2012-09-23, 17:58
(2012-06-10, 11:33)spiff Wrote: why on earth would we lift a finger to help spread geolocked drm infestation? Netflix and hulu should be actively worked against, not facilitated, by anyone supporting floss.
+1
(2012-06-10, 11:33)spiff Wrote: why on earth would we lift a finger to help spread geolocked drm infestation? Netflix and hulu should be actively worked against, not facilitated, by anyone supporting floss.
(2012-06-10, 11:33)spiff Wrote: why on earth would we lift a finger to help spread geolocked drm infestation? Netflix and hulu should be actively worked against, not facilitated, by anyone supporting floss.
(2012-06-06, 19:59)PartialGestalt Wrote: I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I don't see the advantage to doing this (and I can see several disadvantages).
Because these services are external, and can (and often do) change outside the XBMC schedules, having support for them in the core would generate either broken systems or unnecessary churn. These external services are, I think, a perfect example of what addons do well; they're independently updateable, well-defined and well-separated chunks of functionality.
Quote:Many are a mess, breaking constantly, when someone else takes over often they have their own git, errors and many creators of these addons just have little time to maintain them and often just disappear.
Quote:Of course I dont know what the developments team vision for xbmc is.... is it to be a niche software product myself and others use who have some knowledge of computer skills and know where to locate media ourselves? Or do they want it embraced by anyone and everyone as the be all/end all media streamer/front end software anyone would ever need, so even casual users who do like apps that are featured on boxee, apple tv, roku, such as netflix and pandora will consider using it as well?
Quote:User-friendliness is next to godlyness
One major ongoing goal of Team-XBMC has always been to make XBMC and its user interface feel even more intuitive and user-friendly for its end-users, based on the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle of simplicity. It is our belief that usability is the most important aspect of a media center like XBMC. Many other media center projects make user interface decisions by developers, who often have little experience in user interface design. In contrast, Team-XBMC does its best to listen to XBMC's end-users to learn how XBMC is actually being used and how we can improve the user experience. We also aim to do regular overhauls, improving existing features/functions, and scrapping outdated code and features/functions (as "too much stuff" adds unnecessary complexity and can thus also be a bad thing). Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
XBMC as a whole must...
•First and foremost be aimed at a large-screen (28" or more) 10-foot user interface for the living-room experience.
---Large menus, text/fonts and buttons that is designed to be navigated by a hand-held remote-control.
•Be focused around the main features of playing music, watching movies, recorded television broadcasts, and viewing pictures.
---XBMC may be capable of converging other things but those things should never take over the main focus in the interface.
•Be easy to install, set up and maintain (so that our valuable end-users do not get fed up with it and quit).
•Have an user interface that is simple and intuitive enough so that less tech-savvy people are not intimidated by it.
---Make common usage easy, simple 'Human–Computer Interaction (HCI)', from the viewpoint of an ordinary user.
•Be able to play audio and video files that have been encoded using DivX, XviD, etc. directly out-of-the-box.
•Be able to organize audio and video files in an easy and user-friendly way.
•Use standards and be consistent, (the Music section can for example not use completely different controls from the Video section).
•Perform actions in the GUI with as few 'clicks' as possible.
•Be aimed at an international audience, internationalization and localization by supporting different languages, timezones and other regional differences
•Require little to no non-GUI configuration (and all such non-GUI configuration should be done in just one file: advancedsettings.xml).
•Be beautiful to look at, after all we hope you will be using it a lot!
Team-XBMC members should always strive to
•Promote open source - XBMC is based on the ideas of FOSS (free open source software), licensed under the GPL and builds partly on other open source projects which we do our best to support. The GPL should be respected at all times. All code should be committed to the XBMC project’s git repo before any public binaries are released.
•Promote the sharing of knowledge and collaboration - Through the use of information sharing tools and practices XBMC is a collaborative environment.
•Understand that development is a team effort - Treating our users as co-developers has proven to be the most effective option for rapid development. Always strive to work as a team at all times. Actively promote discussion on new features and bug fixes, and respect others comments and criticisms with replies in a timely fashion.
•Apply the Law of Diminishing Return - The majority of the effort should be invested in implementing features which have the most benefit and widest general usage by the community.
•Try to make all code, feature, and functions to be platform agnostic - XBMC is a multi-platform software, thus any single platform specific features should be discussed with other team members before implemented. Major features should be developed in a separate branch or committed in small increments so that other members have the opportunity to review the code and comment on it during development.
(2012-10-06, 06:53)Ned Scott Wrote:Quote:Many are a mess, breaking constantly, when someone else takes over often they have their own git, errors and many creators of these addons just have little time to maintain them and often just disappear.
They are not that way because they are add-ons, they are that way because those services (Netflix, etc) actively work to block outside access to their content. If these were "core" features then you would have to wait an entire year for an update each time one of these sites changed something. Add-ons allow us to modularize more of XBMC and push out updates to those moduals as needed. There are Team XBMC maintained add-ons, after all. There are even add-ons that are co-maintained by the Team and by the general community.
People need to get it out of their heads that being a "core" addition makes something better. It's a form of organization, not a ranking of importance. There are some technical limitations for add-ons, but in most cases (such as this one) those aren't the issue.
XBMC developers tend to be very dedicated, but are still people just like add-on makers. Sometimes an XBMC dev goes away and a "core" feature breaks and we can't do anything about it. We've all just volunteers, and if at any time a developer wants to stop working on some feature, they're totally free to do so. It's no guarantee that the feature will be any better supported by being in the core of XBMC, because at the end of the day someone has to want to work on it. No one gets assigned to these things, they just take them up as they go and if they want to.
Quote:Apps that come with xbmc i have no issue with, they generally work well and are reliable, albiet a bit primitive compared to other offerings.
Quote:I have no idea what xbmc has planned or feels toward this topic, maybe its to risky for the team to take on, maybe to much work or to difficult to implement. I am just a consumer. Their might not be enough man power, or even possible to do any of this based on how xbmc operates, it might just be an unrealistic pipe dream by me.
(2012-10-06, 13:29)Ned Scott Wrote:Quote:Apps that come with xbmc i have no issue with, they generally work well and are reliable, albiet a bit primitive compared to other offerings.
What's primitive? You mean the scrapers? XBMC doesn't come with any video add-ons pre-installed.
(2012-06-06, 19:44)tjcinnamon Wrote: I know that Netflix, Hulu and Pandora are not natively supported on XBMC (as they are plugins) but I think they are popular enough services where they should be actively developed in the community for the upcoming releases (Frodo...).
Thoughts?
(2012-10-19, 06:13)locoguano Wrote: Best Netflix solution? Switch to Amazon. Works perfectly in XBMC and can even be incorporated into your library using the MyLibrary script.