Evaluating Mezzmo - issues I'd love to see resolved

[RMerlin]

I am currently evaluating Mezzmo as a possible replacement for the other media sharing software I am currently using.

Mezzmo offers the following advantages for me versus my current setup:

• Video thumbnails
• Easily configurable playlists through a GUI (my current solution requires manually editing XML files)

However these issues are currently what's stopping me from switching, as they far outweight the benefits:

• Active Playlists sort order is useless for Audio - within an album tracks are alphabetically sorted by Title rather than by Track number (using mp3s in this case). Need to have audio track sorted by Track number, or by a field chosen by the user.
• The content of all sub-folders are shown, mixed with the folder list. So if you have an artist with 10 albums, when you enter the artist's folder, those 10 albums will be listed, mixed amongst 100+ tracks - makes it nearly impossible to navigate to select a given album. I saw a post from 2008 on this issue - any chance the option to hide the content of the sub-folders could be implemented? At the very least, show the albums at the top, and the content of all sub-folders at the bottom. This seems to be more troublesome when using Active Playlists.

For reference, my network consists of a Windows 7 PC running on an Intel Core2Duo E8400, and a Sony Playstation 3, connected over 100 Mbits Ethernet.

Thank you

[Paul]

I am currently evaluating Mezzmo as a possible replacement for the other media sharing software I am currently using.

Thank you for trying Mezzmo and for your suggestions!

Active Playlists sort order is useless for Audio - within an album tracks are alphabetically sorted by Title rather than by Track number (using mp3s in this case). Need to have audio track sorted by Track number, or by a field chosen by the user.

Yes, that's planned for the next update.

The content of all sub-folders are shown, mixed with the folder list. So if you have an artist with 10 albums, when you enter the artist's folder, those 10 albums will be listed, mixed amongst 100+ tracks - makes it nearly impossible to navigate to select a given album. I saw a post from 2008 on this issue - any chance the option to hide the content of the sub-folders could be implemented? At the very least, show the albums at the top, and the content of all sub-folders at the bottom. This seems to be more troublesome when using Active Playlists.

I will add this to the development to-do list. I think that folders should be sorted and shown first and then all the tracks. This is most likely to be implemented at the same time as the above issue, so hopefully for the next update!

Please let me know if there are other issues that you would like to see enhanced or fixed!

Dennis

[RMerlin]

Hi Dennis,

First of all, thank you for the quick response - that's much appreciated!

Better sort on Active List: excellent news What I love about Active Playlists: to achieve the same result in the other product I am currently using required a whole evening spent tinkering with XML configuration files - something quite tedious. With Mezzmo it only took me a few minutes to figure out that an Active Playlist would achieve what I wanted, and configure it within just a few mouse clicks. This level and ease of configurability is definitely a major feature to Mezzmo that's ahead of the competition.

Subfolder content: ideally, having the option to either display or hide those would be the best (I'm thinking about people with folders containing a LOT of sub-folders). This would probably require more work, compared to simply sorting them with the folders at the top, but personally I would be satisfied with just sorting folders at the top - this wouldn't be a problem for my specific setup.

I will keep the Mezzmo trial installed for now and give it a real life test over the next days (I only discovered your product last night through a Google search for PS3 streaming solutions). If anything else comes up (issues/suggestions/feedback) I will post it on these forums. So far I only ran into one issue with transcoding but I will need to experiment a bit more to make sure the issue isn't specific to my setup (new transcoded videos failed to play on the first attempt, I had to stop and re-start playback on the PS3 for it to work).

Knowing that the developers are actively listening to their customers (even potential ones such as myself) is definitely another positive point in Mezzmo's favor. Even if the new features aren't available by the time my trial expires (which I am not expecting since the trial expires in only 15 days), I will definitely be keeping a close eye on Mezzmo's development and be ready to come back whenever they are added.

[Paul]

Better sort on Active List: excellent news What I love about Active Playlists: to achieve the same result in the other product I am currently using required a whole evening spent tinkering with XML configuration files - something quite tedious. With Mezzmo it only took me a few minutes to figure out that an Active Playlist would achieve what I wanted, and configure it within just a few mouse clicks. This level and ease of configurability is definitely a major feature to Mezzmo that's ahead of the competition.

And with plans to support more keywords, there'll be even greater variety of the Active playlists that you can create.

Subfolder content: ideally, having the option to either display or hide those would be the best (I'm thinking about people with folders containing a LOT of sub-folders). This would probably require more work, compared to simply sorting them with the folders at the top, but personally I would be satisfied with just sorting folders at the top - this wouldn't be a problem for my specific setup.

The issue with that is we'd need to go through all the subfolders and see if a file exists in any one of them to determine whether to show it or not and this would significantly slow things down. Maybe we'll be able to solve this problem in one of the future updates as well, but hopefully at least sorting them will help in short term.

I will keep the Mezzmo trial installed for now and give it a real life test over the next days (I only discovered your product last night through a Google search for PS3 streaming solutions). If anything else comes up (issues/suggestions/feedback) I will post it on these forums. So far I only ran into one issue with transcoding but I will need to experiment a bit more to make sure the issue isn't specific to my setup (new transcoded videos failed to play on the first attempt, I had to stop and re-start playback on the PS3 for it to work).

Please let me know if you find any issues or have further suggestions and I'll be happy to help you out. Feel free to send a message to support@conceiva.com as well

Knowing that the developers are actively listening to their customers (even potential ones such as myself) is definitely another positive point in Mezzmo's favor. Even if the new features aren't available by the time my trial expires (which I am not expecting since the trial expires in only 15 days), I will definitely be keeping a close eye on Mezzmo's development and be ready to come back whenever they are added.

We really value feedback greatly and are always ready to discuss new features or enhancements to existing ones.

Dennis

[binou59]

Hey,

Another interesting feature would be to be able that rating submitted by the players consuming Mezzmo's contents where taken into account. At the moment, I have a Internet radio player in my bedroom with some rating functions on the remote. When I try to rate a tune, it doesn't make it to the file, which I think requires the DMS to allow for write rights.
Just my 2 cents contribution.
Thanks

Ben

[Paul]

Thank you for the suggestion - what player do you have?

[binou59]

Hi Dennis

I have a Philips Streamium NP2900.
Thanks

Ben

[Paul]

Thanks - if we get that in for testing at some point, I'll make a note to see if it sends back any commands to the DMS relating to this.

[binou59]

Hi,

Another way to try/see this function is to use windows media player as a DMP. It looks like you have the rating stars available but they are read-only/grey ....
Just a thought,
Cheers

Ben

[Paul]

Hi Ben,

I'm not sure that WMP will pass the rating information back to Mezzmo - I think it stores it internally and doesn't tell a DMS about changes to rating, but we'll test it out just in case it does.

You can set rating in Mezzmo via a context menu, or by clicking on the stars in Detail view or by changing it via the properties dialog for a file.