Tuesday, November 16, 2004
Progress Update
Well I've spent many hours over the last few week -- primarily tweaking Meedio, adding plugins, and working toward getting TheaterTek and FFDShow integrated into Meedio. It's been a fun, frustrating, learning experience.
Meedio is a great frontend with tremendous functionality primarily due to the availability of many third-party plugins. It is very complex, and made more difficult by the general lack of a standard for documentation and support of the plugins. With perseverance, you can get there, but as I said before it can be frustrating.
As an example, I had to add the "PlayMee" plugin to get TheaterTek to play DVD content from within Meedio. It now works (Hooray - success) ---- 95% (Oh No) of the time (somewhat frustrating). I ripped 6 DVD's to the Raid hard drive. The directory structure and naming convention is identical for all (except for the movie name) and one of them just will not play without manually opening it in TheaterTek .... ????
I had to add the "GetMee" plugin in order to download coverart etc... for the movies. That works fine. I added "FeedMee" plugin to give me News Feed Headlines on the main Meedio screen - that works. I added the "Caller-ID" plugin and now I get caller id information fed to the Meedio main screen. All of the various plugins have their own configuration and are set up in a non-standard manner - hence the complexity, fun, and frustration.
I find myself troubleshooting one of these issues for a few hours then just have to step away for awhile and give it a fresh look at a later time. That's where the XBox really comes in handy --- nothing like an hour or two of mindless gaming to get your psyche back in line.
The WOW factor remains high!
Meedio is a great frontend with tremendous functionality primarily due to the availability of many third-party plugins. It is very complex, and made more difficult by the general lack of a standard for documentation and support of the plugins. With perseverance, you can get there, but as I said before it can be frustrating.
As an example, I had to add the "PlayMee" plugin to get TheaterTek to play DVD content from within Meedio. It now works (Hooray - success) ---- 95% (Oh No) of the time (somewhat frustrating). I ripped 6 DVD's to the Raid hard drive. The directory structure and naming convention is identical for all (except for the movie name) and one of them just will not play without manually opening it in TheaterTek .... ????
I had to add the "GetMee" plugin in order to download coverart etc... for the movies. That works fine. I added "FeedMee" plugin to give me News Feed Headlines on the main Meedio screen - that works. I added the "Caller-ID" plugin and now I get caller id information fed to the Meedio main screen. All of the various plugins have their own configuration and are set up in a non-standard manner - hence the complexity, fun, and frustration.
I find myself troubleshooting one of these issues for a few hours then just have to step away for awhile and give it a fresh look at a later time. That's where the XBox really comes in handy --- nothing like an hour or two of mindless gaming to get your psyche back in line.
The WOW factor remains high!
