[harrisi]

Is this sarcasm? I don't mean any disrespect or negativity, I just don't understand. I'm not familiar with this space, but I don't see why the aforementioned expectations are unrealistic. The only issue I can imagine is big media companies strong arming a player in this space (which I assume is what happens to existing companies mentioned). There's nothing technically impossible mentioned.

[otherme123]

Almost everything is technically possible. But I don't think that "ebooks, pdfs, cbz, cbr, etc." reader is a reasonable requirement for a media center. Or an emulator. They start complaining that software is bloated to appeal the community, and then request more bloat, but to their particular wants.

[harrisi]

Yes, almost everything is technically possible. I agree with the first three sentences. I don't have an opinion on the last.

Again, I was just curious if there was any reasons I couldn't think of why the top-level's comments were unfulfillable! I'm always curious about people's desires that (apparently) can't (or won't) be solved with software. This is a space I'm not too familiar with, but there doesn't seem to be any technical reasons why someone should have desires that get pushed against.

Certainly there may be practical reasons, I just wanted to try to pinpoint it a little bit. As an example - although I don't personally see much value in it - the audiobook thing seems like a relatively simple addition that I could see value in. I use Spotify for music, news, podcasts, and audiobooks (the last one is a lie, but I did discover there are audiobooks on Spotify to help my point). I could see the value in having these all on my tv - I just don't have one. But if I were in a situation where the tv was the typical media center, why not have it play audiobooks? It's actually a rather ideal platform for common audiobook consumption. As a recent comment somewhere here mentioned, people (presumably) tend to listen to audiobooks somewhat in the background. It seems handy to have a giant screen that could visibly show the current and recent text in an easy way. I find myself sometimes watching or listening to something where I have a momentary lapse in comprehension and I have to scrobble (do people use that term? Scroll? Seek?) a few seconds back to get the "umph" of a scene, sentence, or general point. If I were someone that listened to audiobooks while cleaning around the house or something, it seems handy to quickly read the missing few words to get the point rather than looking for my phone, unlocking it, looking for whatever app is playing the audiobook, getting distracted by other open apps, getting back to the audiobook app, and rewinding well past the point I missed because scrobbling across a 2 inch wide screen for a 10 hour book by a minute is impossible.

Weird rant. I have no horse in this. Just unemployed and this happened to mentally stimulate me I guess.

But I guess I could always just try mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.[0] :)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Edit: I'm leaving the usage as-is, but I seem to have used "scrobble" incorrectly. I think "seek" is probably the correct term. For some reason just yesterday I was thinking about "scrobbling" and I misremembered its functionality. Oops!

[otherme123]

The limit are resources: mainly time and human [will] power.

Why merge Spotify with Netflix? Just have two apps and services, is not that difficult for the user, nor a real nuissance. The OP didn't request audiobooks. He specifically asked also for PDF, a comic format (CBR) and "etc.". That, I guarantee you, lead to further requests (highlite the PDFs, a unified comic/pdf/movie/music storage and showroom, screencap, sharing...). Add a lot of underlying complexity, bugs, cost in manteinance, extra mental load...

As for the "ideal audiobook reader platform" let me tell you something: audiobooks are consumed by people while walking, running, driving, at the gym, in the sub... I've never heard of anyone planted in front of the reader just hearing the audiobook. The nature of audiobooks is "hear a book while doing something else", and a TV goes against exactly that. A TV audiobook is called "a movie" or "a serie", something that you can already watch in Kodi.

This reminds me of the "4 star but..." in the App Stores. Lots and lots of users of a nice free app comment like "I LOVE the app, but I only rate it with 4 stars unless you add this little, small, really tiny thing that I want. If you do that, I will come back and give you the 5th star".

[checkyoursudo]

Re: scrobbling, I think you are thinking of scrubbing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrubbing_(audio)

[oefnak]

Ebooks, photos and emulators? In my opinion they don't belong in my cinema app.

[bacchusracine]

Technically photos and emulators have been a part of the whole for quite some time now already. The media center is evolving and games are a part of what people have begun to expect to be able to access as part of their ten foot interface. eBooks? Now that is where I too question things.

I don't know the use case where being able to read eBooks from the television is desirable. It certainly doesn't meet my definition of shared entertainment, which is something that media centers are intended for. They're media, yes, and they can be organized, sure--but is there a common use case for reading from the large screen? Unless one is disabled, I really don't see one.

However if looking for a better merge of Kodi and gameplaying I cannot recommend Batocera enough. It has a large retrocomputing (emulation) capability and also supports many DOS games and Windows games via dosbox or wine and has recently added Steam integration. On the media side of things it can be configured to automatically load kodi and seamlessly transition from Kodi to the Emulation Station frontend.

There will be some configuration but once configured it has in my experience generally stayed configured well and can be a set and forget type of appliance if you take the time to organize your games and media and then leave it alone after scraping. Also it's been one of the easiest configurations I've done in a long time. I encourage everyone to look into it.

[harrisi]

I agree! But, objectively, someone does think they belong. That's beside the point. I was curious if there are technical, business, or political (or something else) reasons why it's not possible (either theoretically or practically).

[DrewRWx]

Objectively someone has a subjective opinion...

[syshum]

I agree with the parent comment, Software that tries to be everything to everyone always sucks.

I think the Emby's, Kodi's, and Plex's of the world should focus on the "home Theater" space, making the best experience for the consumption of Movies and TV Shows. maybe music if they want to stretch

There should be separate apps for ebooks, podcasts, etc. I do not (and I am sure very few do) consume ebooks, and podcasts on my Large TV. That is where the "home theater" apps should focus, the TV Watching experience.

I understand sometimes people use a computer monitor, or even a mobile app to view it but I would image that is an edge case, and should not be the focus, when I want to watch a movie I am doing it on my 60in screen not my 5.5in

[9935c101ab17a66]

More features == more complexity, likely a worse user experience, a huge maintenance overhead, and so much surface area for bugs. Not to mention the black hole that would swallow trucks of cash in terms of development time. Even simple, very purposeful apps are hard to design well. And so many of these features are insanely complicated, even if you don’t realize it. My Plex media library is currently 70TBs of movies and tv shows and it works flawlessly with about 15 active users. I’m very happy with that.

[marderfarker2]

I’d rather the app be a master of one than a jack of all trades

Plex is very good when it comes to “just works” for media consumption. That “just works” experience (API enrichment, artwork sourcing, device verification etc.) isn’t easy to maintain.

[harrisi]

That's totally fair. I also definitely agree that IJW is difficult. And people want different things, and have different ideas of what "It Just Works" means. I was just curious about what about the previously mentioned requests were unreasonable.