[Ghostdivision]

I hope this is not taken the wrong way, in my opinion xbmc is the best front end for my media I have ever came across and for that reason I love it like no other.

My one and only issue with xbmc has been addons/apps/ whatever you want to call it. Perhaps this is not what xbmc for, maybe it more of a storage front end solution then a mainstream media player, and my observations are wrong.

When I grab addon's they are all developed by regular users, regular users leave, stop working, have other things to do. None of the addons i use last very long.

When I look at other media streamers like boxee, or rouk, or whatever, they all have working apps or addons that are always working by I assume a team, things like netflix, amazon, discovery channel website, a nicer youtube addon....

I would rather not buy a different device for netflix and youtube, and website videos and things of that nature it would be fantastic if xbmc was all i ever needed and were easily accessible and put out by an approved xbmc team that was able to keep up with it if errors or problems arose so they could be fixed

Maybe xbmc does not have the resources for this, I dont know, but I would be willing to pay money for a centralized offical xbmc app packages I know worked and im sure many others would as well.

And before someone suggests their is a netflix app or youtube app the creators did a fine job, its just not a robust netflix or youtube browsing experience compared to other devices. As well as any streaming video website addons like vice.com, discovery channel, music services (creator of the free grooveshark script vanished for instance and now thats no longer working), ect.. that rely on regular users and break quite often, the addons are simply rarely maintained.

I also know users were working on an app wall or addon wall which would go along way as well. Maybe an xbmc team handling addon's is just not possible, but I thought it was something I should ask or suggest. Maybe since xbmc is free an open source this will simply never happen, but i thought I would bring it up, many casual users get excited about xbmc when i show it to them but get turned off when they see a lack of easy to use addons with nice interfaces that work compared to their boxee or roku or whatever.

[Ned Scott]

Everything in our XBMC.org repo is required to be open source, so that allows a lot of add-ons to be picked up by someone else if someone abandons them.

As it is, this is really no different than a core XBMC feature, so I don't think it would matter much if formal organization was done for these add-ons or not. It all comes down to "is there someone willing/wanting to work on it".

For add-on UI, a lot of that depends on the skin and feature integration. Some special views might not be available for all skins, or our default skin (which aims to be a "one size fits most" skin) might not have some of the extra features some add-ons need for special layouts, etc.

It is true that add-ons could use a little GUI sparkle, since most of them are pretty plain. There are various ideas floating around on how to improve this, but again, it often comes down to how much work an add-on author wants to put into it.

[joebrady]

When using add-ons from the Official XBMC Repository, they can be marked to be auto-updated when changes are made, or removed when the author or team mark them as "broken".

The only sure fire way to make sure you have an always working add-on is to "roll your own"

[Bstrdsmkr]

We're actually discussing something like this over at xbmchub.com too. Not for the entirety of xbmc's vast addon library, but for those our community develops at least. The Idea is we have an open repo that contains all the addons we support. We also keep a running list of addons that have been abandoned, and of those, which are broken. From there, new devs (or old salts with more time on their hands) can step up and "adopt" an addon with help from the other devs to get going.

This setup might not work with the official repo due to the sheer amount of addons available. It could quickly become a huge burden on the xbmc team to keep up with the status of all addons. This works for us because the amount of addons being tracked is comparatively much smaller. We're still exploring options for scalability

[Ghostdivision]

When using add-ons from the Official XBMC Repository, they can be marked to be auto-updated when changes are made, or removed when the author or team mark them as "broken".

The only sure fire way to make sure you have an always working add-on is to "roll your own"

Yes but as i found often, a new developer would take over and have a different repo. Canada on demand for instance would stop working or certain channels would stop working constantly and instead of it being auto updated, someone would post a fix in the thread, or upload to their own repo, i think i went through 3 or 4 different github zip uploads.

As an example of issue i am having, i just think if their was a more centralized authority or group or team that oversee's an offical list alot of this would be avoided. Alot of times i just plain out try a addon on repo and its already broken. If their was an offical approved list that users would know work or being monitored by xbmc would go a long way.


The ability for some basic addons to have a more user freindly interface would be the icing on the cake for main plugins. I noticed with boxee often their apps just browse to a website where you can use the remote though to navigate. It was alot easier then addons which try to incorporate into an xbmc gui.

I am not good at this, and im really out of my element just thought i would bring it up as a new xbmc user the only area I feel is lacking.

To do this and the man power and work required, i would have no issue paying if users would want to utilize an addon package. This would not be something simple i dont think users would be willing to do in their free time for extended periods for free. I would honestly be willing to pay 100-150 for a working set of useful xbmc addons with support (basically the price of a seperate streamer), or perhaps addons could cost 4.99 or something.

Just over at avsforum we were discussing what apple tv can do that an htpc cant, and the main thing brought up was poor netflix support, as well as utilizing other streaming services. Alot of users just suggest getting a streaming media device along with an htpc with xbmc. Use xbmc or media portal just a storage front end for locally stored media, and use an entirely different device for streaming services. My dream would be if xbmc could do all of this as the be all and end all media player any user would need.

Again none of this might not be possible on a reasonably large scale given the man power needed.

[Martijn]

Problem is that every dev has it's own repo for some reasons.
Several reasons:
- For pushing test version before adding to official repo
- Doesn't care about official repo
- Isn't allowed in official repo because of piracy/copyrighted content or maybe offensive material.
- Transferring owner rights of a repo is difficult because it has been linked to his account (github makes this so damn atm)

Nothing we can do about. Devs could easy work together with a single repo for non allowed content.

[zag]

A centralized xbmc "app store" is the solution here. Using the power of the community to report and fix add-ons is just the beginning.

At the moment its a long winded process to keep add-ons up-to-date or report them broken, or even find them in the first place.

I would imagine in the future this will be an area that will be much improved