Anyone Seen Squire?

Dev Community Dev/API Corner
1
Competition for Plex?
Anyone seen this app? Just wanted to see what others thought of it. Competition never hurts I guess.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYAba3xgd-8
2

looks boring lol

3

I love the language and subtitles menu.

4

nah, too iphoney i think.

5

i think it looks good, but if it doesnt have something like pms, its just another xbmc lookalike

6

doesn’t that use copywritten material in it’s ad by showing video clips?

7

Looks interesting… but absolutely zero actual information. Looks like the developer is attempting a buzz campaign without actually having anything real to show - which I can’t stand. When developers do that I tend to boycott their products when and if they come out solely on principal =)

8

I just wonder if it’s an xbmc fork or if it trully original content. Original would be interesting. Another fork, maybe not so much.

9

According to this blog post (translated from Spanish via Google) it’s a native OSX app written in cocoa.

10

No fork, written from scratch.



11


Indeed
12

I’ve just seen this via Twitter. Looks pretty slick.




[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBXTFJtjfIQ[/media]
13


I've been following the Twitter feed for some time. My observations:

1. I've asked them if this is only going to handle local files, or will allow network / centralized sharing (so the XBMC vs Plex workflow) and I've never received a response. Local only = no good for me.

2. Personally I HATE coverflow style menus, so hopefully that's not the only option.

3. Does it actually work :D (fancy menus/scraping are nice and all, but nobody's yet to see any media actually playing)

Looking forward to its release so we can all test/play with it. I can't see anything replacing my Plex at the moment though.
14


Totally agree with all those points, Plex does it for me, I've never even wandered. Nice to see a new kid on the block though, time will tell.
15

Got the Alpha today. It’s far from ready. Auto scrapes any and all drives connected. No user options yet. Many dupe and bad scrapes. Glitches playing anything over 720p.



You can sign up at their website.

16

It’s not ready of course, but I did like that it started loading my media really fast and added artwork really fast. I didn’t even have to tell it where my media was stored, it automatically found the movies on my external harddisk. But that’s basically it, for now. Playing back the movies doesn’t work well yet. And as long as there’s not something like the Plex Media Manager, I won’t be really interested.

17


And I'm sure that auto-discovery will be "problematic" for some users :rolleyes:
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Autodiscovery was always a pain with the ex, when she would update iTunes and it would start looking for every bit of media and start organizing it! :angry:



I have my Squire Alpha, and I’ll have to give it a try this coming weekend. Of course it’s being an Alpha, I’ll be happy if it doesn’t crash constantly!



SC

19

Just tested Squire, and even though I prefer Plex, there are two things it does that I wish Plex did (very small things).


  1. Auto-discovery is really nice - within seconds it had loaded a lot of movies, with fanart, poster, metadata, etc. No need to tell it where I keep my movies. Not a biggie, but pretty cool, especially fo the novice user that is “tech-challenged”


  2. When playing a file, it has this really nice, smooth transition to the video player. You hit play, and it “fades” into the video, vs. an abrupt playback. Plus, in many skins I use, the video OSD appears and says paused before the video even starts playing…in Squire this was not the case.



    Squire is very alpha, so I won’t be using it heavily…plus Plex is just so sexy :stuck_out_tongue: I do wish plex had a smoother transition to the video when playing it though…
20


Thumbs up.

I saw a Bang & Olufsen demo once in Harrods, and when you hit 'off' on the TV, instead of it just snapping off, it was like curtains being drawn over the screen... The pixels were switched off/to black from either side towards the centre I guess.

It's a nice finishing touch that just looks that bit smoother.
A fade in/out or transition effect would indeed be nice, especially as some ripped video content doesn't have a perfect start/finish anyway. Just a 1/2 second fade would look good.