I would like XMBC on the humax box. There we go
bye!
...
Ok, Seriously,
I did not expect the interface on the humax box to be so basic. I didn't exactly expect fancy graphics or anything like that but I would like to start a serious discussion about this.
I've spent most of my day in and out of
xmbc
mediatomb
twonky *cries*
EMDB
PVD
doublefeature
media center master
and probably some other random apps that never did what I was looking for.
In the past I've tried out some different media servers and currently I have a web facing subsonic server with a fully working browser with cover art indexing over 100k of tracks. I have an AppleTV that can not only display thumbnails from media on remote drives but will also bring in synopsis etc from an external database.
What I want to do with the Humax, is index all my media together, including covers and metadata and allow it to be browse-able on the PVR.
Click, see info and image,
click, play movie
simples.
Yet apparently it's not! In fact it's impossible! Is it really? I know everyone is doing this on their free time and I really do appreciate that but from my understanding of computing - it's certainly not impossible and once a template was created it should be reasonably simple.
Here is the way I figure it would or could work...
Using XMBC or media centre master (coincidentally the apps I had the most success with regarding automation) You would gather all your images and metadata and compile it into a library. On the most basic level, you would need to do a quick reindex anytime you added or removed a film.
On the Humax device, you would have a simple web interface that can read said database from the network (or maybe it can fetch and cache the data) showing the user a list from that database, allowing the user to drill down by genre, rating, actor, etc - view details about the film and play to .. well, play it on the screen.
I probably don't have the expertise required to code this, otherwise I would have spent less time talking and more time coding, however is there nothing that could be modified to suit?
With the full XMBC running on a raspberrypi - is it really too cpu intensive? Is this more a restriction on the DLNA side of things? Maybe I'm missing something, I've only just got mediatomb working so I'm going to have a fiddle with that.
To be honest I did actually have difficulty identifying an app that could pull all this information automatically, it doesn't seem to be quite as common as mp3 tagging was. Anyway, I highly recommend the above two apps for doing that en-mass however now I just need to work out a solution to make it useful.
I will add, I personally don't see the point of XMBC unless you have it on a STB. I'm sure there are a million use cases and reasons why I'm wrong - however I do feel that some of the plugins and indexing setups are some of the most efficient I've seen. Just a shame I cant merge the XMBC ratings that I pulled from IMDB with the ratings in windows lol. But that's a major digression .
I realise there are people that find the idea of covers or thumbnails for movies irrelevant - personally I call it unprofessional.
Thanks for listening
Ian.

...
Ok, Seriously,
I did not expect the interface on the humax box to be so basic. I didn't exactly expect fancy graphics or anything like that but I would like to start a serious discussion about this.
I've spent most of my day in and out of
xmbc
mediatomb
twonky *cries*
EMDB
PVD
doublefeature
media center master
and probably some other random apps that never did what I was looking for.
In the past I've tried out some different media servers and currently I have a web facing subsonic server with a fully working browser with cover art indexing over 100k of tracks. I have an AppleTV that can not only display thumbnails from media on remote drives but will also bring in synopsis etc from an external database.
What I want to do with the Humax, is index all my media together, including covers and metadata and allow it to be browse-able on the PVR.
Click, see info and image,
click, play movie
simples.
Yet apparently it's not! In fact it's impossible! Is it really? I know everyone is doing this on their free time and I really do appreciate that but from my understanding of computing - it's certainly not impossible and once a template was created it should be reasonably simple.
Here is the way I figure it would or could work...
Using XMBC or media centre master (coincidentally the apps I had the most success with regarding automation) You would gather all your images and metadata and compile it into a library. On the most basic level, you would need to do a quick reindex anytime you added or removed a film.
On the Humax device, you would have a simple web interface that can read said database from the network (or maybe it can fetch and cache the data) showing the user a list from that database, allowing the user to drill down by genre, rating, actor, etc - view details about the film and play to .. well, play it on the screen.
I probably don't have the expertise required to code this, otherwise I would have spent less time talking and more time coding, however is there nothing that could be modified to suit?
With the full XMBC running on a raspberrypi - is it really too cpu intensive? Is this more a restriction on the DLNA side of things? Maybe I'm missing something, I've only just got mediatomb working so I'm going to have a fiddle with that.
To be honest I did actually have difficulty identifying an app that could pull all this information automatically, it doesn't seem to be quite as common as mp3 tagging was. Anyway, I highly recommend the above two apps for doing that en-mass however now I just need to work out a solution to make it useful.
I will add, I personally don't see the point of XMBC unless you have it on a STB. I'm sure there are a million use cases and reasons why I'm wrong - however I do feel that some of the plugins and indexing setups are some of the most efficient I've seen. Just a shame I cant merge the XMBC ratings that I pulled from IMDB with the ratings in windows lol. But that's a major digression .
I realise there are people that find the idea of covers or thumbnails for movies irrelevant - personally I call it unprofessional.
Thanks for listening

Ian.