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Author Topic: Showcase  (Read 2826 times)

darichman

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Showcase
« on: April 28, 2009, 04:20:27 am »

I had some friends interested in MC so I made some screenshots to send to them. Thought I'd post them here too...
If anyone has some really cool setups or views or customisations and feels like sharing, post them here!

http://www.pix01.com/gallery/7E547B99-5004-478D-A4AC-37AD672F51A4/MC_Gallery/

(PS I think some of the screens on the J River website could be updated maybe as well to fit in with new features?)
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JimH

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Re: Showcase
« Reply #1 on: April 28, 2009, 06:34:56 am »

Thanks.  I added a link called "MORE SCREENSHOTS" to the MC13 features thread here.
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pank2002

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Re: Showcase
« Reply #2 on: April 28, 2009, 08:15:12 am »

Lots of fancy views! Very impressive!

How do you do a "poster-view" for tv shows as here:


I have a similar view but in my view it just shows a screen from the various episodes. The above setup looks much better.

BTW: You must have a lot of hard drives! It seems like a huge collection!

Cheers,
Rasmus
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darichman

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Re: Showcase
« Reply #3 on: April 29, 2009, 02:55:21 am »

How do you do a "poster-view" for tv shows as here:


Do you have some posters to use? If not, that's the first thing you'll need to do... You can just use a google image search, or you can use a dedicated site. I use http://www.movieposterdb.com/ but it's not free. For movies, IMPAwards is free and pretty good. I'm sure there are others too!

Second, you need a field to group your episodes by. I use a custom field [Movie] which I use to assign the name of the movie/show (I know it's a bit confusing using "Movie" for TV shows, but I didn't want to have two separate fields so I just called it movie, and use it for both movies and TV episodes). You could just as easily use [Album] or similar if you didn't want to create a dedicated field. All of the episodes of a particular show should be tagged with the same [Movie] entry - eg "Family Guy". The seasons/episode #'s etc can be used to organise/sort the files within the show. Add your poster (image files) to all episodes belonging to a particular movie. This can be done automatically if you place the images in the folders alongside with the files.

Once you've done that, it's just a matter of creating a view scheme.
View -> Add View ->Add library view -> Empty View
Under "show categories", pick [Movie] (or your equivalent field)
Under "view as" select Movie Thumbnails

And that's it. The top part of the view will show the movie/show thumbnails (which should be the posters if you have correctly assigned the coverart), and the bottom (collapsible) part shows the episode list. That's how I do it anyway - you can tweak the settings any which way to suit your own needs and setup ;)

Quote
You must have a lot of hard drives! It seems like a huge collection!

I've got six internal 1TB ones and a few externals for backups. It doesn't matter how much you've got... you'll always end up filling it!  ;D
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Daydream

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Re: Showcase
« Reply #4 on: April 30, 2009, 02:37:45 am »

darichman, got a question for you. The view scheme looks nice and useful. However don't you feel no inclination to have a screenshot per episode (and per season since I'm at it)? I mean with a scheme like that (or with a stack or with anything else), should you ever "open" it, you would get let's say for X-Files - 202 shots of the same cover picture. I don't know how you watch a series - hey, everybody, how do you watch series? - but unless you start watching everything chronologically, any work at season/episode level ends up in a soup of hundreds of shots of the same image. In Theatre view it's even more apparent since the cover is more largely displayed, and it's the same all the time (goes towards lack of being representative).

Any thoughts? (automatic thumbnails don't count, it's too automatic). I don't have a better solution right now - short of creating nice covers manually which will take an eternity, or finding a magic source, but I'd like to hear other opinions on the concept.

Note: We should start a thread (if there isn't one) about media servers and MC :).
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darichman

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Re: Showcase
« Reply #5 on: April 30, 2009, 05:22:31 am »

...don't you feel no inclination to have a screenshot per episode (and per season since I'm at it)? I mean with a scheme like that (or with a stack or with anything else), should you ever "open" it, you would get let's say for X-Files - 202 shots of the same cover picture. I don't know how you watch a series - hey, everybody, how do you watch series? - but unless you start watching everything chronologically, any work at season/episode level ends up in a soup of hundreds of shots of the same image.

Yes, you're 100% correct - every episode for every season of a particular show will have the same thumbnail:


Click to enlarge.


This is necessary if you want a single poster to represent a TV show (as a collection of files), otherwise the above views would just show fanned/rotating images of the coverart for individual files. The ideal solution would be the ability to assign coverart at the "Show", "Season" and "File" levels ... but short of that, I guess you have to make a choice.

How do others do it?

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