Universal Media Server | Forum

Here is a small screenshot of the Encoder settings from LXiMediaCenter.



This is what we mean for user-friendlyness. The only settings I need to watch movies are there, in a single frame set. Video size, quality, and subtitle sizes. How complex could it be to design this?

Also, and this is very important: This program starts serving videos in less than 5 seconds via WiFi. This is totally unthinkable with UMS, which normally takes 20-30 seconds to start playing the video. Also, the video encoding settings in UMS are unusually complex: For example, the fact that I have to manually TYPE a resolution (!!) instead of selecting it from a list of presets is bizarre to say the least.

Last: please remove or hide useless stuff. Why on earth I am presented so many encoders, that are not even installed, and only when I get into this forums I found that the default one is not the better one? I've been told to switch from MEncoder to FFMpeg, the question is, why do you expect every single user to come here and ask the same questions instead of launching a new version with a warning message like "Please switch to the FFMpeg encoder for best performance"? If you say that "one every 1000 users get better results with the MEncoder", then leave the problems to those users, and focus in helping the mainstream of users that should use FFMpeg.

Unfortunately, I am having serious subtitle issues with the LXiMediaCenter, so I still don't decide which software to use. Anyway, if you don't need subtites, check it out just to compare the results, it's also free and open source or whatever. Its GUI is quite basic and primitive, yet a thousand times easier and quicker to set up, and much faster in all aspects.

inuya5ha wrote:Here is a small screenshot of the Encoder settings from LXiMediaCenter.



This is what we mean for user-friendlyness. The only settings I need to watch movies are there, in a single frame set. Video size, quality, and subtitle sizes. How complex could it be to design this?

It would be easy to make that but much more limited than what we have now. Personally I wouldn't use a program that made me choose a video resolution; I want the videos streamed at their own resolution.
What happens if I have a 1280x720 video but my setting is at 720x576, then I lose half the pixels and the aspect ratio is changed from 1.78 to 1.25 so people look stretched out. Not to mention that every renderer has its own way of interpreting that aspect ratio changes, for example Panasonic TVs and Sony TVs do their own unpredictable and unique things with aspect ratios so we have special code to deal with those quirks. Boiling it down to just one resolution would cause problems for many of our users.

inuya5ha wrote:Also, and this is very important: This program starts serving videos in less than 5 seconds via WiFi. This is totally unthinkable with UMS, which normally takes 20-30 seconds to start playing the video.

Videos start playing instantly for me, unless subtitles are being used by FFmpeg which means it has to extract them before playing, but again for me that only takes 5 seconds max for me.

inuya5ha wrote:Also, the video encoding settings in UMS are unusually complex: For example, the fact that I have to manually TYPE a resolution (!!) instead of selecting it from a list of presets is bizarre to say the least.

Why do you have to type a resolution? Our system is designed so that it works with no configuration. 99% of our users will never need to go into the program settings because our defaults are great and are customized for each renderer.

inuya5ha wrote:Last: please remove or hide useless stuff. Why on earth I am presented so many encoders, that are not even installed, and only when I get into this forums I found that the default one is not the better one? I've been told to switch from MEncoder to FFMpeg, the question is, why do you expect every single user to come here and ask the same questions instead of launching a new version with a warning message like "Please switch to the FFMpeg encoder for best performance"? If you say that "one every 1000 users get better results with the MEncoder", then leave the problems to those users, and focus in helping the mainstream of users that should use FFMpeg.

FFmpeg is the default, the only reason MEncoder would be the default for you is if you installed UMS before we made FFmpeg the default encoder, in which case we won't override your settings, or annoy the users who choose to use MEncoder.