I've been comparing JRiver and Plex to see which is more compatible for overall performance of what I want to do.
I'm an enormous music (vinyl, digital, cds)/music video/movies/tv series) collector.
I've used Catraxx and Catvids, Extreme Movie/Music Manager, Music and Movie Collector, Media Monkey, My Movies, All My Movies, Movie and Music Label, Plex, and several other programs to see how they perform and now I've just recently tried JRiver to see how it stacks up.
As a collector I'm trying to find the best Database/Collection programs that I can so I can put the whole shebang under one roof so to speak. And I was wondering how to do certain things under JRiver... but first I will let you know what I think of the other programs.
I've used Catraxx and Catvids the longest and still find it the best especially for vinyl but it's dated and is no longer actively supported, not that it needs it, it is still a very powerful program and it has a huge following of loyal supporters.
Extreme Movie and Music Managers - Very good but it takes a lot of time to manage it, it's very configurable but again it still has it's quirks, the Music database doesn't stand up as well as I would like.
Music and Movie Collector is starting to look better but it still falls behind Cattrax and Catvids and when I tried to use the import from Catraxx and Catvids feature, some of the information didn't transfer over well and it would take a lot of time to correct it.
Mediamonkey is good for digital music but didn't like the look and feel so far.
My Movies...again promising but i got frustrated with not being warned about the xml files and the fact it's sits in the background on startup.
All My Movies - The interface is very poor and the import features and how it supports television series are substandard
Movie and Music Label - Good database but haven't played with the Music Label so much, didn't like the layout.
Plex - Very good product, love it's interface and the fact that i can use my android box and link to my computer to view anything, the only drawback is that it can't play or even recognize Vob, Iso, ts files and you are forced to convert them to a readable format, again a lot of time spent converting stuff so it will work...but it may be worth it because of the great flexibility and the ability to add comments to the files.
And that brings me to JRiver...The interface is good and I love the flexibility and the ability to import and play all types of formats, including ISO...
The problem I'm having now is in regards to Music Videos, I can't seem to get it to separate the (Artist and Video Title) even though I've correctly set up the structure of the files, In one case I have an mp4 (video) file that does separate correctly and I even been able to include comments, however with another mp4 file this doesn't work, not to mention being able to do this with Iso, TS files, Is there a way to manually add comments or through import capability to do this, essentially I want the following to show up...
Cover, Artist, (Album or Title of video), Dimensions, Date, Duration, File Size, Volume Label, Comment, Filename (Shows path of file)
Because I have several hard drives full of genres, I have several with just Movies on them, Others with just Music Videos, not to mention music on another hoard.
It also helps that I can use the hard drives volume label to know where my files are stored on a particular hard drive. Since I'm new to JRiver, I just want to determine how I can display the files in the program to meet my needs, Regular Movies should not show up in the same category as Music Videos, now I
understand that that may require filters as long as I can tag each file for it's own category.
Any help, suggestions or thoughts would be appreciated.
So far I like what I see and I'm willing to buy the product if I can find out how to do certain things. It might mean that I may have to continue to use various products for various types of media, depending on which one does the better job.
Thanks for any advice or comments you make
Music4al
