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[wired1087]

Hi all, so I'm big into video podcasts lately and I have been using Miro. Well, Miro has a lot of potential but it has been just too unstable on my system, so I went on a hunt for a replacement. I tried a few things and found Media Center 12. Killer media player/organizer, AND it does video podcasts,among other things! I was in love. But, I'm having a few problems. I'm going to outline them here and I wondered if anyone could help me. If I can get things worked out, I'm really considering buying a license....

- Random freeze ups and crashes. They seem to be triggered by a few certain things, such as deleting an empty folder when I delete the videos in it and trying to play video formats that the app doesn't support(which also concerns me).

- Podcast list resets everytime the app closes/crashes. I keep having to reimport my opml file and set all the podcasts to download the newest episodes.

- I have a folder containing a season of the west wing in .avi format and the app doesn't recognize it as video. It's filing it under "documents" and wont play any of the vids.


Other than that, this is a great tool, and I really want to use it. Any help for a newb? ?

[JimH]

Welcome to Interact.

The crash may just be a bad DirectShow filter.  Search for CCCP on our Wiki (link above).

Podcasts don't reset.  What do you mean by "podcast lists"?  The list of episodes in the feed?  That gets retrieved for each podcast if the feed has been updated.  There are a lot of options for podcasts in MC Tools/Options.

AVI is a container format.  MC will put it under docs if it finds no DirectShow filter for whatever is inside.  CCCP should help.  You can force MC to see it as a video file if you edit the media type (part of the tag).

[wired1087]

Thanks, I'll check out CCCP. As far as the podcasts go, I meant that the lists of podcasts that I'm subscribed to keeps disappearing. I have to keep re-adding my podcast feeds to the app. Also, the app just crashed again when it tried to delete an empty folder...quite annoying...

[JimH]

Thanks, I'll check out CCCP. As far as the podcasts go, I meant that the lists of podcasts that I'm subscribed to keeps disappearing. I have to keep re-adding my podcast feeds to the app. Also, the app just crashed again when it tried to delete an empty folder...quite annoying...

Try an uninstall, reinstall.  The list of podcasts is saved, but something on your PC is preventing it.  Watch for errors during install.

Install as admin.

Virus checkers sometimes do strange things.  There is a thread on this type of problem in my signature (Weird Problems).  You could try it for ideas.

What build of MC are you using?  Did you get it from our site?

[wired1087]

I'm using build 12.0.497, got it here. I'll try an uninstall/reinstall and get back. Thanks a lot for your help.

By the way, I thought about a work around for the crashing on folder deletion thing. How does one set the app up to NOT download each podcast into its own folder, but just put all vids into a single folder? Right now, each feed gets its own separate folder, so when I delete one that I watched, if nothing else is in that folder, the app tries to delete it and crashes.....

[wired1087]

Ok, so I uninstalled and reinstalled and rebooted. The app froze again with the delete folder thing once, then I tried again and checked the box to not confirm next time I delete something and it deleted the vids without asking about the folders and without freezing....not sure if that means it's fixed there or not, but no freeze this time.

However, the list of subscribed podcasts is still disappearing every time I close and restart the app. This really sucks as it will make it unusable if I can't make it work. Could it be because I'm using an opml file to import them? I may try to manually import them individually and see if that helps...

I've yet to try the CCCP thing though. Thanks again for any help you can offer.

[JimH]

Something is not right with your PC.  Did you try disabling the virus checker?

Podcasts do persist over sessions.  I don't know what an OPML file is.  Try entering a few by hand.

[glynor]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML

I believe you guys support them, though I've never used them.

OPML files are commonly used by RSS and Podcast readers to exchange RSS Feed subscription and organization information between different applications.  For example, if you export your bookmarks in Firefox to an OPML file (using the OPML support add-on) you can then import them directly into Feedburner (a RSS Feed reader application) while preserving your folder structure and automatically converting Firefox's "Live Bookmarks" into RSS Subscriptions.

Just thought I'd add that I agree that something is definitely going on with your system.  I use Video Podcasts heavily with MC, and I've never seen it lose the podcast.xml file.  Among other problems, something is blocking write access to the podcast.xml file in MC's library.

[wired1087]

Wow....I just imported a feed manually and even added the "default feeds"....Upon close and restart...all gone....I think I'm going to try the app on my laptop just too see, but you're probably right, it's my pc. Any idea as to what exactly and how to fix it?

[JimH]

Virus checkers sometimes do strange things.  There is a thread on this type of problem in my signature (Weird Problems).  You could try it for ideas.

[JimH]

There is a little triangle to the right of the word Podcasts in the tree.  Try clicking on it.