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[stricko]

I was giving a friend a demo of MC16 / Theater View the other day, and whilst he was blown away by the functionality and the flexibility, he decided that it wasn't for him because "the learning curve was too steep". When a dug a little further, it turns out that it's not the technology that's intimidating, but the apparent multiplicity of ways of performing even the most basic of tasks. One specific question that came up was how to handle multi part video files. These include;

Movies split into more than one avi file, either for length, or to handle extras
TV series with multiple series/epsiodes
Multi-disk DVD sets, including both box sets, and extras disks

And these all sit alongside a multiple of single file / single disk titles within your collection.

There are obvious ways (and no doubt many less obvious ways) of dealing with each of the above, but I'm interested in how to deal with them all together.

So for example, I have lots of recorded TV shows, some one-offs some series etc etc. For a Video, there are several tags that I could use to identify / group these: Season, Series, Episode, Name....... all spring to mind. Using these for House M.D. Season 5, episode 21 is pretty obvious, as would be the query to retrieve them. But how would I tag a one off Hugh Lawrie music special, so that the same query would also pick it up in a reasonable structured manner, when there is no obvious Season, Series or Episode values.

I've already built my own way of dealing with this, and many other combinations, (which I would say fits 85% of what I want), but the real point here, and the my friends stumbling block, is that I had to work it out for myself.  Please bear in mind that I'm primarily talking about a family friendly theater view environment here, so multiple complex queries handling different types of files is not going to get high marks. This starts with someone using a remote to select VIDEO, and them not necessarily knowing or caring about file types, box sets etc. The user might not know what they are looking for, so everyting must be visible, but in a logical structured way.

So, I'm keen to understand how others may have tackled this. Your thoughts? 



 

[stricko]

Anyone want to chip in with this?

[Matt]

If the problem is a steep learning curve, I don't think categorization and hierarchy are the best answers.  How about a flat list of videos with new ones at the top?

At home my 4 year old daughter likes controlling the remote.  She can find television and movies pretty easily with the stock Theater View layout.  I don't have 10,000 movies like some users, so maybe hierarchy becomes more important in extreme cases like that.  But if you're advanced enough to have 10,000 movies, you probably aren't the type that minds a learning curve.

[csimon]

No easy answer on this.  Just some considerations:

How would your friend go about organising and searching within a physical DVD library?  The DVDs might be structured in a specific way, but with physical media you've only got the choice of one structure.  Your example of the Hugh Laurie music special - how would you go about finding that in a roomful of ceiling-to-floor shelving packed with DVDs? This isn't really a computer problem, this is a logistical problem that your friend would have to work out how to do in real life. So if he/she can give you an answer, then this should inform how they would need to set up their digital library.

The question about TV series in particular is quite simple I think.  Your Video menu should have sub categories of the main types of video files you may have. I'm not talking about specific file types and formats and computer-level stuff, I'm talking about logical divisions in your DVD library, such a Movies, TV Shows, Home Movies, Music Concerts, Documentaries.  Each of these types will have its own way of categorising and indexing - TV Shows in particular are going to be of the format you describe, i.e. Season,Series,Episode etc, as an inherent "structure" to the collection, although you can still provide additional custom views which sort them by year, actor, genre etc.  There is not really going to be a hierarchical structure like this for Movies I guess, apart from being able to sort by attributes such as genre, director, actor, year etc.  So generally, there are two things you need to think about for each video type: 1. Whether there is an "inherent" structure to the collection, and 2. What additional ways you might like to browse the collection.  These will tell you what tags you have to populate for each video type.

As to multi-disk sets, or one title composed of separate physical files, you can look at how many people solve the same problem in Audio, i.e. multi-CD sets.  Different people have different ways to deal with this problem, and many media servers are not flexible enough to be able to cope with it, but the way I do it is as follows.

I use an additional tag called Volume or Disc Number which can be used to assign different identities to the individual disks within the set, while retaining a single, common identity for the overarching box.  The main title of all disks is the same but the volume is unique. Please see http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=64030.0 which is a thread dealing with these considerations.  The main gripe I have with MC is that this method involves defining an extra level in your custom views, which is fine and is exactly how it should be done, but for most of your titles this extra level is superfluous as it there will only be one volume.  MC should allow for the ability to skip a level if it returns only one item.

[stricko]

I use exactly the same approach with the music collection, and it works well. The use of an existing, and well supported tag as the primary identifier of both a single disc and/or a multi volume set provides the simplicity of access that works well in Theater view. I'm not sure that I've picked up your concern in the last paragraph about skipping a level if there is only one item, ie. a single disk set. In Theater View at least, and using a view such as Artist / Album/ Disk, MC does exactly what you suggest, if all the files within an album have the same "Disk" value, it drops straight to the file list.

I'm looking for the same sort of elegance for videos, but I guess that there are just more possible ways of looking at the collection. I have a certain amount of pre-categorisation, the collection is split between "Movies" and "Videos", but that has resulted in TV series appearing n both sets (depending n whether they came from a DVD or individual files. This is what has prompted the question, I know I need to move to another level, but there is no "obvious", or recommended way of getting there.

One aspect of the challenge is that the data structure is the opposite from the audio example above. It seems like for audio, Album is the default identifier that everyone uses, so it's esy to build complexity below it, without compromising the overall structure. For video, Name seems to be the default identifier but the challenge is grouping Names together. Fundamentally, I'm lazy and I don't want the overhead of complex tagging for every file I load. Maybe I just have to accept it....

[rick.ca]

Fundamentally, I'm lazy and I don't want the overhead of complex tagging for every file I load. Maybe I just have to accept it...

You're right, video is different from audio. There's nothing more or less complex about its tagging, however. You'll need to tag series with [Series], [Season] and [Episode]. But that's analogous to the requirement to tag audio with [Genre], [Artist] and [Album] in order that it be organized according. Also analogous to audio is that the effort required to organize and tag the media can be minimized by a sensible work flow. What that entails depends on how the media and its meta data are acquired, as well as personal needs and preferences. Series already in an organized folder structure (e.g., \Video\Series\[Series]\[Season]) and a filename that includes [Episode] are easily handled in MC. Much of the tagging data might also come more or less automatically from some other source (e.g., Sick Beard Integration).

[csimon]

In Theater View at least, and using a view such as Artist / Album/ Disk, MC does exactly what you suggest, if all the files within an album have the same "Disk" value, it drops straight to the file list.

Ah yes, this is probably down to the way I'm using MC. I'm not actually using it as a client, I am only using it as a DLNA server. The DLNA server does not do this automatic skipping. But I do believe that it should!  Or at least allow the option to skip a single-value level.

[csimon]

I'm looking for the same sort of elegance for videos, but I guess that there are just more possible ways of looking at the collection. I have a certain amount of pre-categorisation, the collection is split between "Movies" and "Videos", but that has resulted in TV series appearing n both sets (depending n whether they came from a DVD or individual files.

It probably needs the structure on disk to be defined so that the tags can be automatically filled.  So that any videos appearing in the TV Shows folder will get a "type" of "TV Shows" and any in the Movies folder will get a type of "Movies".  They won't appear in both lists. If you have certain TV programmes that don't appear in seasons but just have episodes, then their Season folder will just be an arbitrary value and MC should skip that level so that you don't see that value and you go straight to a list of episodes.

I think the concept is the same as audio, as audio too will have different "types" of things that will be tagged and sorted in different ways. The obvious example is classical music, which would not normally be indexed as Artist and Album.  But if you make sure you have a "type" tag in your music, you can ensure that these different types are separated in your menus and get a different browse tree.

[glynor]

For the original poster... Here's the way I do it:

For my TV Shows, which I define as anything that has multiple "episodes" (so it includes miniseries type content), I set [Media Sub Type] = TV Show, and then fill out [Series], [Season], [Episode], and [Name].  For stuff I really like, I actually bother to go in and add [Description] and [Series Description], but I have pretty few of those tagged.  For the [Name] tag, I actually use this format: [Season]e[Episode] - Episode Title.  I do this to simplify sorting, and to give episodes names where I haven't bothered to actually tag the episode titles (so they'll just look like 2e06, 2e07, 2e08, etc).

For miniseries shows, and similar items, I usually either tag [Season] with 1 (in case they ever make a "round two") or just leave it blank.  Those episodes are usually just numbered and named.  It doesn't really matter much what you have listed for the season, because if there is only one to show, Theater View will skip that "tier" when you're drilling down into the shows.

My sort order, for both Standard and Theater View is: [Series], [Season], [Episode], [Name].  That way, even if I haven't actually filled out the [Episode] tag, they'll still sort right if the [Name] tag is formatted like I explained above.  Filling out [Episode] is easy though if you make clever use of the PadNumber(Counter(), 2) function.

So, that brings me to "special episodes".  I don't actually have too many of them, just for stuff I really like or want to keep archived for a long time... But, I've come up with a pretty good solution:

1. For "special episodes" that are not tied to any particular season (so maybe DVD extras that are generalized about the show, and not really specific to a particular season or episode), I tag them with [Season] = Special.  The [Season] tag is just a string field, so you can put text in there, even if they're usually numbers.  I have relatively few of these.

2. For "special episodes" and extras that ARE tied to a particular season, I usually tag them as episode "00", and then tag the [Season] field normally.  They sort to the top of the list.  If this annoys you, you can just tag the [Episode] as "Special" (that's also a string field), and then they'll sort to the bottom of the list.

Lastly, I'm now making use of the [Media Sub Type] = Other choice to have a set of auxiliary video that doesn't cleanly fit into the other Media Sub Types.  Then, for those, I tag [Genre] to classify them into different "sets".  So, I have a Comedy Genre for all of my Standup Comedian performances, Instructional for videos that would be classified as instructions or self-help types of things, a Test Files Genre for my special set of tester files, and then I have a bunch of ones that I use for my editing work that probably wouldn't apply to you.  For these, I just have Standard and Theater views that filter to only show the "Other" files, and then uses [Genre] as the category, and then just displays the file lists sorted by name.

The only thing I don't have a good solution for is Movie "extras".  Currently, I'm stacking those with the movies themselves.  This works great in Standard View, as the movie itself can be the stack top, and then if you want the others, you just expand the stack and you can play what you want.

Unfortunately, this system doesn't work in Theater View.  I posted a thread a while back about this very thing, and it is a problem that could be solved quite easily with a few tweaks to MC.  Mostly, I don't have or use very many movie extras.  I have a few, for the 10-or-so of my absolute all-time favorite movies.  Most of those extras are crap anyway, and you'd only ever want to watch them once, if that, but some of them are very cool, so I keep them if I have them and just stack them.

For all of this, using the tags makes it easy to have rules pre-defined in the Rename, Move, and Copy tool to organize the file structure on disk later when you get around to it.  I have essentially two different "incoming" folders (one for downloads/rips, and one for recordings).  MC monitors these folders and automatically imports what it finds.  As I finish tagging the files when I get to it, I go through and use the Rename, Move, and Copy tool to file these away to the M:\Video\ directory structure where they "belong".  I always can find a list of stuff I need to deal with, because I can just look at the contents of those folders in MC.

At home my 4 year old daughter likes controlling the remote.  She can find television and movies pretty easily with the stock Theater View layout.  I don't have 10,000 movies like some users, so maybe hierarchy becomes more important in extreme cases like that.  But if you're advanced enough to have 10,000 movies, you probably aren't the type that minds a learning curve.

That is true in some regards.  I have much too large of a video library online to deal with a truly flat file listing in Theater View in most cases.  However, one of my most useful views is certainly my "New Video" view.  This is sorted basically just like you described (newest on top, just one list, no drill-down).  This is really nice for the stuff I'm NOT going to bother tagging, or if you just want to get in there to watch something that just recorded last night.

I do NOT bother to tag every file I ingest into the system.  If it is something "junky" like an episode of Law and Order that I'm going to watch once and then delete, I don't bother to tag it.  The new Theater View auto-detecting of [Media Sub Type] works quite well.  Sometimes I have to go in and tag just the [Series] tag for some shows, if I end up with a bunch of them.  The untagged files don't show in my "main" Theater Views, but they're easy to access now with the new three-tiered Theater View setup.  I just have some special views that DO show the untagged stuff and use the new automatic sorting system.

I'm happy to post a ZIP of my library file so you can take a look if you're curious.  All of the files will be "broken" of course, but it can give you some ideas about how I manage things.

Update:  I messed up in the part numbered 1 above.  I said [Series] = Special which doesn't make any sense.  I meant [Season] of course.

[glynor]

The need to tag the files manually is a huge problem.  We actually had a MASSIVE discussion about this very topic when the new Theater View changes were first being discussed.  The developers basically said that in an "ideal world" they would have more automatic tagging system that could parse file names and automatically look up metadata from online databases like Wikipedia, theTVDB, and IMDB, but that it probably wouldn't make it into this version, as they have other fish to fry.

I spend the time.  I've trained my wife to do some simple tagging tasks, and she does help out occasionally (much more with music than video), but mostly it falls on my shoulders.

If you are going to do this, you MUST learn how to use some of the expression functions, and how to make efficient use of your tagging time (don't do things one at a time, break the job into hunks, and apply similar tags to as many files as is possible at once).

[Daydream]

The only thing I don't have a good solution for is Movie "extras".

Any opinion on mkv seamless branching and ordered chapters? Chances to be implemented before MC 20? At its far extreme use, it could probably make a grown man cry seeing how you can start the main feature, any additional extras, with embedded covers and whatnot, from a 20KB file.

[glynor]

Any opinion on mkv seamless branching and ordered chapters?

Not really, other than that would be a huge nightmare to actually implement (for the users)... There aren't any good editing tools for creating these beasts, and frankly, if I cared about having that level of interactivity in my video files, I'd just rip the DVDs to image files and use those.

I don't.  I just want to be able to hang onto a few of them here and there, and have an easy way to manage them as one unit.  Stacking is perfect for this, except that you can't choose the stacked files from Theater or Display View.

Sorry, I misunderstood what this was about (I thought you were talking about the rudimentary DVD menu-like replication features of the MKV container format)...

My general sentiment still holds... I probably wouldn't bother.  Storage is cheap.  If I really want to have a "Director's Cut" version of a movie, and an "Original Cut" version of the move (I actually do have a few of these), I just rip them twice in full, and then Stack the files in MC with the one I like the best on top.  So, for example, I have both the originals and the new versions of the Star Wars series.  Of course, Luke shot first so you can guess which ones are on top.  

That method is much more flexible and much more portable to other applications and systems.  Any file you have for archive is only as good as your confidence that you'll be able to use it still in five or ten years... My confidence level with that would be classified as almost nil.

[Daydream]

Not arguing just want it to be clear about what's doable. It's not only about the Director Cut and movie version. It's about attaching the extras to the movie. It's about creating chapter Editions that could play the movie, the movie and the extras, the movie and the-sky's-the-limit and so on. It's about storing the Cover, tags, subtitles, fonts for subtitles and who know what else in the file, either as a global set or as per track. And it's an open format that's been around a along time.

If I understand correctly Boxee is reviewing the option to support all this. Maybe it's not such a niche thingie like it appears at first look?

And this outlook on... life, with what may happen in 5 or 10 years has its caveats. In 100 years nothing we do right now will matter; should we stop developing everything then? Or is it that we can work only on features that make us comfortable withing the limited time frame that we imagine we can predict?

[glynor]

Not arguing just want it to be clear about what's doable. It's not only about the Director Cut and movie version. It's about attaching the extras to the movie. It's about creating chapter Editions that could play the movie, the movie and the extras, the movie and the-sky's-the-limit and so on. It's about storing the Cover, tags, subtitles, fonts for subtitles and who know what else in the file, either as a global set or as per track. And it's an open format that's been around a along time.

Right, I got that.  I was just using the "versions" as an example.  But the bigger problem is that the process to actually create them is very manual and time consuming, especially when compared to how long it takes to Stack two separate files in MC (in other words, no time at all).  I'm just skeptical of "optional" container features like that that will limit what players your file will be supported by.... Even if MC supported it fully, I wouldn't use it.  Does Quicktime Player with Perian?  Does AirVideo server?  Does VLC?  So on and so forth...  I've been burned before, and we only get so many days.

That doesn't mean it is a terrible idea.  Just that, at the current time, I wouldn't spend my time doing it.

[rick.ca]

...especially when compared to how long it takes to Stack two separate files in MC (in other words, no time at all).

If a Theatre View Play stack command were available and the OSD included a menu for choosing any item in the stack from a list, it's difficult to imagine why anything else would be necessary. A "normal" play order (e.g., trailer-movie-extras) could be easily established when the stack is created, and it would still be easy to see the queue and choose what to play next. I also like the idea of stack play because then choosing from a list would not be required very often. Just pressing <Next> would be sufficient to skip a trailer and start the movie, for example.

[glynor]

Exactly, rick.

[Daydream]

But video stacks it's a local invention. This time, echoing Glynor somewhat, but from a different angle, I don't like to tie my video collection to that. MKV options are at the file level. You can program a piece of software to understand them, teach a hardware player to deal with them. What's the opposite? Everybody in the industry falling in line with JRiver?

[glynor]

But video stacks it's a local invention. This time, echoing Glynor somewhat, but from a different angle, I don't like to tie my video collection to that. MKV options are at the file level. You can program a piece of software to understand them, teach a hardware player to deal with them. What's the opposite? Everybody in the industry falling in line with JRiver?

Fair enough.  That totally makes sense.  I certainly wouldn't be opposed to support for that capability of MKVs.  I'd really like to see better built-in tagging of MKVs, using the container's native tagging system (I'm not sure just where we stand on that, actually).  I just think that the main problem with getting player applications to support the more esoteric features of MKV is that there are no good, user friendly tools you can use to create them (and I really don't see MC going down that route).  There's nothing with the ease-of-use of Handbrake or whatever that can take a BluRay release and just do it without a bunch of fiddling.  And because that isn't really out there, people don't have the files, and so it isn't important for players to support them.  Chicken and the egg.

If MC did support them, I'd consider it, but I'd want to see lots of other software support first.  What does support them right now?  Does Haali still?  Is there anything else that works well with them and has a nice UI for choosing what branch to play?  Ahhh... No, I'd really need AirVideo to support them...

One thing to consider, though, is that my files will work no matter what.  And, if there is some terrible incident involving some monkeys, a lightning strike, and a naked man carrying a large foam-rubber bananna in Minneapolis; and JRiver's floating command station is destroyed (think of the humanity!), the metadata can follow my "vanilla" files wherever they go, via the JRSidecar.xml files and a dusty Pearl book I have in the corner.  The thought fills me with dread, of course, but not as much as remuxing a bunch of not-well-supported files with esoteric command line tools (which take days and weeks of scouring Doom9 to understand) scares me.  That's all I'm saying.