Couple of comments:
1) In MC13 you can now add Coverart to "Data" files without setting to Video First.
That's fabulous - saves one step for me anyway. I normally use a screen grab from the movie as cover art, so when I add something to the library, I play things temporarily in the internal MC player (by setting the file type to video) and get to a good point, pause it, right click and 'Use screen grab as thumbnail'. I can do that in BSPlayer, but its a bit more of an effort. Nothing JR can do about that though.
2) I dislike that the "two" views areas behave differently as I think they should behave consistantly - eg. When I add "DATA" to the "Media Type", in the STDView ViewScheme I see my ISO's integrated with my Video files and they both play just fine (the Video Files internally and the "DATA" files externally) YET if I do the same with the TheaterView ViewScheme the "DATA" "MEDIA TYPE" is just ignored.
Me too. Stuff like that makes me wonder what else it's controlling for me behind the scenes that I don't know about... makes me nervous. If I set up a view with sorting etc, I want that view to be ubiquitous - no matter how I choose to display that view in the graphical sense.
3) The solution to me (as alluded to my Matt) is to allow files to be tagged both as to what View they should appear in VIDEO, AUDIO, IMAGE, DATA etc and also how to play the files, eg Internal or External. This allows for you to have these files appear where they should in the Library AND play accordingly, eg:
- ISO: As these are disk images they need to be mounted by a virtual drive at which point the OS will determine it it is a Video, Audio or Data disk and it will then play in what ever program you have set as the default
- Files: As the OP stated there may be some file types that you want to keep in your library but play in another prog
Good suggestions.
I think
any file should be configurable (ISO, AVI, whatever) as to where it is played... why not let the operating system handle that part of it? I love the organisational features of MC. I love that I can have all my videos & music catagorised & tagged in the same library. But I just can't get on with the internal video player - I've tried, and decided that I don't want to have a degree in post video production to understand all the nuances of the various filters etc to get the right results (just want the things to play without skipping) - so I use BSPlayer Pro for everything and with MC12 it works well. Not great, but well enough.
One (simple?) way of achieving this would be a tag to say 'Use default player for file type' on the file. BSPlayer is set up on my system as the default player for certain types of files - in MC12 that tag was setting the media type to 'Data', which is confusing as Matt says. Maybe a special tag for that purpose would be better and can catch whatever you want to add to the library.
Edit: an additional feature to this which would be
very useful for assigning cover art would be to have two 'Play' options when you right click on a file. One to play in the internal player, and another (which can be set as default as per file type / file) to play in the "default" player. That way, you don't have to change tags at all once you've set up a file as being played externally, and I can still use my "assign cover art" trick above.