Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[skarsol]

I've been using Media Center for years as a music server, and now I'm trying to ditch ps3mediaserver in order to use Media Center as my one stop shop for media streaming, and I've got just about everything set up except for streaming TV to my 360, which has a pretty big problem I can't figure out. I've customized the view to show categories Program then Season, which works great, but as soon as I enter the Season folder on the 360, it sorts the episodes by filename which is pretty much useless when you're wanting to watch the next episode in order. I tried using the Set rules for file display and set it to sort by Episode (a-z) but the 360 appears to ignore that.

Searching on the forums I see posts from 1 and 2 years ago of people having this same problem and there being a couple really ugly kludges that can be done to alleviate it (like naming my TV files "07 My TV Episode") which would then sort properly but would be horribly ugly and would require me to manually rename each TV show file as they're downloaded (I know I can do a batch operation on the current ones).

Someone suggested that an option to be able to modify the name presented by the DLNA server, so that it served up [Episode]-[Name] (or better, [Episode] with a leading 0 if 1 digit + [Name], would work, and that would be awesome, but I see no Dev response to that and it appears to never have been implemented. This could even be added as a Xbox 360 Compatible checkbox in the DLNA server options like the Playstation 3 one.

Another option is to add a Episode category under Season, which puts each episode into its own folder, which is annoying but makes it at least useable. Unfortunatly, Episode is 1-9 then 10-99, so the 360 sorts it 1, 10, 11, ... 2, 20... etc, which is less than ideal. I tried to see if I could change the Episode library field to force a leading 0, but that doesn't seem to be possible.

Any other options? Something simple I'm missing? Off chance of having custom DLNA name presentation implemented? (As a side note, it works perfectly going to the PS3, sorting by Episode number and even showing the air date for further confirmation. Stupid Microsoft.)

[MrC]

I don't have one of these boxes, nor know much about them.

You can try customize the DLNA view, setting the Video > Name to the expression:

  padnumber([episode], 2) [Name]

This will pad the episode number to 2 places, prefixing Name.

[skarsol]

Okay, I'm trying to find someplace to set that, and I'm not able to. The rules and modifiers window was my best guess, but the rules section only lets me adjust which files do appear, and the modifiers section seems to only really affect sorting.

Maybe I can use that padnumber to at least set the episode fields to be padded so using the episode folders "solution" will at least be sorted correctly.

[MrC]

Sorry, does this help?  See attached.

[skarsol]

Okay, cool, that got me episode folders with proper sorting, so that's a definite improvement, thanks! Now just need to find a way to not have the episode folders at all and instead have the list of episodes sorted properly, but it's looking like that's still impossible.

[IlPadrino]

Okay, cool, that got me episode folders with proper sorting, so that's a definite improvement, thanks! Now just need to find a way to not have the episode folders at all and instead have the list of episodes sorted properly, but it's looking like that's still impossible.

Was this ever made possible?  I'd like to not have to go down another level to get to just one item per folder.

[MrHaugen]

Of course. It's been there forever. Just drop the category with Episode or Season (you might have to leave a simple thing like Series there), and instead go to the "Set rules for file display". Under Modify Results, you add "Sort by" and add "A-Z Season" and "A-Z Episode".

You really should explore these kind of options more. If not, you'll end up missing out on a lot of beneficial customization.

[skarsol]

Not at my 360 currently, but looking at the options it appears that this will give me one big sorted list without indication of the numbering of each episode. Sounds like it will be difficult to get to "Season 7, Episode 2" but maybe I can have it preface the filename with that information. I'll look.

Edit: Yeah, not seeing a way to modify the filename in the display, only the folder names, so there's no way to get the numbers in there without using folders, and if you're missing an episode, just having them sorted doesn't give you useful information. Thanks for the information about the sorts though.

[MrC]

Hang in there - there has been some discussion of modifications to the DLNA server code to allow more complex file name presentations to clients.

[skarsol]

Awesome, that would be a huge feature for me.

[MrHaugen]

It's called captions. The text representation of the "file". This is very advanced for MC clients, and often more limited for DLNA. I do not know how much work it would be to get similar capabilities for other devices.

[IlPadrino]

DLNA captions?  I tried finding some posts on this but had no joy.  Are you talking about MC sending a custom "filename" to the DLNA player that can be customized?

[MrC]

MrHaugen was pointing out that there is an optional attribute that can be passed to DLNA renders for additional information.  Unfortunately, not many use it.

So, MC added the ability to use an expression to present a modified Name value.  This can include, for example, the Track #.