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[Randy B]

If I want to have all the episodes within MC13 of season 1 of 3 DVDs containing the TV series “House” and NOT use the Main Menu of the DVD to navigate, do I have to rip each episode individually?   I have found several threads on how to setup a view and manage nesting, but I’m not sure of the best way to rip it.

[benn600]

I personally use full DVD rips and deal with the disc numbers.  I would like a solution that provided the best of both worlds: full DVDs + quick links to each episode.

[Randy B]

I saw a thread that someone used the “Simpsons’” as an example that I really liked, but for the life of me, I can’t find it again.  I guess you saw the conclusion as to my Cover Art dilemma.  So simple once I got it to work.

Thanks

[jmone]

Here is how I do it both for Music Videos and TV Series - http://forum.videohelp.com/topic338512.html

You get one file per episode or track.....

Thanks
Nathan

[benn600]

That's the best of one world jmone.  I used to use a similar technique and did get a file per episode.  But that was until I started getting upset my DVD rips didn't include subtitles, secondary audio tracks, deleted scenes, menus, and other bonus features.  I paid good money for every DVD I own and there is a definite number of discs that I want the extras.

I still think if there was some way to create a SHORTCUT in MC.  Think of it as an entry that would say PLAY Simpsons 11.2 (Season 11, Disc 2) at chapter 5!  This would instantly start exactly the episode you wanted!  It would be a lot of work setting it up but it would be doable.  Is this possible right now?

[Daydream]

I still think if there was some way to create a SHORTCUT in MC.  Think of it as an entry that would say PLAY Simpsons 11.2 (Season 11, Disc 2) at chapter 5!  This would instantly start exactly the episode you wanted!  It would be a lot of work setting it up but it would be doable.  Is this possible right now?

That'll mean that MC will will have some kind of spying function that will scan your DVDs' IFO files, learn the navigational instructions between VMG, VTS's, PCG's, streams and all the programming that might be put into that. And all on the fly, under .5sec preferably so you won't notice a delay. And then merge everything in a meaningful way into its database. I would venture a guess that it won't happen. E.V.E.R.

From my experience there is no simple way. And the closest thing to keeping extra-content requires some serious work. That is demuxing the content (can be done at rip time) and remuxing what you wanna keep in an MKV container. That will give you the video track, as many audio and subtitles tracks you want (with embedded fonts if necessary), with chapters (embedded), with picture cover and with external links to other files. All in one file. That's where the good news end. There is no proper way to read the cover even if embedded and the outside links will be played (seamlessly if needed) together with the main file - say you don't want to encode the intro into each episode since it's the same; encode it once (or cut the original part) as an external file and link it at the beginning of each episode. That kind of thing. We may be able to force the MKV navigation with some creative thinking but basically it can't do everything-and-the-kitchen-sink.

And I have to say that I don't understand the logic to keep everything. Statistically the percentage of good extras I would call it abysmal, while the percentage of content with dual soundtracks that one actually needs it's probably in the single digits and the procedure described above should cover it. Of course just my opinion. I know people with their DVD collection counting discs in 4 or 5 digits, so I guess their tastes far exceed mine, but that's a whole different thing, they won't probably rip them to begin with.

At the end of the day one has to wonder what's worth it. You leave and die by some extra content that will force you EVERY time to go through some (mind-bending) DVD navigation menus instead of click-play. You will never be able to create playlists with episodes since you use entire disc rips. You will never be able to add metadata per episode and work with episodes in any meaningful way. You lose some, you gain some.

But if I wanna have an X-Files night with my friends and watch only top-rated, myth-arc episodes I'll doubleclick on a smartlist. And boom! - the Truth is out there. Do that with full DVDs.

[Daydream]

Here is how I do it both for Music Videos and TV Series - http://forum.videohelp.com/topic338512.html

Agree with one note: VOB and MPG is not the same, renaming is not 100% safe. If you rip a movie (just the movie) and then take the resulting VOB through a remuxing to MPG process, the MPG will be ~50MB shorter. The difference is not significant, but the files being "clean" is important, so some decoder won't stumble just because. There's a lot of leftovers in a VOB file that a player doesn't need.

Otherwise this is indeed the idea that I've embraced a long time ago - breaking the discs into episode rips. Still true even with Blu-Ray, just need to change the tool to eac3to.

One thing that I never figure it out (haven't tried too hard though) is whether a Stack (say I'll create stacks by seasons) can have one cover, and episodes inside the stack their own individual covers. Stack cover takes over everything.

[jmone]

Agree with one note: VOB and MPG is not the same, renaming is not 100% safe. If you rip a movie (just the movie) and then take the resulting VOB through a remuxing to MPG process, the MPG will be ~50MB shorter. The difference is not significant, but the files being "clean" is important, so some decoder won't stumble just because. There's a lot of leftovers in a VOB file that a player doesn't need.

Otherwise this is indeed the idea that I've embraced a long time ago - breaking the discs into episode rips. Still true even with Blu-Ray, just need to change the tool to eac3to.

One thing that I never figure it out (haven't tried too hard though) is whether a Stack (say I'll create stacks by seasons) can have one cover, and episodes inside the stack their own individual covers. Stack cover takes over everything.

OK...but I've used this process to create hundreds of individual files without a single issue.

[darichman]

Learned a lot from this thread, thanks guys

[imugli]

Personally, I use DVDShrink and do rip each individual episode to an individual folder. This then allows me to sort my DVDs and TV series and create different view schemes for both. So under Video in Theater View I then choose Movies, Home Movies or TV Series, then under TV Series I choose the show, which then drills down to seasons and episodes. Works great.

[benn600]

That'll mean that MC will will have some kind of spying function that will scan your DVDs' IFO files, learn the navigational instructions between VMG, VTS's, PCG's, streams and all the programming that might be put into that. And all on the fly, under .5sec preferably so you won't notice a delay. And then merge everything in a meaningful way into its database. I would venture a guess that it won't happen. E.V.E.R.Smiley

Media Center is already doing this.  When I've tried syncing a DVD to my iPod a year ago or so, MC listed the chapters and allowed one to be chosen.  Why do you think it's so hard?  MC right now has a bookmark feature that will jump to a point.

While watching a movie, the OSD could have a "Create Shortcut" option that would create a shortcut element in the database that would simply bookmark where you were at!  EASY!!!!  The capability is there and it may not happen E.V.E.R. because it would clutter up OSD, add all these shortcut elements to the database, etc.  Funny how you mentioned it better take .5 seconds!  HA - that's your computer speed.  Starting a DVD in MC has taken .1 seconds and sometimes it takes 3 seconds!   Do I freak if it is more than 1 sec?  No, I understand a lot is going on.

[benn600]

JRiver,

Does adding a DVD Chapter shortcut feature seem feasible?  My preferred storage medium would be a special shortcut (XML?) file stored right inside the DVD folder so other HTPCs would find the files and auto import them.  The interface could simply be "Create Shortcut" and then MC would create a shortcut to the START of the chapter you are currently on.  It would be bad to directly link where you are at because you'd start a few seconds into the actual video.  The result would be a special file that MC would import and it would basically be a shortcut to the DVD with a hard coded bookmark time.

Thanks everyone!

[Daydream]

Media Center is already doing this.  When I've tried syncing a DVD to my iPod a year ago or so, MC listed the chapters and allowed one to be chosen.  Why do you think it's so hard?  MC right now has a bookmark feature that will jump to a point.

I believe we are talking about slightly different things. I would refer back to your initial Simpson example where you mentioned "PLAY Simpsons 11.2 (Season 11, Disc 2) at chapter 5". While I don't have the Simpson DVDs, for all the series that I have an episode is not a chapter. An episode is a PGC with its own chapters. What you are saying with reference to chapters might be feasible to some degree (maybe), but it won't give you access to episodes. The PGC's episodes are in, they can be in any arbitrary order depending how the DVD was authored. Can be in the same VTS, can be one one PGC per one VTS and many other mind-bending combination. Scanning the structure and learning what's what it won't have any base of reference, i.e. the program wouldn't be able to tell what's an episode what are extras on the same disc.

As for bookmarking are you suggesting this should be done manually? I don't see how I could go beyond 5 DVDs before losing the will to live .

[benn600]

But creating all the individual files requires a lot of overhead for adding episode names, tagging, etc.!  Both methods require manual work--get used to it.

My point is that the bookmarking feature will resume a DVD wherever you were--be it a menu or part way through an episode.  So all we need is a link to the DVD with a hard-coded bookmark.  This would be able to link directly to the start of an episode.

Plus, if special files were created, people could zip up their files for each season of a show since the discs should be the same.  Then just add the 3-7 files to your DVD folder and instantly you would have links to specific episodes.  The tagging info could be stored in the XML files I just described.

[Daydream]

Bear with me this is going to be long.

I have over 20 series, but let's just say 20, rounded. Times 5 seasons a series on average, times 5 discs per season. That'll make it 500 discs. I will never bookmark manually 500 discs. For more than 2000 episodes no less. It's not a matter of time and effort it's the mind over matter thing.

I always follow this idea: I wanna enjoy my collection, not die tweaking it every day. So. Rip the episodes (I did that using 6 drives at once). Then you will discover that the overhead of renaming and tagging them is much less than what you thought. Just make a plan in advance. There are tools for mass-renaming that can do this; in many different ways. Get the episodes' names from epguides.com or the likes, put them in a txt file, and there are tools to rename your episodes from that file. At the very far end of mass-renaming there are regular expression (regex) that can do amazing things. You can have in the end file names for episodes that'll tell you everything, even when the episode was originally aired, what's the online average rating, anything, everything. Filenames to tags in MC after that would be a walk in the park. And then you have a zillion of criteria to work with your material.

But I want even more. I want my MC database to store everything there is, that will ever cross my mind, that I will ever need. I want the duration for each ep. (should I chose not to trust MC scanning my files), an entire cast list for each episode, I want a brief description of the plot of each episode, I want trivia, quotes, notes, comments I wanna have everything... I WANT TO DREAM ORANGE WHEN I FLY OVER MARS!!! And here it comes: even THAT can be automated (well, without me dreaming orange). There is software out there that does that (and exports the info if necessary), which means that it can be done from withing MC too (it's a matter of online info retrieving scripts). Maybe it'll require some work on the programming side from JRiver (regarding expanding the way (meta)data is imported) but that will be work with a definite purpose that can then be used by anybody and everybody, in a consistent way.

As opposed to (in no order): manual work; there is no automation possible; bookmarking it won't be consistent, so it can't be exchanged even if desired -> series are released worldwide, in different zones and discs differ or are even re-released (X-Files) and people would need to be careful as to why isn't apples-to-apples all the time; series are released in different formats (say Stargate was released in volumes of a couple of episodes (first in UK?) and only after as seasons). The amount of variables generated by such a method far exceeds any kind of good return.

But that's just my point of view. Anyways, one thing that I believe we agree on is that collecting TV series still needs some help.

[benn600]

I have 344 discs of television (exactly).  Of course it doesn't take much for someone to discover a series and up that number by 10 seasons * 4 discs.  And I always buy new seasons of certain shows.

There is still a lot of manual work no matter the method.  In my experience, linking episodes from DVD discs to online info is horrendously difficult.  Episodes are in different orders, chapters are aligned backwards, etc.  I think YADB could be setup for DVDs and it could include all the Shortcut details for MC that would be created by users and shared.  So upon checking YADB, your discs could be updated with details, title info, bookmark info for shortcuts, etc.

I look forward to a workable solution and realize that the beauty of Media Center is the ability for everyone to customize it just as they want.  Of course there will inherently be some limitations.  I see benefit in the one-file-per-episode system but should add that I am moving from that method.  I had ~8 computers encoding solid for weeks converting my entire collection.  Thousands of hours of computer time.  I actually converted 500+ DVDs 3 times.  I just felt like I was giving up too much.

We'll see how it goes.

[benn600]

As far as "not die tweaking it" I totally agree.  I put in some time up front but have a strict policy for importing CDs, Pictures, etc.  I get the essentials but do not go overboard.  I probably use tags the least of any Media Center user but the tags I use are basically perfect.  I hand examine CD song tags to verify accuracy and scan my own cover art for 100% of my collection.  Once files are imported, I almost never edit tags.  I also don't want to spent a lot of time editing things.