I can understand the frustration of having to rebuild an entire collection. I was using direct image tagging in MIP to flag all my posters with the media tags. While MIP will fix alot of the general issues with Auto Pilot, I know I'll have to actually look at every movie to make sure it gets them all right. If this is the path you're choosing, there isn't really an easy way out.
It really boils down to preference. What do you prefer? Appearance or convenience? If convenience is what you need, Aeon Stark isn't for you right now. It probably will be much easier in the future, but right now it will add some frustration. Is the work worth it for you? That's the question you have to answer. Most tech geeks will probably answer "Hella Yes!", we strive for the challenge, but I understand the need for something to just work. Wives, girlfriends, regular folks and even our kids are not so forgiving. Aeon Stark needs some time to mature a bit, so hold off on the excitement just a bit and keep checking back til its all solid.
The main issue (as I see it) with the media tagging stuff is that XBMC itself needs a base media tagging facility. This is in the works. I am sure it requires extensions in many directions to support properly. As such, it has already been stated that it won't be supported in 9.04 (next stable version). Since the XBMC developers are in a feature freeze, we also will not see this in any of the incremental builds until after 9.04 is released. This new feature would make life easier for both the skin designers and the users. The media tagging looks like a longer term feature, so if you want the pretty stuff Aeon provides, you have to play along with the workarounds they are providing and sacrifice some short term convenience.
Its actually a piece of brilliance to use the skinning engine to provide features the core currently doesn't provide on its own. I greatly appreciate the work that DJH, Fekker, Digitalhigh and others are putting into modifications in the skins and their own media manager programs to support something as "trivial" as media format tagging. However, the larger your collection gets, the more important these things actually become to you. Keep in mind that once the tagging is supported in the core, all this work people are doing to provide the tagging is somewhat wasted work. Knowing this, these folks are still pushing out the fixes to get this working. Time and skill they are providing happily (or maybe not as much
) free of charge.
This may sound a bit like a rant, so I am sorry if it seems that way. However, my purpose here is just to deflect some of the frustrations I expect a few people are having. If it seems too much, just wait a bit. Its likely things will clarify sooner than you think.
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