Now after almost two years of mPod@MediaPortal, it's about time to let you know a bit about myself.
Most people here know me as mPod, but in real life people just call me Marc. Born back in '74, I moved to Berlin more than 7 years ago.
Now I'm co-running a media post production company and have specialized on DVD authoring. Before I became a DVD authorer, I worked as a PC/Windows technician at a western german system vendor.
I learned C# just for MediaPortal, although I started my first coding steps by the age of 12.
My role in the MP project is general development on the one hand and co-administrating parts of the MediaPortal team and the project on the other hand.
Good thing about my job is that my work place is also my living place (or vice versa), so whenever I'm not busy with work, I can spend my time on this great MediaPortal project with a great team.
I'm Helmut Wahrmann, that translates into Trueman, living in Vienna, Austria.
Well it looks like that with my 42 years i'm the senior in the team.
I started in IT at 1985 as a Junior Systems Engineer at Computer Associates and made it up to the Technical Director for Austria.
Since 1999 i'm working in a company, called IND, where i am Manager for Professional Services and Presales.
We are implementing Internet Banking solution in Eastern Europe and the Near East region.
So i have sometimes business trips to not so nice countries.
I found MediaPortal in 2004, when searching for a software to enjoy my music collection in the living room.
And MyMusic is also the part in which i do some development.
I'm married now since almost 20 years. Yes with the same wife. :-)
The 2 ladies on the picture, my 7 year old twins, Stephanie and Raphaela, are the ONLY excuse, why i can't dedicate more time to MediaPortal development.
At the moment I am writing this lines I am 27 years old. I life in Austria (befor you ask, no we do not have kangaroos in Austria, you mean Australia ;) ), to be more specific in Tirol.
How did i came to MediaPortal? Well like many of us iIbought an xBox a few years ago and used the XBox-MediaCenter. Quite some time later someone told me about a new HTPC software called "MediaPortal". This was in december 2004.
Then in august 2005 I started the Test Team webpage to provide the developers with useful testresults (test team forum is now integrated into the main forum).
Beside my role as leader of the test team, I am also the main admin on the forum and sometimes I am also doing design related work.
But there is also a part in my life which is not MediaPortal related. I am married and have 2 kids. Hannah and David. I am chief technician in a medium-sized company. Our domains are electrical installations, computernetworks and antenna installations.
Besides family and MediaPortal I spent my free time with mountainbiking, skiing (of course ;) ), looooong trips with my motorbike and Battlefield2 /2142.
So this is me :)
note: all spelling mistakes are intended to get your attention.
Hi - I'm LordMessi...not the best intro, I know...hmmm, okay!
Hi, my name is Thomas Starup, and I'm 27 years old. That sentence is the first thing, that you'll learn in school, well except for the 27 part ;-).
Again - to get serious, I'll tell abit about myself.
I live in Aalborg, Denmark and I'm a Technical Consultant at a Microsoft Gold Partner company in Copenhagen, Denmark. I normally work at home, but sometimes I'm in Copenhagen.
I found MediaPortal in the summer of 2004, and have been here since. I've been apart of doing MediaPortal Webinterface(MPW), MediaPortal Language Editor(MPLE). I'm also a MediaPortal Design Team Member (was also Leader there, but didn't have the time).
My part in MediaPortal is to talk to plugin devs, getting new ideas, talking to skinners and such. So I'm in the more creative role - and not as a developer.
My interrests beside MediaPortal include Football(Soccer), Movies, Our pets and my wife ;-)
Most people know me by my nickname Frodo, but my real name is
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
. Although everybody thinks that Frodo refers to the famous character from Lords of the Rings, i must admit that I got the nickname from my neighbours cat ;-)
I live in The Netherlands where I was born 35 years ago. After finishing highschool I started working for TSS where I worked on various multi media projects developed in pascal, C, C++ and later .NET. During the years I moved from junior programmer to senior programmer to technical architect and at the moment my function is CDO which means that I'm responsible for the entire software development department.
I started my first big open source project in the years 2000/2001 when i met runtime and together we created the famous XboxMediaCenter. XboxMediaCenter is still a big hit today and considering the xbox is simply a 700MHz pc with 64MB RAM, its amazing that it became one of the best mediacenters available. Since it was impossible to add PVR functionality to XboxMediaCenter I left the project in 2004 and started my 2nd opensource project called MediaPortal. Now 2 years later MediaPortal has become one of the best mediacenters with very advanced PVR capabilities.
Besides MediaPortal I do have some other hobbies as well. I'm a diving instructor and during the months april-nov when the weather is 'nice' I like to to make fun dives in Zeeland, go on diving holiday's and teach new students how to dive. Other hobbies are fitness, playing (acoustic) guitar and offcourse my girlfriend.
Being a MediaPortal Tester and a Mediaportal user i find that the 2 often dont go in harmony.... this has been one of my frustrations... and this is my solution to it......
As most of you know the CVS builds are the cutting edge... meaning sometimes you get cut! Something may not work right, in extreme circumstances TV or Music may not work at all! this can be frustrating and most importantly MediaPortal loses WAF!
So we have a way round this... not one i can take credit for, as im sure plently of you guys out there do it... im just imparting the information to you so if you wish to play... well... heres how to without upsetting the Wife/GF
Now that the days are getting colder and darker, i find myself spending more time playing music, offcourse using MediaPortal
What i found was that although My Music is pretty stable, its not as userfriendly as i would like it to be. Some observations i have: - I spend too much time searching for songs - I never use playlists since its too much work to create one - Even if i got some playlists, its too much work to load them - I use the favorites view a lot - I'm switching constantly between genre, artists views
Things i'm searching for - easy creation of playlists containing songs i like - much better way of finding songs, even ones which are not 100% correctly tagged - good overview of songs and playlists
Now how can MP help in this i asked my self. Some idea's i have:
Classify songs Basicly you should be able to add extra metadata to a song. Suppose you are playing a song, or playlist. I think it would be great if you where able to classify the song while playing Classification could be: - assigning (extra) genres to the song - assigning own keywords to the song - linking a song to another artist, album or song. - changing existing tag info
Favorites Tivo has its thumbs up/down system, a bit like our favorites view. I found that one single favorties view is not enough. Sometimes i want to play hiphop, so listen to all my hiphop favorites while at other times i want to play quiet , easy listening songs. A single 'favorites' view wont help much here. Offcourse you can create playlists, but the way its done at the moment is not very userfriendly.
So in short, you should be able to create playlist very easy, userfriendly and also important. You should be able to browse & start a playlist with minimal action.
Playlists can come in 2 forms: dynamic and static Static playlists we already know. You compose a list of songs and save it as a playlist. A lot can be done to make this much more easier, but once you created the list it wont change anymore.
Dynamic playlists Now this is something which interests me, can i tell MP to create playlists for me? Instead of searching and looking for songs,maybe MP can do this based on search criteria These playlists are auto-generated and new songs are placed or removed from these lists automaticly.
Example: - A playlists of all love songs from 1980-now - A playlist of all top 1 hits of the last 5 years - A playlist of all songs featuring madonna, anastacia and britney spears
When new love songs are added/removed from your music library the playlist will be adjusted automaticly. Also if you re-classify a song this could mean that the playlist will be changed
Now after almost two years of 
I started in IT at 1985 as a Junior Systems Engineer at 
At the moment I am writing this lines I am 27 years old. I life in 
Hi, my name is Thomas Starup, and I'm 27 years old. That sentence is the first thing, that you'll learn in school, well except for the 27 part ;-).
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