Dark Liquid

I’m fed up with most media center software out there. MythTV I’ve found to be unstable and irritating to use at best, elisa apparently still doesn’t have DVD playback support and none of these the ones I’ve used so far seem to provide a simple way to configure how files are stored and to automatically manage things like downloads for things like trailers and what not and store them in places based on user definable criteria. They often seem to focus too heavily on being a TV viewer/PVR and I don’t want TV viewing or PVR stuff.

Here is what I want:

• A simple, friendly media browser that:
  • can list media by genre (e.g. Action, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Comedy)
  • can list media by name
  • can list media by category and subcategories (e.g. TV > Series > Family Guy > Season 2 > Episode 1)
  • can start up a player for the media full screen without any fuss
  • can add the media to a queue of things to play
  • can add media folders to a queue
  • has a way to move media from one place to another or generally organise media in some simple way
  • can automatically list files from any attached device (e.g. will index files on network drives, upnp devices, usb harddrives, etc) and optionally categorise it into an appropriate media folder
  • list recently added media
• A download app that:
  • can download files and store them in appropriate media folders based on user-definable criteria (e.g. store stuff downloaded from apple trailers in a Film > Trailers directory or something)
  • can schedule downloads
  • can automatically download items from RSS feeds (e.g. podcasts)
• A simple app to configure the two previous ones that:
  • can add new auto-file storing criteria
  • can add new devices or directories to index
  • add new RSS feeds to download items from (and ways to match against specific content in the feed)

All I want is a file browser with a download manager and a media player that all work together. I don’t need or want half the crap in pretty much any solution out there. So far, elisa is pretty close to my goals, as I can set up a download thing separately in the background, but if it doesn’t have DVD playback its unusable. GeeXbox was also pretty close, but doesn’t seem to offer anyway of setting up stuff like downloading and has no capabilities for metadata-based media browsing. Maybe I’ll just try and hack up my own thing - I need to hack up a distro to actually run it on first as currently I can’t get audio over HDMI with Mythbuntu 7.10 (with the latest updates and ATI drivers) on my Asus M2A thingy (I did at one point before I installed the latest ATI drivers, so I know its possible).