[Didier]

I apologize for what I said about the application. I didn’t mean that I don’t like the application, I meant that I don’t like the forum, and by association, the “community” that seems to be cropping up around it. I read my post again, and realize why it seems I don’t like the application. I definitely do. I hope it becomes stable enough to use regularly. I definitely think it’s severely beta quality at this point, but whatever. I’m sure it will progress steadily, and when it’s ready, I’ll be using it daily.

When I wrote the title of the thread, “Least helpful forum, ever.”, I meant that I think the forum is unhelpful. I understand that since the forum is attached to the project itself, maybe it could be construed as me hating on wiimc. I also understand that this statement was unnecessary and derogatory: “If your goal was an easy, no fuss media center app for the Wii, yet a pretty technically savvy person can’t get it to run stably or reliably, then I’m sorry, but you have failed abysmally. “

That said, I have a lot of respect for the devs and I apologize. I still think this forum is bullshit though.

[Didier]

OK, that’s a complete BS response. I switched off wiiMC and went back to my XBMC… I think tantric’s doing a find job of making mplayer look better on the Wii, I just think I’m looking for a more polished experience, and XBMC still has it.

As for saying that creating a user interface that hides the warts a little better is a bad idea, you’re obviously not in the software business. Definitely not in the UI design business anyway…

[Didier]

What do you mean, “What’s the point?”? I think the point is to have metadata attached to movies for sorting/searching. You know, like.. say you wanted to watch a Coen Brother’s movie, but don’t know which, it’d be nice to list them. Or movies with a particular actor, or made in a particular year. These are just examples of reasons I’ve used metadata attached to movies..

[Didier]

Do you have a guest account enabled? You could try that. Sorry, I’m a programmer not a domain admin… I only deal with that stuff when absolutely necessary.

[Didier]

I’ve been flipping back and forth between my XBMC and this, and watching how the buffering works. Theirs is definitely optimized and buffers very quickly, but I realized that the time difference isn’t the problem. It’s the way the buffering is presented to the user.

When I select a movie file from the list, and a small insignificant throbber starts pulsing off in one of the corners, and maybe says “buffering…” in really tiny letters next to it, I can see what’s happening during the unavoidable pause as the file is buffered. However, when there is suddenly a big BRIGHT WHITE, HIGH CONTRAST, message stating “Buffering” across the middle of the screen with a PROGRESS BAR the WIDTH OF my BIG ASS TV, I feel sort of inclined to think that I’ll be waiting a while.

I’ve read in various posts that it is a goal of this project to make a Wii media center application that is user friendly and approachable. I think putting extra effort into creating the perception of speed and fluidity would definitely be a huge step in that direction.

[Didier]

I would love it if it would at very least blank the screen after a period of no video activity.

Maybe dim after 5 minutes, blank after 10, or maybe user configurable steps.

Actual screensavers would be nice, but dimming/blanking would suffice for me.

Music visualizations would be nice too, but not as easy as screen savers, and no where near as easy as dimming/blanking, so way lower on my nice to have list than the other options…

[Didier]

Can’t you just make the share available to “Everyone” on the domain as a read only share?

[Didier]

My bad. I scanned real quickly before posting, must’ve just missed it. My apologies.

[Didier]

It seems unlikely that this is because of the Wii or software running on it, but more likely that there’s something wrong with your SMB configuration on the server side. The wii connects to your network on a workgroup, not a domain, so whatever you’ve got set up will have to work for workgroup connected systems.

[Didier]

Thanks Tantric, I’ll mess around with the settings. I understand the need for buffering, it just seems that there could be some optimization done in terms of leaving more in the buffer for faster rw/ff performance. Maybe not.. *shrug*

2-3 seconds of buffering whenever I hit the D-pad left makes having to jump back two minutes take an extra 10-20 seconds… that’s annoying. Going back 5 minutes would add ~30 seconds… not ideal at all. If that *is* desirable performance in your eyes, I’ll have to agree to disagree.

~c

[Author]

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