After importing i now have a poster thumbnail being displayed for each movie and if i click on it the movie plays, great so far. the questions are is there any way to link the movie .ifo file to the j.river database or into its tag fields so i then may display it with the thumbnail if i wish. if not then do i have to manually type in genre, cast members, duration, etc for each movie thumbnail?
Unfortunately you have to Tag the files manually. A bunch of us have been agitating for some kind of automated way to pull details from IMDB and/or TV.com for quite some time. A few other HTPC front-ends have these capabilities and it is sorely missed in my MC.
One additional question, my movies are on the upstairs computer and i wish to share them to the downstairs computer which is connected to my big screen hd tv. I am not trying to stream the movies i just want to be able to access them on the upstairs hard drive on the downstairs computer and have the database info the same on each machine, is this possiable?
Yep. This is easy! Simply install MC on the downstairs PC. Then on the upstairs PC, put your "library" in a shared network folder. The "library" is MC's term for the database (by default it is in your Documents and Settings folder, but you can create as many as you want or move move them wherever you want under
File --> Library --> Library Manager). Anyhow, put that on a network share and then point the downstairs PC's copy of MC to load that library.
Obviously the files in the database all need to "live" in the same place for all machines that use the library. So if the computer upstairs has all the files imported in C:\media\ then it won't work. If they're on a network drive (
M:) or imported with UNC names (
\\upstairs\media\) then you'll be fine.
To prevent conflicts, the way it works is that the first copy of MC to open a particular library "locks" it. All subsequent copies of MC running elsewhere on the network can open the library, but only in Read Only mode. This keeps multiple copies of MC running on the network from trying to update the library at the same moment and causing corruption. Unfortunately, there isn't yet a way for the "Read Only" mode computer to "request" full access from the computer that has the library locked. You have to actually close MC on the Read Only machine, walk (or VNC) upstairs and close the "Full Access" machine's copy of MC, and then walk back downstairs and re-open the downstairs copy of MC.
This is only a minor issue for me as I typically only use MC on one machine at a time. If I do use it on more than one, I'm typically only "tagging" files on one machine (while my wife watches something out on the HTPC).