Season Discs (ISO) with multiple episodes (2+). (1 Viewer)

[luci5r]

I have the entire X-Files DVD Collection; that's 9 seasons with 5 to 6 discs per season. Each disc has 4 - 5 episodes. I have each disc ripped as ISO into appropriate season folders. The name of each ISO represents the episodes it contains in the format "S01E01 S02E02 ..." and so forth. So essentially, this is what my folders/files look like:

D:\Series\The X-Files\Season 01\

"The X-Files S01E01 S01E02 S01E03 S01E04.iso"
"The X-Files S01E05 S01E06 S01E07 S01E08.iso"
...​

D:\Series\The X-Files\Season 02\

"The X-Files S02E01 S02E02 S02E03 S02E04.iso"
"The X-Files S02E05 S02E06 S02E07 S02E08.iso"
...​

...... and so forth & so on.

The reason for naming the ISO's is because I use Zappiti on Dune Smart D1 on another device and it requires the naming in such a way. It's able to scrape every episode in each ISO and link it to the ISO. This way I can click on Season 1, Episode 3 and it will play Disc 1 ISO.

I'd like the same to happen with MP-TV, but it's doing something strange. It's scraping the FIRST and the LAST episode on each ISO, but nothing in between. So Season 1 will list Episode 1, then 4, then 5 then 9. How can I get MP-TV to scrape the episodes in the middle?

Thanks!!

 

[ltfearme]

WE only support two episodes per file.

 

[RoChess]

"The X-Files S01E01 S01E02 S01E03 S01E04.iso"

One thing you can do is create symbolic/hardlinks to the ISOs, so you can individually import each episode and the link will open the ISO. The problem is that you will launch S01E03 and that you will have to go through the DVD menu and/or skip to 1x03 manually, so extracting the episodes individually is the way to go. And you can do that quick without a need to transcode the video/audio codecs, though obviously a conversion from old MPEG-2 into modern H.264 will save you a bunch of storage, as a 200MB H.264 file is about the same quality as a 1GB DVD ISO episode.

 

[luci5r]

"The X-Files S01E01 S01E02 S01E03 S01E04.iso"

One thing you can do is create symbolic/hardlinks to the ISOs, so you can individually import each episode and the link will open the ISO. The problem is that you will launch S01E03 and that you will have to go through the DVD menu and/or skip to 1x03 manually, so extracting the episodes individually is the way to go. And you can do that quick without a need to transcode the video/audio codecs, though obviously a conversion from old MPEG-2 into modern H.264 will save you a bunch of storage, as a 200MB H.264 file is about the same quality as a 1GB DVD ISO episode.

Ro,

I'm perfectly OK with the episode launching the correct DVD; that is how I have it setup right now with Zappiti / Dune Smart D1. So if I click on Season 1 Episode 3, it launches the first Disc of Season One, allowing me to choose the episode via DVD Menu. I'd like to keep it that way, as opposed to extracting each episode individually.

That being the case - you mentioned creating symbolic/hardlinks to the ISO's. How do you do that? I know each episode that's on each DVD, for example DVD 1 of Season 1 has the first 4 episodes. Right now MPTV-Series is importing Episode 1 & Episode 4 but not episode 2 & 3. How do I create the links for Episode 2 & 3 to Disc 1?

Thanks!!

 

[RoChess]

Ro,

I'm perfectly OK with the episode launching the correct DVD; that is how I have it setup right now with Zappiti / Dune Smart D1. So if I click on Season 1 Episode 3, it launches the first Disc of Season One, allowing me to choose the episode via DVD Menu. I'd like to keep it that way, as opposed to extracting each episode individually.

That being the case - you mentioned creating symbolic/hardlinks to the ISO's. How do you do that? I know each episode that's on each DVD, for example DVD 1 of Season 1 has the first 4 episodes. Right now MPTV-Series is importing Episode 1 & Episode 4 but not episode 2 & 3. How do I create the links for Episode 2 & 3 to Disc 1?

Thanks!!

Ok, so taking your own example: "D:\Series\The X-Files\Season 01\The X-Files S01E01 S01E02 S01E03 S01E04.iso"

That will import as S01E01 + S01E04. So you need to simply create a symbolic link to have MP-TVSeries import the other two episodes.

Assuming you use Vista+, then as per: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link#Syntax it is really easy to do.

Inside an elevated command prompt (right click and "Run as Administrator"):

mklink "D:\Series\The X-Files\Season 01\The X-Files S01E02+03.iso" "D:\Series\The X-Files\Season 01\The X-Files S01E01 S01E02 S01E03 S01E04.iso"

This will create a 0-byte link, that MP-TVSeries will import as new and thereby fixing your problem. If that does not fool MP-TVSeries, then you will have to create a HARD LINK by adding /H to the above command as such:

mklink /H "D:\Series\The X-Files\Season 01\The X-Files S01E02+03.iso" "D:\Series\The X-Files\Season 01\The X-Files S01E01 S01E02 S01E03 S01E04.iso"

But this will screw with your free space calculations, as it literally fools the system into thinking you got an identical copy of the file with the same filesize. The same problem exists with the C:\Windows\WinSxS folder, which is filled with hardlinks and can screw up your freespace situation. Thankfully Microsoft fixed this issue to a great extend with Windows 8, but time will only tell how effective they did so.

Now due to the repetitious and predictable nature of all the symbolic/hard links, you can actually automate/batch-script the entire process, but this is a tricky thing to do that I would suggest you Google for instructions. The instructions you seek are more generic in nature, but the same principle applies.