Our best ideas.

[Colby]

Its been a long time since there was feature request for really unique things. Hopefully we all catch the vision of Xlobby again and strive to make it better than every other front-end out there. Most of our feature request are little technical advances, or bug fixes to the existing XL; while these are necessary, where are all the "big" feature requests? Now that Steven is developing again, let us as an Xlobby community inspire him. Here are some things I believe are the waves of the future...

1. Everyone knows TV on dvd is the way to go, and many people are cateloging their episodes online in home built servers. I invision a database managed personal TV generator. It would have a chrono calculator that could randomly generate given amounts of television viewing from our database of online shows. How cool would it be to input 75 min of "Threes Company" and have Xlobby "decide" a random playlist of my shows back to back 75min long. Or better yet a random from my whole tv database. Or even a calender scheduler of my favorite shows from my online collection. I could watch Cosby on mondays, and Friends on Thursdays, no commercials no surfing, just reruns of the programs I love and own.

2. From a visial standpoint, I think as more and more HTPCs make their way controlling homes and entertainment, Virtual components (matching hardware) could be created and a touchscreen could be installed in the rack system. Why look at a plain blue VFD, when I can have 64bit, color graphics telling me the same info? I bring this up because I think that 2 monitor setups will be the way to go in HTPC. The "inrack" control screen and the 65" HDTV monitor. Xlobby should have full dual monitor support.

more to come... add yours.

[BaddaBing]

I agree with XL providing default dual monitor support. This feature is a given in any professional level control application such as Crestron and AMX. Perfect example is in slideshow, you want it on the big screen - not on the control monitor.

[S Pittaway]

Yep, dual monitor support is really important... you dont need touch screens to make the most of this, i have xlobby running on a 32 lcd tv and movies ect are shown on via a projector...

multi-mon support is espically needed if steve wnats to move towards "internal" players.



I also think some really simple stuff is needed -


A nice slideshow - the current one is wank (for lack of a better word ) and its limited to the xlobby monitor.
I want nice animated slideshows, with decent transition effects (ken burns/fading etc) ie something that looks a bit more professional. I was writing a plugin to do this but it should work out of the box, MMC has it and so does Media-Portal.


i think some basic database stats would be a good idea, most people want to know what films/music/pictures/yyy have been added recently and view/listen to the new entries, also adding played times/counts automaticaly is easy and something that most people want. Ditto for entry ratings.

When you have them its not much more work for steve to add most popular/played genres ect (again something that quite a few people have asked about).



Personally, i think the music player needs some extra functionallity adding to it, check out itunes and you klnow what i mean (i added some of them in xmusic, but they should be there by default and work with zones).

track ratings
track played times
repeat track/repeat playlist
shuffle the playlist (not just the next track) (ie same as media portal and many others).
playlists which use the stats above to try and ensure you listen to everything (ie favor unplayed/favourate tracks).

If steve is pushing for the internal player (which i think he should) milkdrop support is needed... it looks grat with xlobby on one screen and milkdrop fullscreen on the other (i also can be used to add some life to boring "now playing" screens).



I know there is nothing ground breaking here, but thay would add tho the overall product.


Sean.

[P3rv3rt B3ar]

Hmmm sounds like u missed my suggestion, mayby it sounded too simple and techical. Just in case Steven missed it also i repeat it here:

Internal player capable of accepting .GRF (dshow filtergraph files) and play media accordingly.

That also solves many problems with multiscreen, with right filter mayby slideshow issues, who knows mayby even mikdrop has dshow wrapper...

most importantly it would make internal player to be inline with totally customizable spirit of xlobby. M$ prolly would not like but who gives a crap about them.

sometimes best ideas are just very simple and technical.

[P3rv3rt B3ar]

Since Steven just implemented my last wish, im bold enough to present another request:

DLNA support to xlobby!!

It would allow for example playstation to play local content in xlobby databases. Im currently using WMP11 for that, but would be so much better if Xlobby could handle that too and structure of content would be based on xlobby bases (be same as in HTPC). On the other hand this could be plugin as well...

[Wayne123]

That is something I really want also, It would be nice to be able to control a Networked media player from a touchscreen running the Xlobby thin client.
I can do this now with Premise but the GUI is crap compared to Xlobby.

[CiXel]

That is something I really want also, It would be nice to be able to control a Networked media player from a touchscreen running the Xlobby thin client.
I can do this now with Premise but the GUI is crap compared to Xlobby.

I do that with my XBMC actually.
XBMC accepts commands via ip. I launch my movies from within xlobby and then can tell it to pause etc from the launching screen. It works really well.