binkley
October 31st, 2008, 01:58 PM
Hi there, Boxee's.
I uninstalled the software lastnight - and I wanted to give you my reasons. I hope this is the correct location for it, and if not I kindly ask one of the mods to move this post to the correct area.
First - I should say that this was not the last time I will try this software. I love what you are pulling off, and think it has a tremendous amount of potential. However, these are what killed it for me right now:
1) Interface too small - My wife, daughter and myself use a 13" macbook at night to watch a couple of shows before bed. The interface was impossible for me to read on that size screen on the chest at the foot of the bed - Front Row is perfectly legible from there. Now, I don't claim to have the best vision, but it's not that bad either.
2) Lack of volume control for non-local content. This was especially annoying for dynamic content like some Anime, and loud commercials on Hulu.
3) Klunky when trying to return to a video that is playing when you bring up the menu. If I hit the menu button on the remote, I would always have to restart the episode that was playing in order to return to it - I couldn't just make the menu go away when the video was playing behind it. This may be less irritating if the episode didn't continue to play behind the menu.
4) Lack of apparent support for aliases - I have folder aliases pointing to different locations/machines on my home network in my laptop's movie folder. Even with the referenced network volumes already mounted, they were not respected - forcing me to ferret through many levels of folder hierarchy in order to get to the videos.
5) It completely forces out Front Row - maybe I'm in the minority here, and you can certainly make the "well, duh! it replaces it with something better" argument. However I can tell you that if I had a simple way to enable/disable Boxee's remote input "grab", I wouldn't have uninstalled it. I would have left it, and depending on what we were watching that night, I would have enabled it when we wanted to watch Hulu.
So - you guys have a wonderful alpha product going. Seriously! I wouldn't take the time to give this feedback if you didn't.
I'm excited to see your next version, and thanks!
Binkley
(And bless Opus, as he shuffles loose this mortal coil on November 2nd.)
I uninstalled the software lastnight - and I wanted to give you my reasons. I hope this is the correct location for it, and if not I kindly ask one of the mods to move this post to the correct area.
First - I should say that this was not the last time I will try this software. I love what you are pulling off, and think it has a tremendous amount of potential. However, these are what killed it for me right now:
1) Interface too small - My wife, daughter and myself use a 13" macbook at night to watch a couple of shows before bed. The interface was impossible for me to read on that size screen on the chest at the foot of the bed - Front Row is perfectly legible from there. Now, I don't claim to have the best vision, but it's not that bad either.
2) Lack of volume control for non-local content. This was especially annoying for dynamic content like some Anime, and loud commercials on Hulu.
3) Klunky when trying to return to a video that is playing when you bring up the menu. If I hit the menu button on the remote, I would always have to restart the episode that was playing in order to return to it - I couldn't just make the menu go away when the video was playing behind it. This may be less irritating if the episode didn't continue to play behind the menu.
4) Lack of apparent support for aliases - I have folder aliases pointing to different locations/machines on my home network in my laptop's movie folder. Even with the referenced network volumes already mounted, they were not respected - forcing me to ferret through many levels of folder hierarchy in order to get to the videos.
5) It completely forces out Front Row - maybe I'm in the minority here, and you can certainly make the "well, duh! it replaces it with something better" argument. However I can tell you that if I had a simple way to enable/disable Boxee's remote input "grab", I wouldn't have uninstalled it. I would have left it, and depending on what we were watching that night, I would have enabled it when we wanted to watch Hulu.
So - you guys have a wonderful alpha product going. Seriously! I wouldn't take the time to give this feedback if you didn't.
I'm excited to see your next version, and thanks!
Binkley
(And bless Opus, as he shuffles loose this mortal coil on November 2nd.)