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[9aul]

Hi all (sorry for long post)


After recently building a new HTPC and wanting to get the most out of it, have just purchased J River (using latest 17 beta), mainly for audio and movie playback and streaming but hopefully will be able to migrate all video watching over with time

I have been using xbmc for the past couple of years which is really great software I find it a little clunky for audio and wasnt really getting the best out of my movie collection

Just thought I would give some feedback on my use so far mainly in regards to the theatre view, and give a few comments/suggestions, I realise that the software is in beta and still being developed, so feel free to ignore/disregard them but hopefully will be of some help...


A customisable aspect ratio change depending on source aspect ratio would be really useful  i.e. crop for 4:3 aspects and as source for all wide screen video, currently I find you have to keep changing the aspect depending on source files

Think we need more options in the setup menu to customise controls on the remote, what is there is a great start, but adding more would greatly expand the range that people can use their remotes for, which at the minute is a little limited

Think dynamic linking within the theatre view from track information to artist, album, genre etc for easier navigation would be a great feature and really enhance getting around. Thought that it was already a feature when I found you could scroll down and highlight the extra info but was a bit disappointed when nothing happened when hitting select

The get movie info from Internet is a great option for the standard view, and would be great to have this option within theatre view, especially as their is no auto scrape feature at the min, but even with this feature would be nice to have for update of info or to correct current info

Make the scroll bars more visible - have changed them from the default to wider but are very difficult to see when scrolling big lists of info - some way of seeing what letter/number in a list that you are scrolling past would also be really nice - I see you have done this with the 3d view when scrolling music albums

We need some way of showing episodes and seasons and movies that have been watched, before the user selects them - either a tick or progress bar at the bottom of the file or an option like xbmc where you can globally view/not view watched video via a context menu - currently I have setup a view that only shows unwatched movies and one for shows but is far from ideal and definitely not good for new users having to set this up

Could do with some way of getting to the bottom of a list - I like that you can get back to the top using the left arrow and then from the bottom to the top by pressing down, but there is no way to get back to the bottom again - can be frustrating when you are scrolling a few thousand items

There is a bug that I have found that when changing views with the “more” context menu, it will change a number of views then the cursor will jump back to the media view meaning you have to back to the menu to carry on changing the views, not a big deal really though

I feel the info panel takes up too much room when browsing movies - think the movie thumbnails should be larger (currently difficult to see and cuts off titles) - more like what are being used for the tv shows as you can easily get in-depth info by hitting select, maybe a panel that makes better use of the screen real-estate could be used across the bottom of the screen, this could be used across tv shows too, which currently has no info

The tv episodes are not sorted by episode when selecting a season (maybe I’m doing something wrong?), and to make it more frustrating the episode number is not shown until the episode is selected, so you have no way of knowing what the episode order is. I have created another episode view within the season folder so I now get a thubnail with episode numbers - although no other info until they are selected, is the a better way of doing this currently?

Also would be nice to have the clock show up in all views not just the home screen - maybe the top right of the screen?


Hope this doesnt come across like a rant or criticism, I really like the software especially for audio which it is amazing for especially over my home network with zones, just wanted to give some feedback from a new user, and someone who has been using xbmc extensively for the past couple of years


Anyway thanks and keep up the good work

As a side note i have a lot of old movies that have been ripped in two files with cd1 and cd2 is there any way to get MC to see them as one file?

[mbagge]

As a side note i have a lot of old movies that have been ripped in two files with CD1 and CD2 is there any way to get MC to see them as one file?

This can be done if you rip your videos into .MKV files. Everything from the disc will go in there except the menu part. Then you can use mkvmerge to make one file out of the two. (there is several threads in here describing this in detail) 

[MrHaugen]

I agree with quite a few of this points. If there is one place MC is lacking the most, it is in theater view. This is partially because of the lack of good skinning capabilities I believe. If Theater View skin was highly customizable, and easy to do so as well, I think we would have seen several good user created skins already.

I hope that a few things can be added fast though.
- The Clock should be easy to implement, and have been mentioned a few times. Even Matt was considering this, but then there was silence
- We need better ways to check if things have been watched or not. In some cases this also depends on the following:
- Adding a view for TV Shows and seasons, and corresponding relational Info

There is also the point about better ways to change the views on the fly. Without having to entering options in standard view. This is a bit more work I think. A system is needed to change view properties. A sort of options panel have been suggested for this.

While I would love to see this, one thing that is more pressing in my opinion is the Automatic Scraping system. This is highly needed, and I think JRiver is missing out on lots of users without this feature. Some people is just to lazy to do without it, and they are used to this stuff from other programs like XBMC and is offspring.

[9aul]

mbagge - thanks will look into mkv merge, was hoping to not have to re-rip the files but can be treated as an ongoing project I guess, the original rip quality wasn't too great anyways

MrHaugen - agreed, the theatre view is not quite up to the level of the rest of the software at the minute, if I could have one feature it would be the watched indicators, using theatre view for watching multiple tv shows can be a headache without this, auto scraping a la xbmc would also be great to see

[rick.ca]

if I could have one feature it would be the watched indicators, using theatre view for watching multiple tv shows can be a headache without this

There are already a number of ways to distinguish watched items. If there were some sort of automatic watch indicator, it would have to be optional—so as to not interfere with these other methods.

[9aul]

Thanks for the link...

Have just spent some time looking at this, have added the expression for the file caption (below) which when combined with the watched/not watched customised views and adding additional info to the info panel gives a workable solution, although still a little convoluted

For anyone unfamiliar with this and wants to get a watched indicator only on video files I have used the following expression which seems to work well (just copy and paste into the file caption in theatre view advanced settings)

[Name]If(IsEqual([Media Type],Video),If(IsEqual([Last Played],never played),,*),)

This gives a star after any played video file but can be customised to suit, change the star to anything you like

Would be great if this went even further and allowed us to change things such as text colour and fonts and even include some symbols, also think it would help preserve sanity if this could be set per view/media type within the theatre view settings

[flac.rules]

I agree with quite a few of this points. If there is one place MC is lacking the most, it is in theater view. This is partially because of the lack of good skinning capabilities I believe. If Theater View skin was highly customizable, and easy to do so as well, I think we would have seen several good user created skins already.

I hope that a few things can be added fast though.
- The Clock should be easy to implement, and have been mentioned a few times. Even Matt was considering this, but then there was silence
- We need better ways to check if things have been watched or not. In some cases this also depends on the following:
- Adding a view for TV Shows and seasons, and corresponding relational Info

There is also the point about better ways to change the views on the fly. Without having to entering options in standard view. This is a bit more work I think. A system is needed to change view properties. A sort of options panel have been suggested for this.

While I would love to see this, one thing that is more pressing in my opinion is the Automatic Scraping system. This is highly needed, and I think JRiver is missing out on lots of users without this feature. Some people is just to lazy to do without it, and they are used to this stuff from other programs like XBMC and is offspring.

Yeah, I totally agree. While Theatre View is pretty functional, it lacks when it comes to the smooth looks of many of its competitors. Maybe the skinning system is the problem, I don't know, but there are not the same amount if user created skins for MC as it is for other platforms.

[mvph1]

Coming from streamedmp mediaportal, what I'd like to see in Theater View are:

Display background images for a selected movie based on local fan art.  Currently, this only seems to work for tv series/music and pulls from online sources.

Customizable/skinable OSD

More layout options for scrolling through your list, ie. a single scrolling row at the bottom

An easy way to mark watched/unwatched from the user interface that's not based on whether you actually played a file