Family Quits MedaiBrowser 2012 - Conversion Issues? (2 Viewers)

[AZMedia]

Hi All,

When my family discovered an easy way to create "playlists" using PowerDVD, they all stopped using MediaBrowser, over a year ago. MB became frustrating for them and for me to keep up with fixes. However, I never stopped collecting and correcting all metadata, images, and 1080p trailers. I also use Media Center Master. We have an exceptionally clean database of movies and TV shows (artwork, trailers, actor images, metadata, etc).

GENERAL QUESTIONS:

1. Will we be able to use our existing backdrops, actor images, trailers, and XML metadata? (I can use software to rename files as needed).
2. Can I continue to collect the above type information and keep it as part of our collection. We would like to keep the movie info within that movies folder...futureproof our collection against apps.

HOT QUESTIONS:

1. We might have a few 1080p files in a movies "Trailers" folder (trailer, trailer1, trailer2...). Can MP play all of them or must you have only one trailer file?
2. Each individual movies folder has multiple backdrop images. These would rotate after a few seconds on the movie details screen. Does MP do similar...can use multiple backdrops?
3. Can you create playlists? Ex: Play the last 4 episodes of "Justified", 3 episodes of True Blood, Avatar movie, 6 episodes of Sons of Anarchy? Does it save the playlist, come back in a couple days to finish the sequence of shows?

Anything else we should know to convert our folders/data for use with MP?

We have all new hardware, gig network, AC band wireless, 10-bay Synology NAS, and using Win 7 (64). Thanks for the patience. I have read nothing but great things about MediaPortal.

 

[kiwijunglist]

You can divide your collection into 2 categories

1. TV Series

This is easy to answer, Mediaportal has only one plugin for your tv series. It's called MP TV-Series. It will scan your tv series folders and idenitfy them using the folder + filenames. It will ignore any .nfo/.xml/images in the folders. It will automatically create it's own metadata and download it's own images (All from www.thetvdb.com) which it stores in it's own database/directory seperate from the video files.

2. Movies

You have 3 main plugins that can handle your movies. They are 'moving pictures' , 'my videos' (which is built into mediaportal) and 'my films'. I'll just comment on moving pictures, because I think it is the most straight forward to use.

Moving Pictures:
It will scan for .nfo and .xml files in the same folder as the moviefile, it will look for the imdb_id# in the nfo/xml file and use that to identify the movie. If it finds a folder.jpg or cover.jpg it will use that for the movie cover, if it finds fanart.jpg or backdrop.jpg it will use that for the backdrop. If it can't find any local artwork it will automatically download the artwork. It does not support multiple backdrops per movie. It does not support locally stored trailers (in fact it may think they are movies, unless you specifically tell it to ignore the files in advanced settings).

General questions

1. see above

2. Mediaportal is designed to not pollute the media folders with database files. There is a method with moving pictures where you can make it create a .nfo or .xml file to help identify the movie should you need to repopulate your database.

Hot Questions

1. see above

2. see above

3. Whatever method you use for movies + tvseries mediaportal will remember what you have watched, what you havn't watched. If you are half way through a file it will remember that as well.

You can create playlists in my tvseries, but I don't know why you would bother, since it knows where you are and can automatically play the first unwatched episode in a tv series/season.

Note:

If your tv series files are nicely named then my tvseries setup just involves pointing to your tvseries folder and the rest will happen automatically. If it is not sure it will ask you to select a tv series or episode from a list of matches.

If your movies are single movie per folder and each folder has a .nfo or .xml file that contains the imdb+id# then moving pictures setup just involves pointing to your movies folder and the rest will happen automatically. If it is not sure it will ask you to select a movie from a list of matches. It also helps if either the movie file or foldername approximately matches the movie.

 

[AZMedia]

SuperMod..Thank you so much for the detailed response from down under!

1. So...is there a way to view that movies trailer? Only if the trailer file existed in the movie folder, MediaBrowser displayed a "Trailer" button next to the movies "Play" button. This 2010 thread asked MP for a trailer button....did that ever happen? We also used a plugin like "My Trailers" to view upcoming movie trailers.
2. Is there a way to replace a poster or backdrop? Because of the numerous posters and backdrops for each show at TVDB & TMDB, scrapers don't always pick the best one. I pick the best per my taste, end up changing about 10-20% of them, make sure backdrops are 1920x1080.
3. Playlists - I think most watch new episodes within a day or two after they air. Because we are very busy, a few weeks might pass for us. Can MP do similar to the below example: The playlist contains episodes 18,19,20,21 of my show, episodes 11,12,13 of her show, and a 2012 movie she likes. PDVD will play the entire list non stop. Playlist are created manually in PDVD.

 

[armandp]

1. Together with a plugin called OnlineVideos most plugins for movies/series show a trailer option with your movies or series. These trailers however are streamed live from online sources. Also there a lot of trailer sites you can use just to browse (iTunes, IMDB, Youtube). OnlineVideos also has the option to download those same videos to a local directory for playback in the future.
2. Yes
3. I think TVSeries plugin support exactly want you want: https://code.google.com/p/mptvseries/wiki/GettingStarted#Playlists

 

[kiwijunglist]

So...is there a way to view that movies trailer? Only if the trailer file existed in the movie folder, MediaBrowser displayed a "Trailer" button next to the movies "Play" button. This 2010 thread asked MP for a trailer button....did that ever happen? We also used a plugin like "My Trailers" to view upcoming movie trailers.

There is a trailer button next to movies that will search youtube for the trailer for your movie using the online videos plugin. It searches with "%movie_name% %year% trailer", I have never had a situation where this string has not found the correct trailer within the first couple of matches. You can use online videos to browse sites like imdb trailers, and select upcoming movies or popular recent trailers etc, you can use the apple website too. The My Trailers plugin was suprerseeded by online videos plugin.

There is an additional plugin in the works for local trailers, it will support storing local trailers in own directory, or with the movies, it will allow you to stream trailers, or to go through your movies and automatically download all the trailers, store them locally and index them. The maker of my tvseries is working on this, although I think it is a long way away.

Is there a way to replace a poster or backdrop? Because of the numerous posters and backdrops for each show at TVDB & TMDB, scrapers don't always pick the best one. I pick the best per my taste, end up changing about 10-20% of them, make sure backdrops are 1920x1080.

TV Series - Very configurable

Set it to Download 720P vs 1080P vs both. Select to download fanart vs fanart with series name. Select # of fanart to download per tv show. Automatically downloads fanart based in order based on the user rating on thetvdb. within GUI there is fanart browser, lists all fanart for that series on thetvdb with thumbs and you can click which ones to add to the fanart for that show. Can delete any fanart you don't like in the fanart picker.

Moving Pictuers - Select minimum backdrop dimensions. Can manually replace fanart by overwriting the file in the database directory. Alternatively as I said already in the above post, you can drop your custom fanart in the movie folder and tell moving pic to import local fanart if available. Supports 1x fanart / movie.

Playlists - I think most watch new episodes within a day or two after they air. Because we are very busy, a few weeks might pass for us. Can MP do similar to the below example: The playlist contains episodes 18,19,20,21 of my show, episodes 11,12,13 of her show, and a 2012 movie she likes. PDVD will play the entire list non stop. Playlist are created manually in PDVD.

TV Series -> View By -> Recently Aired Episodes ; Lists all new episodes for all series in order of air date.

Moving Pictures -> Movie -> Trakt -> Add to watch list

Most of your questions are already answered in our wikis

My TV Series
https://code.google.com/p/mptvseries/w/list

Moving Pictures
http://moving-pictures.tv/wiki/Main_Page

Mediaportal
http://wiki.team-mediaportal.com/

Search button in forum
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/search/

 

[AZMedia]

Incredible help. Thanks all.
We have terrible memories so we view trailers often. I asked about them because I have gone to great lengths to obtain clean 1080p trailers for almost 1,000 movies we have. This includes theatrical trailers, "Featurettes" and "B Roll" clips for certain movies. Sounds like I will not be able to use these.

FYI - More and more trailers, at least on Youtube, are loaded at the begging or ending with ads, promotions, reviews or other garbage - then passed off as an "Official Trailer". I started to collect them manually because we got tired of the embedded garbage in trailers pulled from the net by the app...

I'm good to go with fetures. Thanks for the links "Kiwi". I will now search/figure out best approach to integrating our Synology unit with MP. The MySQL, SMB, and other tech items are fairly new to me. I'm paranoid about exposing our Syn to the net and hackers.

GREAT FORUM!!!

 

[kiwijunglist]

with regard to trailers you could create a category called trailers in moving pictures, then have a filename filter filename = *-trailer.*" or whatever filename/directory structure you used. Then add an exclusion filter for all the other categories so that trailers don't show up in them. There are posts on the moving pictures subforum with instructions. GL.

so you can make certain hacks to get trailers into your collection but it is not nicely, easily, officially supported.

 

[CypherMK]

And with moving pictures, you can play a difined amount of trailers before you play a movie. They have to be stored in 1 directory and it will pick a random one. It is in the advanced options of moving pictures.