Multiple DVD directory entries for 1 title in 4.2.6? (1 Viewer)

[cyberquixote]

Hi again zebons,

I am wondering if I am missing another trick...

What I would like to do is have 2 DVD directories associated with a single title - i.e. lord of the rings extended versions come on 2 disks for the 1 movie. What I would like, is to select the movie cover, then be presented with the 2 choices in a dialog like when it finds multiple matches in general.

After reading examples, I have tried a few things:

1) nameing the directores Lord_Of_The_Rings_The_Fellowship_Of_The_Ring1 and Lord_Of_The_Rings_The_Fellowship_Of_The_Ring2, then just running the plugin with no "source" attribute set. This correctly finds the 2 directories and asks me to pick, but once I pick, it is written into "source" and I am not prompted again.

2) I tried manually setting the source attribute to the 2 entries separated by a ";" Source="c:\vids\Lord_Of_The_Rings_The_Fellowship_Of_The_Ring1\VIDEO_TS\VIDEO_TS.IFO;c:\vids\Lord_Of_The_Rings_The_Fellowship_Of_The_Ring2\VIDEO_TS\VIDEO_TS.IFO". It does not seem to allow that for Dvd directories (I get a "Please insert disc" message).

3) general playing around with directory hierarchies...no luck


Is this something that is supported and I am just missing the trick, or is it not implemented? If not, will it be?

Thanks much!

 

[vvulture]

WOW !! no responses... i was wondering the same thing.

Seems like either:

- Not many people are using this plugin

or

- No one has required this function before

 

[HappyTalk]

Well you could use the folder hierarchy for that sort of thing which is what I use, so you set the OriginalTitle fields thus:-

OriginalTitle fields like this:-

Movie.LOR.01.The Fellowship of the Ring 01
Movie.LOR.01.The Fellowship of the Ring 02
Movie.LOR.02.The Two Towers
Movie.LOR.03.Return Of The King

(note I'm using . as the seperator setup in MyFilms setup not the default \)

Then when viewed when you select the fellowship entry you will be shown the 2 entries (1 per disk). if you hit select you will be taken to the main info window, and in there you can use fwd/back to flick between the 2 entries and play whichever one you want. By having 2 entries you can have different info for the description field, but by using the folder hierachy they are nicely grouped together

The other way you mention, using a single entry with the 2 ifo files ; seperated should work. I've not tried it. This would bring up the 2 disk icons when you hit play allowing you to select which one you want. You say however that this doesn't work, maybe something has been broken or maybe it never did work for DVD ifo's. I could understand that it might not as MyFilms uses a playlist for multiple entries passed off to the MP video playback engine that maybe doesn't support multiple DVD's? Personally I use the folder hierarchy for this sort of thing as all my stuff is offline on DVDR's so being on 2 seperate disks necessitates having 2 entries. If you wanted slightly different covers or different info etc then you'd need 2 entries so this is my preferred route.

 

[zebons]

The other way you mention, using a single entry with the 2 ifo files ; seperated should work. I've not tried it.

Actually that way doesn't work with ifo files. I'll improve it in the next version I'm working on...

 

[HappyTalk]

I don't really see how it would work anyway with multiple dvd's. As you use the skip button to skip between chapters on a DVD and skip is used when there are multiple filenames to jump between them. With regular avi's they reach the end and so play the next one, but a DVD doesn't actually reach the end in the same way until you actually exit it. When the main movie exits it goes back to the main menu, but...

 

[cyberquixote]

Agreed...I am not sure it makes sense to just use the default ";" separated behavior - what I think people would want is they should be presented as a 2nd level menu, so there may be a better mechanism...

What I currently wound up hacking together for myself (sorry...I used proprietary QT toolkit & a lot of assumptions about my personal setup to streamline the UI development) that works nicely for me, and MAY be worth implementing for the world at large is basically preprocessing the ANT database & my directory structure - matching all the .ifos with their movies when I found them, then looking 1 directory up on all the unmatched ifos...

So in my case, since I am coming from DVDProfiler, I can just rewrite the ANT database XML for each of the movies it finds on the disk updating their location, and also create new entries so that when it finds the directories "LOTR two towers/Disk1" and "LOTR two towers/Disk 2" will replace the original "LOTR Two towers" entry in ANT with two copies using the new names and set the locations, then the My Films engine will do the right thing with the menus if you set the separator character correctly.

It might be worth considering this a bit for further development - by making a private copy of the ANT database, you can manipulate it however you like to make it more a representation of movies on the disk, rather than movies I own... though I am guessing that was not the author's original intent...but it seems like there is lots of interest in that direction . Then there could be a "rescan" button on the My Films UI in Media Portal that would resync the private copy from the ANT database, pre locating all the movies, adding extra entries...maybe removing ones that are not found on disk...etc. Also nice with this method is you could provide feedback about which movies either on disk or in the DB...or found twice etc, rather than wait until you try to launch the movie for the first time. In my case, there were a very large number of movies where my directory did not QUITE match the title in ANT and needed to be fixed (about 1 in 5).

Thanks again for a great plugin!