Media Centre for Wii

When this product was announced, I was thrilled: finally an application for the Wii that turns it into the one thing it was falling short in: a media centre.
I saw it announced on several boards and checked the manufacturer's website. I was happy to see that they had experience building such programs, so I got confident and ordered it as a pre-order.
I received it only a few days after it was released and tried installing it.
Installation went fine, then I started scanning designated directories. And I waited... And waited...
Then I waited some more. The application crashed and died. Upon restarting the application, all directories I had entered in the application for scanning had vanished, so I had to enter them again.
Started scanning.... And waited....
After several attempts, I deinstalled the software and reinstalled again.
Scanning.... Crash...
I left the software to rot on my desk for a couple of days and emailed support at x-oom.
Several days later I discovered there was an update available, so I downloaded and installed it. Upon scanning a single directory with only a few pictures in them, so as not to upset the Media Server too much, I realised I was seeing a progress bar that had never been there in the first place. "Great," I thought "It's finally working." By then my frustration of support never mailing me back had disappeared: they probably had fixed my issues but forgot to mail me about it. Happens...
By then I had grown confident and tried to add a folder of music files. That's where I met an old friend of mine: the Eternal Wait soon followed by his close relative, the Horrific Crash.

It's several weeks later now, a couple of more attempts and even more updates from my silent friends at X-oom. When the software DOES add media files, it's slower than my dead grandmother. I can not delete testdirectories I added. New directories cause it to crash on scanning.
It is obviously a MySQL database, but why does it have to be so slow? It's sure not putting every single media file in the db, is it? I have been a programmer for the past eleven years, but this piece of %&%^&!* would have gotten me fired. I can not fathom why this does not work, the task it has to perform is no rocket science but it fails miserably in every aspect.

Overall: STAY AWAY! Spend your money elsewhere, buy your wife some flowers, give it to the homeless, but do..Not..Spend..It..On..This..Piece...Of... You know...
Discovered Orb and it worked first time. Should have done that right away.
Bye X-oom, it could have been so great.

Edit on March 20 2008:
I finally found out what makes it crash so often upon scanning files: when scanning for movie files you can select what kind of movie files to look for, .avi, .mpg and a third one which I can not remember right now. If you scan a directory that does not contain one of the selected filetypes, Media Centre -will- crash. Uncheck all filetypes that are not in that directory, then let it scan that directory. Media Centre will finish its scanning and it will add those movies to the database.
It's a simple error that should never have gotten past quality control.

Its awful, its crashes when it searches for files, which is about the first thing it must do before it plays them. Goodness knows what it will do if its actually managed to find a file before crashing.

After installing the product and downloading the initial update. The expectation was that the product would be of a reasonable standard to use on a repeated basis and would do exactly as it said on the box (or at least most of it)

I get paid to manage testing groups that help improve product quality for all sorts of software packages prior to shipping and from what I have seen thus far, this product has to go down as one of the worst attempts at releasing a quality product to the public that I have seen in a long time.

Performance is a big, big problem, the user interface needs a lot of work, scanning for files has some major design flaws (resets and rescans your library every time which can take forever) and in one scan half your movies, mp3's etc. will be found, the next it will be the other (It's like the lottery but more random).

That's just the tip of the iceberg, it really is a poor piece of work.

This is obviously a case where a company was in a position where they needed to get a product out before Christmas regardless of how good it was for marketing reasons or the like. Might please their CEO but it certainly has annoyed me, the customer who paid good money for what is now a poor quality product.

It may not be all bad though. The basic concept of the media center is a really cool idea and if they manage to iron out a number of the basic bugs and resolve some of the file scanning flaws, then they will have a really decent product on their hands.

No news yet on that update though and I am now in position where I'm having to be patient and wait for it. Till then, the chances of me using this properly is about zero and it's being mothballed till then. My advice to anyone thinking of buying this would be to wait until an update arrives and these guys get some positive feedback which would by the looks of things, would make a nice change :-)