Xlobby being dwarfed?

[Cosworth]

To get into the debate please take a look a this feature list for Media portal

http://mediaportal.sourceforge.net/features.html

Mediaportal is a port of the xbox mediacenter to the PC. It has a lot of similarities to Xlobby only it has a small army of developers with a core of 4-5 guys as opposed to Steven - "the one man army".

Don't take me wrong - I love Xlobby and what you can do with it. On the other hand I can see how one man has a hard time keeping up, even if it's Steven.

Xlobby is still unique in its client/server architecture and PPC support, but won't it become harder to attract new users to Xlobby when we're up against large projects like mediaportal? (which is free too)

What do you think?

[Arthur]

Haven't tried mediaportal. One thing I did notice was the very ugly windows bar on top of the screen. XLobby is fullscreen, and nobody knows windows is running underneath

Arthur

[sp00head]

you can set mediaportal to go full screen

I had a quick play with ti, but it kept crashing out, but my media box is getting very dodgy latelly so that could be why.

I do agree with the point on developers and the whole opensource issue with xlobby, steve is the man at programming, but with increasing numbers of users and bugs/demands he's going to be hard pressed to keep up.

[hjackson]

It has a ways to go. I didn't notice if it did multizone, independent and synchronous audio. I know it has flexible skinning options but those sample screenshots make it look like a highschool project done last minute at the breakfast table... not that I was ever able to do a multimedia frontend off my Atari 2600, but you know what I mean.

hjackson

[stevenhanna6]

I think in the end everyone will just have to try each frontend and pick which one suits their needs best.

As far as opensourcing xlobby, well I'm not in the same position as media portal....I wrote all my code from scratch and none of it is based of someone elses work so I am not obligated to release my source code like they are. But opensource doesnt mean I would have a bunch of developers knocking at my doorstep...look at media portal, frodo does pretty much all the code for that thing. So if he has trouble finding developers then surely I would also....I'm just saying slapping on the word "opensource" to xlobby wouldn't change very much....you also have to think xlobby is EXTREMELY complex.....and its has over 50,000 lines of code....there are alot of things that depend on other things and if you change one you break the whole system....you guys will have to trust me opensource would not help xlobby in the way your thinking.