Dear Santa,
I hope my letter finds you and your family well. I know it is coming around to that time of the year when you become extremely busy so I won't take up too much of your time. I only have 2 (and a few sub) wishes for you.
1. I wish that you bring health and happiness to all the staff at firecore.com. Also, to all the people that contribute and answer questions on the forums. They help out people such as myself who are new at this sort of thing. Truly, they are wonderful.
I have had much help in finally getting my ATV (2nd generation) going so that I can watch my movies off my hard drives. I might add that I OWN all the movies on DVD or Blu Ray. Ripping them to my hard drives serves a dual purpose: ease of access and the ability to regenerate the movies after my four-year-old grandson has finished destroying a few of them.
2. Can you please bring extra cookies to the developer(s) of Media Player? This is a great piece of software and is the centrepiece of my entertainment hub. However, it does have a few shortcomings (which I will list below), hence the extra cookies are a means of enticing (OK, let's call a spade a spade: bribing) the developer(s) to fix or add the following features:
a) I use DVDFab to rip my Blu Ray movies in the MKV format and save them to my hard drives. DVDFab generates the subtitles in a .sub file. Because I have a hearing problem, subtitles are a must for me, otherwise the rest of the family take great pleasure in belting me for having the sound up too much! So having ripped the movie, I then have to try and track down a subtitles file in the .srt format.
I think it would be a very welcomed feature if Media Player was able read the .sub file that DVDFab (and I am sure other software programs) generates. It would save so much time and frustration.
b) Did I mention that Media Player is a great product? I think I did. It does a fantastic job of playing my .vob and .mkv files over my wireless network. It sometimes pauses to buffer the video but I have fixed that problem by hard wiring my ATV into the network. So this brings me to my next point.
(Are you still with me Santa? I hope you haven't nodded off!)
c) I wish that Media Player would support the playback of ISO image files. In order to preserve my Blu Ray movies so that I can re-burn them if my grandson destroys the originals, I save them to my hard drives as ISO image files (I use the CLONE feature of DVDFab). At the moment, I have to mount the ISO and access it via my ATV but this is a bother as it means that the PC has to be running. Wirelessly, the ATV was choking on playback but hard wiring it into the network solved the problem.
Another huge, mammoth (substitute your own adjectives here) advantage would be that having cloned the Blu Ray disc to my hard drive, I wouldn't have to rip it again to convert it to .mkv format so that I can play the movie through the ATV. This would be a huge time-saving feature and cut down on the hard drive space used. This would be absolutely, positively brilliant.
(I'm almost done Santa. Please bear with me.)
d) Some of my Blu Ray movies are in 3D. I have my ATV connected to my Samsung 3DTV. It would be superb, fantastic and a few other adjectives if Media Player was able to mount the Blu Ray ISO files and play them back in 3D if the movie is in 3D.
(Almost there Santa …)
e) I paid for the ATV flash software. Best thing I ever did. So, to further entice the developer(s) of Media Player to add the above mentioned features (especially the ISO and 3D playback) I would suggest that this very special Media Player incur a cost to whoever wants to use it. If you think about it, it costs $90 to $120 to buy a decent software program that plays DVD and Blu Ray files.
Why not charge people for the developmental costs if at the end of the day we get software that is stable and does everything one could ask for?
That's it Santa. Thank you for taking the time to read this letter. I hope I haven't stressed you out too much with all the wishes I have asked for.
Keep well and I hope you make it through the festive season intact.
Cheers.
PS. Is Rudolf's nose red naturally or as a result of too much drinking? My grandson and I would like to know.