Good review.
I've been using Meedio Essentials for a couple of weeks now and it works pretty well. I only used myHTPC prior and that worked pretty well as well, but ME is better for the most part.
A couple of nit picky things really bug me are how the Jukebox and Media are layed out. Neither has a way to sort by folder, which is how I have my music sorted \...\music\artist - album. It's annoying that everything is either sorted by Artist or by Album.
Also, it'd be nice if there was an option to sort the media librarys by an items order in the library. Example, I have all three Austin Powers movies.
I'd like to display them as:
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me
Austin Powers 3: Goldmember
The problem there is that the order gets loaded into Meedio as:
Austin Powers 2:
Austin Powers 3:
Austin Powers:
The (space) is "weighted" less than the : so the colon comes in last.
I tried:
Austin Powers:
Austin Powers2:
Austin Powers3:
Same problem. The : gets weighted more and ends up on the bottom of the list.
I've since given up on including the numbers in this case because each movie stands on its own, kinda like James Bond movies. Where that doesn't hack it though is the Alien Quadrilogy.
Alien
Aliens
Alien 3
Alien Resurrection
The only way I could get them into the correct order was to name them:
Alien
Aliens
Aliens 3
Aliens Resurrection
If you could force Meedio to load in the order that the library is in and allow the items in the library to be moved up or down it would make having to come up with cute ways of naming your movies an CDs a moot point.
My complaints are nothing more than irritations, but even little irritations are irritating.
I still like Meedio enough that I would recommend it to friends and have no plans to make a change later despite these two problems.