MMS, first contact

The first time I saw MMS was in December 2005 and a lot has changed since then. But here are the first impressions I had when I had my first contact.

I looked at the two screenshots on http://freshmeat.org/projects/mmsv2 and saw the slide-show screen. Well, this was exactly what I've been mainly looking for, a good slideshow usable with lirc. That MMS is a whole media system, I didn't realize at this point in time.

I've downloaded mms from http://mms.sunsite.dk and began to install it. To be honest, I didn't come very far. I've started to google for an installation instruction and finally found a good one at http://mms.kicks-ass.org/wiki. I was using Debian and luckily the installation instruction was made for Debian. The main-menu of MMS was nice, and simple though. It containted a "Play music", a "Movies" and "Picture" menu-entry. All the rest, that was also possible I didn't compile in. Actually I didn't intend to watch movies with it, since VDR is good at this point too. The first time I've compiled MMS, I've been using lirc, but I didn't understand the key-mapping for my remote control, and so I've compiled it with keyboard support.
( UPDATE: With the documentation of all MMS-commands and this graphic it isn't a pain anymore.)
Using both, lirc and keyboard isn't possible at the same time. Untill today, I don't understand what this division is good for, since vdr can be controlled via lirc, keyboard and network at the same time without problems.
( UPDATE: Meanwhile I've found a simple solution.)

Here I've got now a freshly compiled MMS running, and I started my first slideshow now. Wow! At this point I knew, this is it. No picture zooming those days, never the less, I was pretty satisfied. Then I've starting to test the music-module. I had my difficulties to play one single song, untill I realized, that MMS is, like most other applications, fully playlist orientated. But one single hit to much on the remote control started to add a folder with many thousands songs into my playlist, it took ages. A kill -9 was mostly the only solution. Navigation in music folders had a bug, it took upto half an hour to enter a directory (I'm not kidding), and it took me a while to convince the developer, that this is a "no go" solution for the music-module. It finally had been fixed, and I could also start using the music functionality of MMS.