Hi bobinatcat, I was in the same boat and decided to get the SMP two days ago.
It’s definitely a lot fancier and has some cool features over the previous generation. I find the content info function works really well and as you’d expect. I used the manual lookup for mine and It’s found most of my titles. Some required me to manually edit the search term picked, but as Tony said you might be better off naming the files to specification first (I didn’t). I didn’t use the auto feature because I’ve got a heap of home videos and music videos that wouldn’t be found and might even get mapped incorrectly.
The TV show content info is also really effective and helps me track which episode I’m up to because it shows the episode synopsis.
I haven’t tried the RSS feed yet, but I’ll be looking at that soon.
The interface is really nice and makes use of widescreen displays better than the previous incarnation (tiling of thumbnails, listview columns etc).
I’m still new to the device, but my initial impression is really positive. I’m still looking at how best to manage my media library settings (rescan settings etc), but looking at this forum I think it sounds like I should be able to make it stop rescanning the library every boot up.
I think custom themes is another cool feature that will keep people interested in this product, another benefit over the Live+.
You can create a queue which “kind of” functions as a Now Playing list builder. What I mean is you can add different sets of albums to the queue, but you can’t do these at the folder level, just file level. Thankfully there is a “select multiple” option which you can choose to select all files and have them added, it’s just a bit tedious to get to that menu option. Hopefully this will be improved in later firmwares, but it does actually get you the end result. This can also be done for a separate video list as well. You can’t mix videos with audio in a single list though.
So to answer your question, “is it a worthwhile upgrade?”, I say yes. It’s early days yet but I’m glad I made the leap from Live+ to SMP.
If you’ve got any other specific feature questions, let me know and I’ll see if I can answer them.
