I forgot one very important one (for us at least):

  6.

Provide a settings GUI to customise the overscan compensation for the MC GUI.  It isn't very user friendly that for every Media Center system (that is hooked up to an HDTV/projector) that we have to use the registry to adjust the GUI overscan compensation.  The default overscan compensation is far too much for modern HDTVs and results in excessively undersized text that is difficult to read.

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Pet Peeve:

1. Not customizable in terms of what's displayed, order it's displayed, and grouping of logic. Basically what everyone has complained about. How about customized buttons? Link to Hotkeys?

2. Able to default the start screen. ie. Ability to start TV automatically or whatever it was last at? Again, customizable.

3. Able to skin it. Blue is good but ...

4. More sensitive. I really hate the delays between clicks that appear sometimes. Maybe it's just Vista but it's very common during the start menu.

 

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Vista Ultimate x64|MSI Custom Built Low Profile|AMD 5800+|4GB DDR2 800Mhz|4x500GB Sammy SATA2 RAID-5|HPG 1600x2|HDHomeRun|HDMI|SPDIF
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Comments posted here are not the opinion of my employer.

Another vote here for strip-customization or at least change the container of "video" from image+video to movies.

 

Good:

* The look
* The navigation
* The start menu is the thing I have the least complaints about

Suggestions:

* The small video area in the bottom left corner. You already have a fullscreen video mode with the menus shown transparently on top, so why not always use that?
* Remember the most frequently used button in each strip and default to that
* If Picture Library and Video Library will remain grouped together under "Pictures + Video" (which I hope they wont), at least make the "Play All" button the default to reduce the number of button presses it takes to get to the Video Library.

I hope you do more of these feedback threads, 'cause the Library views needs some work (cover art quality, disabling file deletion and removing the totally pointless menu that's displayed after every video playback)

 

They've been mentioned, but I thought I'd give my thoughts:

• Split Pictures/Videos - seems like the most popular suggestion.  I'd like to see the Videos combined with the DVD Gallery (Movies).
  
• Customization of Start menu items - another popular one.  I would want the core items to remain locked though in order to maintain some level of consistency; i.e., there should always be the Music, Pictures, Videos/Movies, and TV categories.
  
• The left to right scrolling: for instance, when scrolling to the right, when you reach the last item in the section, it'd be nice if hitting the right arrow again takes you back to the first item.
• One feature I miss from 2005 was the ability to see the last couple of items played under Music.  I often listen to the same playlists, and it'd be nice to have those recently played items accessible directly from the Start menu (rather than selecting Music, then scrolling to find the playlist I want).
• Somewhat related to that, it'd be nice to be able to quickly attach a customizable Picture slideshow to the Music.  I know the PowerPlaylist plugin does this, but a little tighter integration would be nice.

Overall, I think most folks are pretty happy with the Start menu, but I think customization is the real key.  If we can control what items are visible and where they are placed (to a degree), I think you'd have a lot of extemely happy users.

Let's hope MS are seeing the rather consistent trend forming here!!

I would certainly vote the three most important things:

1) Customisation, at best, or at least a more sensible organisation of the menus;

2) More control over the content appearing in menus - stop music folders appearing in pictures etc.  With MCE2005 I shared a bunch of network folders, and then allocated them to a particular area of the menu.  With Vista they just turn up anywhere, and I see little control over this;

3) Please make it so you can get to the power options in a consistent way.  With MCE2005, even if I didn't have the screen on, I knew I could press the Green Button, and then left, and get the power options.  Now, you HAVE to be able to see the screen.

Thanks, please let's see this in a really decent Fiji update, asap!

Here's another vote for some kind of option that seperates tv shows from movies in the Recorded TV menu. I have a couple of hundred movies recorded from tv and that really clutters up the Recorded TV menu and also makes for a pretty heavy performance hit when selecting Recorded TV from the main menu since all of my recorded tv, both tv shows and movies, reside on a network share. So I'd like to be able to quickly get at my tv shows without having to wade through all of the movies that I have.

Oh yes, and how about thumbnails being square?!  All my folder.jpg files on MCE2005 looked fine, and now they look rubbish because you crop them down to some 'widescreen' format.  Can't they be square images?

Why vote on just 3 things?

The main frame company I use to deal with would set a buget of blank dollors, blank tech hours or one time they did qty of bananas.  They Would take suggestions.  They would put value on about 50 requests and  then have a vote.  You could vote on anything you wanted, but you could not exceed the total cost value allowed. 

Maybe you would get what you want or not, maybe it would be 3 big items or maybe 10 mixes.  All said and done, they spent only the amount of time and money that they would alot for new features

I'd like to see more sorting options for videos.  Similar to tags in the Windows Photo Gallery.  Sorting by Name and Date is not enough.

1) Pull "Videos" out of "Pictures & Videos."  This was stupid.  The users have spoken out about this from day one of the beta.  Fix it.

2) Allow me to control what content shows up for which type of media (as others have suggested).  I don't want album art in pictures.  And make sure that printers, scanners and card readers aren't displayed (or at least can be removed).  I can't seem to get a consistent display of the appropriate folders no matter what I do.

3) Make sure that extenders actually map the same Videos, Music and other user folders.  So, if my  VMC machine has the Videos folder pointing to \\SERVER\Videos on my Windows Home Server, the extender should also use that for it's Video folder NOT C:\Users\MCX1\Videos or whatever with a shortcut added for that folder.

4) Like #4, the extender Start Menu experience should be a mirror of the host PC, including those customizations.

Im going to agree with pretty much everybody here...

pros...
im a big fan of the general look and feel (horizontal and vertical scrolling)
transparency
smoothness (especially on extender) but doing some things causes it to lag pretty badly.  no reason for it to do that when you can play hd content flawlessly and it doesnt lag at all.

stuff id like to see changed.
1. agree on the overscan part....  for some reason some of the stuff (internet tv beta) will not scale to my projector very well at all.  (this doesnt specifically have to do with the start menu though)

2. i want to customize the start menu

3. remove videos from pictures...  they should be 2 separate categories.

4. id like to see some kind of ms sponsored gadget program where it would be simple to modify the start menu to do whatever we would like. (weather application on the start menu for instance)  you can do alot now with media center but its far to difficult to access.  do it like the vista gadgets where we can go to a "online" section in media center and automatically trigger the install and then you can allow ratings/number of downloads, etc.

5.  Id like to see the internet tv beta broken apart.  what i mean by that is you have the trailer section.  I like it alot but you sorta have to leave the media center experince to access the internet tv section.  I think the better idea would be to create a movies+videos section and in there have something called "Movie Trailers" which links to the just the movie trailers part of the internet tv beta.  Each section should go where it is most used and be integrated into the media center experince not be integrated into a stand alone suite.

6.  have some way to remove content from media center.  (this also doesnt have anything to do with the start menu exactly but its one of my biggest annoyances in that once you add a folder to media center there is no way to remove it).  all you can do is have it not be watched anymore.

7.  i want a tuner status page added to the start menu where we can see informtion from the homepage w/o needing to go into the recorded tv section.  and it would be nice to get more detailed into in general about whats recording.

Hey Charlie,

We really like the start menu.  It looks great and it's easy to get around in. 

I agree that customization would be nice.  I'd hide the sports section, for example.  Maybe even something with switchable profiles so my kids can have a more controlled experience. It doesn't bother me that videos and pictures are together but, again, that could be addressed via customization. 

I'd echo the thought that it would be nice if the horizontal menus wrapped around.  With an extender, there's a slight pause with each menu move so moving from the far left to the far right can take a bit of time.

As part of the customization, flexible keyboard/hotkey shortcuts that could be exposed to the extender remote would be nice.  It would make it easy to map a custom button to, say, MyMovies.

• TV strip should have a direct link to Sheduled recordings
• TV strip should (maybe) have a direct link to Series
• The Play DVD option is too far over on the TV strip
• Remove Live TV from the TV strip
• There should be a separate Videos strip
• Videos should have a search command (both on the start menu strip and after you've selected the Video Library)
• Maybe move the Movies stuff under the new Videos strip
• Move Internet TV to the Videos strip
• Pictures should not include videos
• Pictures shouldn't include my music folders
• Pictures should have a search command (both on the start menu strip and after you've selected the Picture Library)
• Music should have a search command after you've selected music library

-Michael O. Schoneman

Much like everyone else:

1.Lets separate Pictures & Videos...

2. Give the user some control as to what is up there.

3. Last played? Dissappeared after MCE2005 - I quite liked the ability to quickly navigate to the last thing I was playing.

 

 

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