In my never-ending quest to find the perfect streaming server for my home theater, I’ve come across many programs. I’m currently more than satisfied using the clean, lightweight Medialink for all of my audio and video, but have been investigating a few other solutions that transcode video on the fly (namely for HD MKV files) and that search led me to PS3 Media Server for Mac.
Let me first say that this program is so feature rich I haven’t even scratched the surface of it’s capabilities. However, the user interface is so completely alien to the Mac platform that I had to make mention of it somewhere:
The interface is written in Java. Users of the late Azureus will recognize similarities, especially in the tabs.
An interface like this will intimidate people who really just want to engage in the simple task of streaming media. For someone like myself who’s pretty well versed in video encoding and streaming this makes sense, but I think it’s safe to assume that the layperson doesn’t have a clue what “Force framerate parsed from FFMpeg” means. If cleaned up and made more, pardon the term, Mac-like, its appeal would instantly be broadened and people would flock to this incredibly powerful piece of free (as in beer) software.
A great program along the same lines that takes something complex and breaks it down so that anyone can use it is Handbrake. Through the use of tooltips and plain English, Handbrake gives the user great insight into what are otherwise complex video encoding settings. Its standard icons-across-the-top interface give you access to the most important actions of the app and through the use of native UI tabs, your options are further broken down into logical settings like Video, Audio, etc.
Handbrake advanced settings window
I don’t profess to know how daunting it is to build and maintain a program, especially one that fuses two things as complicated as networking and video, but I think we can all agree that clean, intuitive interfaces work well for everyone. That little extra bit of polish is what can really hurtle your program ahead of the rest.
Post a Comment