Land Dolphin's Blog Post Here

Video Here

Nice! It looks clean and straight-forward. Performance of thumbnail loading could be a little better. The market has quite a few media center controllers already so I hope they know how to price it if they want to make any money back from all of their hard work.

Read in their blog that they are working on optimization and should be out by the end of February. I've tried 'Remotely Possible' which is okay but 'Meteor' is a much better design.

Geez - I just couldn't get through all the text on that page to figure out what exactly Meteor actually does!

I couldn't sit through the video. TV details are barely visible (out of focus) and some screens were too busy to see what was happening clearly. User was wandering through the menus as though lost in the app. Redo the video. Maybe raise the volume on the TV.

mmatheny

Geez - I just couldn't get through all the text on that page to figure out what exactly Meteor actually does!

 

I agree, is this a remote control in winphone 7 for media center?

 

I can't watch the flash video at the moment since I'm on my phone...

It's a Windows phone based Media Center remote control app.

There's a couple of earlier videos on youtube that show the app running on the emulator.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wssxuN-OYvk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atd57VS6JUw

Edit:

A search for "meteor hub" on the WP7 youtube app should bring them up too.

holidayboy

It's a Windows phone based Media Center remote control app.

There's a couple of earlier videos on youtube that show the app running on the emulator.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wssxuN-OYvk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atd57VS6JUw

Edit:

A search for "meteor hub" on the WP7 youtube app should bring them up too.

Rob, I tried Remote Buddy which is good but is more for scheduling recordings and streaming your recordings. Meteor looks good how you can build a music playlist but the EPG doesn't look as finished as the rest of the application. Have you tried 'Remotely Possible' has some nice features?

Hi duffstars.

No I haven't tried any of the "remote control" apps yet, I am using Media Buddy for remote access and streaming TV (I also have By Remote and Smart Potato!).

I'm looking forward to trying Meteor and Media Center Manager.

The scrub bar while playing music/podcasts in MC will be a great feature to have.

I'll check out Remotely Possible as well, thanks for the tip.

Just thought I'd come and answer any questions or comments that have come up in this thread. I'll just go one-by-one and see how it goes :)

- Performance of thumbnail loading could be a little better.
Agreed, however note that all of the images in Meteor are loaded asynchronously (loaded over the network as requested) and on a separate thread so that the overall UI doesn't get blocked. We've just done some optimization to the backend so that thumbnails are a fraction of the size they were in the video, so that definitely helps loading. Also, my wireless network at home is average at best, so you're probably looking at lowest-spec performance there. Just on that, Chris just completed a big optimization of how data is sent over the network, so it's extremely snappy. Just on that, though: Meteor uses isolated storage where appropriate, so once an image is transferred, you don't need to fetch it over the network again. Hard to really explain this without pulling back the curtain and going into developer land.

- Geez - I just couldn't get through all the text on that page to figure out what exactly Meteor actually does!
That's a really good point, going to get a product page up ASAP. My blog posts are pretty heavy on the creative side rather than the informative side, I'll admit :(

- I couldn't sit through the video. TV details are barely visible (out of focus) and some screens were too busy to see what was happening clearly. User was wandering through the menus as though lost in the app. Redo the video. Maybe raise the volume on the TV
Haha, there's a funny story about this: we actually discussed over several days what sort of video we wanted to do and decided on just a dude sitting on his couch using his phone as a remote... wait, that's not funny at all. In all honesty, there were some features I wanted to show but didn't rehearse how I'd show them, so I was doing my best to keep it snappy and just show that stuff rather than do something scripted and, well... fake? As a interesting side: my partner doesn't get lost using this app, so it's possible that I'm one that has no idea :D

- The scrub bar while playing music/podcasts in MC will be a great feature to have.
Hehe, that was actually really quite hard to implement :)

If anyone has any questions or comments, can always reach me on twitter: @thenoumenon or contact@landdolphin.net . I'm more than happy to chat about Meteor if I've got a spare minute (this is an after-work BLOCKED EXPRESSION project for us, so we do have day jobs). We use Meteor every day and will continue to use it regardless of how successful it may or may not be; we've always wanted to create something awesome that we can use and hopefully other people like it too :)

Thanks for popping in

The music scrub bar has been a feature request in many threads around here, so the hard work is appreciated!

Ben

I read somewhere in your blog and comments you could control more than one Media Center and even extenders with Meteor, is this correct?

Can you view the Pictures + Videos tiles? I currently use the Videos tile to store TV Series in.

Can you use Meteor as a remote? Up, Down, Left, Right, Ok, Back, etc.

Valid Bits 'Remotely Possible' can do this as an example: http://validbit.com/RemotelyPossible/WPAbout.htm

I like how well designed your app is and good to see you adopt the Metro UI.

i am currently just doing my research into media center, so i apologise for any nievity, but what has held me off setting one up is that i want to construct a whole house system, and so with the launch of wp7 i was waiting for apps such as this to arise. however one massive selling point that i would have thought could be implimented into this app is a 'play to' feature. so i could send my media to any point in the house that is dlna certified, be that a stb, tv, extender, sound system or whatever. or even have the media play on the wp7 device. would a feature like this  even be possible? or would the remote have to have control of whatever client it was connected to at the time? i realise problems would arise with recorded tv unless using extenders, but other media? could land dolphin implement this?

edit: i know lg has this feature but thats play from the phone to a device, i mean from within an app such as this to direct your media which could be on one device eg server, and send it to another device, eg television? without having it travel through the phone to get there of course?

The LG phones have a Play To feature built in - hopefully other brands will get similar functionality at some point....

Ok...  I gotta admit... that is a very cool looking remote UI.   Can't wait to try it out on my Focus :)