olympia Wrote:Huhh? Seriously guys, what's wrong with the addon browser within XBMC?
It lists all the addons approved by Team-XBMC with descriptions.
Those will all work with the version of XBMC you use, and if an addon is broken, then it will be marked as broken.
What are you all missing that much?
The addons browser is great, and certainly puts XBMC lilght-years ahead of where it once was for browsing and installing plugins/scripts. And the ability to check the working/broken status is a god-send! But I think the short answer to your question of "What are you all missing that much?" is content not hosted by the official XBMC repo.
I understand that there are very good reasons why some content isn't hosted by the official repo, and I'm certainly not appealing for any content to be moved there that isn't there already. However, when you browse the official repo you're only browsing part of what's on offer. I think that most users who are reading this will have addons from 3rd party repositories, so there's clearly a lot of value in them. But unless you read about them on the forum, you might not know that they exist, and won't know which repository to install to get them. Then once you have found out about it then it can be hassle to install the repository - though this point has been largely made redundant by the excellent
unofficial repo installer addon. But to know about that addon you'd have had to find it on the forums first! You could argue that you could install
all of the unofficial repositories to be able to browse all the content at once, but without further categorisation of the addons then this could be overwhelming and confusing. By further categorisation I mean further categories under video, audio, etc. for example: news, TV, film, video sharing sites etc.
As I said above I'm really happy with the new addon browser, but there's room for improvement in terms of finding what's on offer. This could come from within the addon browser, or from an addon that allows browsing of
all available addons and tells you which repo you need to get them. For such an addon to exist there would probably have to be a central list of addons with all the necessary links and information. Similar to the
Wiki's unofficial repository list, but for individual addons. In fact, just the list itself could probably be enough for what most people here are asking for. But once it's up then I guess an addon could be made relatively easily.
Just my $0.02.
tl:dr In answer to "What are you all missing that much?": There's a lot of good addons in unofficial repositories which you can't really discover through XBMC alone.
