res artwork, etc. etc. Information that stays with the file, like with mp3s and jpegs, no matter where you decide to use it.

Apple’s Front Row
This is simplicity in its finest. Well, almost.

Front Row is able to read all the information it needs from the files you import into it (via iTunes). There’s no need to worry about crap data from less-than-complete sites and horrible looking artwork. If you have taken the time to encode the file yourself and added all the relevant info, you are rewarded with a nice, clean collection.

But it falls short because of Apple’s apparent shunning of this software – the sorting of your library is messed up and can become tedious to try and ignore.

Movies have no options to browse by Date, Genre, Director, Actor, etc. All the info is there, and you can browse them in iTunes really easily, but in Front Row you’re presented with one gargantuan list. But this list is ordered via the “Sort Name” tag though which is a godsend (you’re able to order collections such as the Alien films in the proper order, instead of by name only).

The TV shows suffer a similar fate – multiple seasons are ordered one after the other, listed by Show Name only. For example, 3 Seasons of Dexter and 8 Seasons of Red Dwarf would be listed as follows…

Dexter
Dexter
Dexter
Red Dwarf
Red Dwarf
Red Dwarf
Red Dwarf
Red Dwarf
Red Dwarf
Red Dwarf
Red Dwarf

…Where you find the episodes listed in reverse order (newest on top).

Another example of the poor sorting

You would expect the TV Shows to be listed as Show Name > Season Number > Episode ordered by oldest on top.

Windows 7 Media Centre
As much as I hate to say it (I’m a bit of a Mac fan-boy), Windows Media Centre is almost my favourite.

Windows 7 can read the data in the mp4 videos perfectly. Even allowing you to edit the tags (or ‘atoms’ as they’re officially known) from within Windows Explorer itself. More than Mac OS X allows.

But in some monumentally stupid move, the Media Centre side of things insists on pulling the data down from the web too! For the love of all that is Holy, WHY?! The data is there, you can read it fine! Aaargh!

It does integrate brilliantly with TV Tuners though.

The other Apps out there are very similar, so I won’t go in to every one. Plex, XBMC, Windows 7 Media Centre and Front row are the best I’ve seen.

What about purely Hardware based solutions?

There are quite a few offerings out there. The main two being The Popcorn Hour and The Western Digital TV Live.

They both offer almost the same functionality – play-anything codec support in a small form factor, with the Popcorn Hour giving the option of an optical drive.

But even these feel half-baked and rushed out. If you search online for bug lists of such devices, you will likely find forum posts dedicated to users listing the short-comings of these cheap and seemingly simple devices. I had to send back my original WD TV back due to irritations with playing back simple DVD rips (it would read the aspect ratio incorrectly, displaying the movies in the wrong shape).

Their interfaces are usually very sluggish too; with the low power processors unable to offer any smooth navigation to anything above simple text-based file lists.

No Media Centre is worth anything if no one can use it but you. You need to have something your partner, family and friends can pick up and navigate too. Otherwise you might as well hook your PC up to your TV screen and navigate the files with a keyboard and mouse.

So what needs to be done?

A few very very simple things need to happen to get the current state of offerings out of the depressing half-arsed Media Centre scenario:

Plex, XBMC, Moovida, Boxee, Media Portal and the rest of the ‘Open’ Software solutions need to stop dicking about with adding more eye candy and fix the Library functions.
No one cares if they’ve added the option to see the bit rate of the current playing song, or made the star rating from IMDB look better – if the bit rate of a song is bad, it’s not in my library. And I couldn’t give a monkey’s fart what rating the movies in my collection get on IMDB! Get a clue and import the tags from my standard, non propriety, MP4 files!

If they implement this, they will have a truly perfect Media Centre (the TV Tuner side of things can be handled via launching a different app from within).

Apple need to fix the current bugs in Front Row.
It was working before with the older versions. The interface of Front Row to me is perfect – a nice, snappy, clean, simple system. If they fix the simple sorting bug I believe a lot of people would drop Plex and XBMC (those that can do without the plug-ins). You can even get apps that will scrape the data for your *cough* downloaded collection and add it to iTunes.

I also feel Apple needs to stick to their guns more about abiding by the standards that they’re promoting. As far as I’m concerned (and I speak for the majority here), mp4 is the current standard to replace the ageing format of DVD. h.264 is already the way to go as far as the video codec is concerned. It’s scaleable, meaning it can be used for anything from small mobile phone sized videos right up to full 1080p video and beyond (it’s used for Blu-ray). And the multi channel AAC format for audio is perfect for replacing 6 channel 5.1 AC3 (Dolby Digital). Match that up with an embedded text file for chapter markers all wrapped up in the MP4 container and you have the perfect 21st century format for movies.

VOB container -> MP4
MPEG-2 video codec -> h.264
Multi channel AC3 -> AAC
Chapter markers -> nameable chapter text file

All of that results in a smaller format, practically indistinguishable from the original, and able to hold all the metadata you could need.

The problem is, there are no Amp manufacturers currently supporting decoding for a multi channel AAC bitstream, you have to feed them something they can understand. The most obvious is AC3.

Plex already does this by transcoding multi channel AAC into AC3 on the fly. This is perfect as you have a standard format to store your movies in. But, Apple seem reluctant to fork out for Dolby Live licences, leaving any multi channel AAC sound being down converted to a PLII Stereo signal at best.

All that is needed is for them to allow the Apple TV, Quicktime, Front Row and even the iPhone and iPods to accept multi channel AAC and either convert it to AC3 for current amps (as Plex does) or, with regards to the iPods, down convert it to a stereo source.

Because they are dragging their heels over this, we’re forced to create a file with two audio tracks – one as a PLII mix of the original AC3 track and the second as a pass-through of the AC3 track. This breaks the mp4 container standard and leaves you with a file, although more compatible with current devices, larger than it needs to be. It’s also has the extension “.m4v” making it feel more like another propriety format.

*sigh*

I feel so strongly about this as I honestly cannot find a single bit of kit worth writing a glowing report about and yet I believe it’s not something that should be this hard to find. I have used all of the well known apps, and read enough forums about the hardware based Media Centres to know that I’ll still be searching for a while yet.

You show me a Media Centre and I’ll show you where it falls short…