Hello Peter,
Thanks for replying. I think most of the current XXHE users use their computer transports for music only, therefore just remote control without anything visual would be good enough. But I want more from my htpc
I have two responses that seem not much related, but they are. The first may look kind of stupid and hard to judge for the real merits :
The Library functions of XXHighEnd and the Galeries in special, are created with one thing in mind : a huge amount of data to be managed. "Huge" means several thousands of albums Explorer already can't handle because of the time it takes. So whatever front-end you want to use, anticipate on these amounts. I do / XX does, and it does it explicitly. "Manage" means that you can deal with it for functional reasons, and only when you have thousands of albums loaded, you can start to see what I mean with that and it is from various angles (like what to pick, where to store, how to find, how to backup and a few more).
The necessary speed of it all is already a bottleneck for everything, although I did not examine other software, but I think I know.
I do not have thousands of albums. I think I have between 500 and 800. Anyway, media portal and WMP11 have already good search features, listing by genre etc. I havent done ax extensive comparison, though. I see XXHE similar to WMP, expecially considering the pc-looking interface. The problem for me is that it cannot be read from 2-3m in a 7" inches screen. Give me something like Classé Omega CDP and we start talking
Even cics CMP (in the thread above this) is readable on a HTPC screen.
When to my judgement XXHighEnd is far better in whatever area than anything else, or I know because of developments to come that it will, there is no reason to spend time on "interfacing" with other software. Mind you, there is no reason for *me*. Going along with it, is the logic of better spending the time on the functionality (etc.) this other software might be better at, than spending time on that interface, knowing that XX will be as good on the matter concerned, might it be sooner or later.
When XX will have skins that will have text that looks good, not like a windows program and be readable at 2.5m of distance, then I won't have need to use a different frontend. I do like things simple. I will surely prefer to use only XXHE to play music. Ideally it'll be launched from the main window of mediaportal (play music), not from windows taskbar. Touching the screen or, sit, with my harmony.
Again, this sounds stupid but it is my strategy anyway. Not enough time to do it otherwise !
Let me try to give an example of which I hope I won't offend anywone but the developer who seems to be vanished anyway :
People exist who like MP3Toys as a front end. So there's the question : could XX not be controlled by it (because Foobar can and blahblahblah). So yes, I could make that. But man, software like that is so much outside my own standards (for decency) by far that I would degrade myself (or (future) XX) by doing it. So I don't already for that reason. More important though is that those who want/use MP3Toys, apparently don't see the "problems" you'd have when using that instead of XX itself, all ending up in me solving those problems which really aren't of my interest apart from you being that customer of mine. Also, I *know* that interfaces are the most hard to create and maintain, and most often something not working anymore is beyond both parties knowlegde and blame (like : "hey, it doesn't work with Vista SP1 !").
I dont know what is mp3toys and I have tried many media centers, vista one, meedio, and other 4-5. basically everything that is available for windows and linux (yep, i tried that too, in a virtual machine). So far, mediaportal is the best. It can launch external applications (altough one plugin is bugged in vista), and I use TheaterTek for playing dvds and divx, since it is the best player and has memory. I do find the SQ with asio and a better plugin than the original close to (without exclusive mode, until I replace my terratec on the test pc).
Girder is a paying software. Before I will need to use it I hope XXHE will support infrared commands. There is another utility which is free but is less powerful. The Harmony itself can mimic windows media center remote, which makes easy to use most interfaces. I'm really eager to see XXHE respond to my Harmony.
I know, a command line interface doesn't seem much (work), but when it's there it should be there for the good reasons. In fact I can tell you it's already there, but the means to exploit it for *my* reasons are not, and that's why you don't have it. At the time it is freed to you, yes, you could use it to let front end software control XX, but let's say that's a coincidence and it won't be supported.
I do not understand why. TheaterTek for instance has a command line interface to launch it ant it works very well and users like it. If It hadnt maybe I wouldnt have bought it.
Coming to the second part of my response, and I think this is less stupid, my before mentioned "good reasons" would be remote control, and might you not know, this is a whole world of knowledge and experience in itself. Since you mention Girder it might be so that you have good experiences with that in the HTPC/Movie environment, where btw 50% of my roots are too. The very major difference is though, that with movies you have OSDs (On screen Display) and you can see what yo are doing. Audio playback however, inheretantly works with the
smallest device possible, that coincidentally being very close to you otherwise you can't see anything, that by itself urging for touching the screen since it is under your nose anyway.
Now what ?!
This is a subject I couldn't work out so far myself. I do try though, if you'd only know that the Asus mentioned earlier in this thread is one of the attempts to find out, a Philips Pronto is another (talking about costs
) and yesterday the postman brought a Harmony.
At this moment I
think it comes down to a most simple form : infrared remote control with any random generic programmable remote (think of Harmony like devices), and XX accepting commands as smart as we can all think of. How that makes us selecting albums/tracks without a visual ...
... but if you'd compare it with a normal CDP, well, then yes.
A normal cdp has a vfd screen that shows some data. Some have cd-text feature. A HTPC frontend can and must show more information. For instance, another mediaportal plugin shows the lyrics of the song that you are playing (it retrieves lyrics for about 60-70% of my songs and store them on my computer): that is very nifty, expecially for those of us who are not english native speakers.
And I want to see everything from distance. I do not want to power on the TV to read it.
Maybe in one year from now all this will be taken from granted by the users of XXHE, maybe not, maybe just some. I wanna dream the perfect interface.
