I have begun doing some preparation work in hopes to get Matinee 3.0 development underway. With its recent success as part of the Mystery Bundle at macZOT! a couple weeks back, I feel that now is a good time to keep the momentum going. The application has now received over 25,000 downloads from the web site and that doesn’t include installs from any demo discs.
There is a feedback form on the web site and I have a whole folder full of suggestions from both registered and unregistered users. However, I thought I would put the question up here to see what kind of feedback and responses I get as far as desired features for the next major release of Matinee. Some of the more popular ones I have received are listed below.
- A Full Screen Based UI
- Automatic Lookup Of Cover Art
- Better Network Drive Support
- Front Row Integration
There was a point in the past where I was getting lots of requests for .MP4 support. I personally feel that Front Row has addressed that issue, and since it is a quick and easy process to get it installed on non-Intel machines I not really sure if this is an issue anymore. Matinee was originally designed to launch DVD’s with Apple’s DVD Player… kind of a one trick pony.
So if you are a user of the application and want to chime in with some thoughts or feedback, please post a comment below so others can follow along.
April 28th, 2006 at 8:05 am #Greg
Abraham,
GREAT application…love it. Even the wife digs it, so if it passes her test, you know you are doing something right
My suggestions:
1) A better way to handle a large number of movies. We have 86 movies at the moment available on the home media server, scrolling the list is a little hard.
2) Cover art…YES PLEASE!
3) I would like to see mp4 support…however you could to this would be great. Be it just a tie in somehow with Front Row. I have a ton of iTMS videos that I would like to play and I would like to do this without having to deal with multiple applications (or at least feel like multiple applications).
4) Network drive support? Seems to be fine from my perspective
5) Maybe a rating system?
And definately a full screen UI
Perhaps steal from Front Row and just add a Matinee thing there.
April 28th, 2006 at 9:18 am #Robby Valles
Hey Abraham!
The items that you listed are pretty much all that i’d like to see. I have about two hundred dvds on two terabyte drives, so I really would love something that would be full screen and allow you to navigate really quickly through the list. Right now I have this all running on my mac mini which is on my plasma, ideally I would want something that would be on all the time. Pretty much anytime i switch to the mac mini on the tv it’s because i have people over and we’re going to watch a dvd ( about every other day ). Most times they always want to take over and pick a movie themselves, so it needs to be very easy!
I’m not clear by what you mean as to Front Row integration. Is there a way to add modules into Front Row or are you talking about something else?
One thing that isn’t mentioned here is about the play back locations… Right now there are 5 options for Volumes to search. I plan on getting some smaller drives, since they are so cheap right now, and I’m guessing that eventually 5 will not be enough and it’d be better to have a list so that there was no limit.
Thanks for your hard work!
April 28th, 2006 at 10:44 am #Benjamin Aiken
Abraham,
As per our previous discussion, the only main request that I have is MP4 support. Although Matinee rips very quickly, and in amazing quality, it’s also not easy on storage space. MP4 support would be great, simply because due to the lack of hard drive space I have at the moment, I’ve only selected a few of my DVDs to rip for Matinee use, rather than all.
It’s a great application, and I think you could get a lot more people to jump on board if you added MP4 support.
Keep up the great work!
April 28th, 2006 at 10:53 am #Abraham
Robby - In response to your comment…
The Front Row integration that I have received numerous Emails about isn’t going to happen. I have absolutely no idea how to hack into Front Row and just the thought the work involved makes me cringe. This also goes for people asking for integration with Delicious Library. That is another closed application that doesn’t allow plug-ins as far as I am aware (and I’m a beta tester).
In response to the addition to add more playback locations, that should be doable. The original thought was to allow an unlimited number but then I thought that five was probably plenty. I was wrong. You people and your terabytes of storage space! Perhaps I will need someone to donate a terabyte external drive to the cause so I can make sure it work properly.
April 29th, 2006 at 4:51 pm #Greg
2 terabytes? Time to order another array from FW Depot, I can’t be beat
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:21 pm #James Gowan
I would love to see something more like the new Apple TV interface that has the poster from the movie so that you see at glance (and launch with a click) what you have. Being that many people will not immediately go get art for those posters, the name of the movie should be immediately below each poster. A really nice feature would be auto look-up and “grab” of posters off amazon or someplace.
My 2¢, James