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Author Topic: Problems/Questions with Theater View  (Read 2159 times)

DanielBMe

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Problems/Questions with Theater View
« on: November 03, 2012, 10:22:43 pm »

Using Theater View for the first time and I'm encountering a few problems.  I hope someone doesn't mind helping out.  I want to make sure I can do what I would like before buying the product.  So far though, I have to say I'm loving the look and feel of the JR.  I'm quite impressed.

1)  When using the Wall View within Theater View, I noticed that the cover art and fonts are a little small especially when viewing from the couch.  Is there a way to make these larger?

2)  I noticed that JR seems to be accessing my network drives quite frequently.  When it does so, the system seems to freeze for a minute or so.  Not sure what's going on.  I did notice that the drive that is be accessed the most by far is the one that contains my music collection which is quite large.  Not sure how to stop this.  Any ideas as to what is going on?

3)  Just curious as to when viewing the music library  or movie library, is JR scanning my network drives for the thumbnails or are the images stored on the local pc? 

4)  Can JR group movies via boxed sets?  For ex, I have numerous James Bond films.  Rather than showing each in the main library I would like a grouping called James Bond Films and when entering that, then see a list of the James Bond films.  Is this possible and how?

5)  When viewing my movie library I noticed some problems with my Planet Earth series.  I have a folder called Planet Earth, then below that a folder for each of the separate episodes.  The name of the folder is the actual episode name.  In the Theater View I'm seeing each of the episodes as separate items called Planet Earth.  I believe this is because the sidecar file from MyMovies.  In MM I had an entry called Planet Earth, attached to that entry via the disc icon, I created separate entries for each of the episodes.  So when creating a sidecar, it appears to just name them all Planet Earth.  How do I correct this?

I really hope someone can help me figure this out.  Thanks
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kensn

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Re: Problems/Questions with Theater View
« Reply #1 on: November 03, 2012, 10:45:21 pm »

1) I do not know of a way, but that does not mean it can not be done.

2) It could be the drive is powered down (sleep mode) and it takes a bit to spin up. My NAS does this. Once you access the drive does the delay go away?

3) The thumbnails are on a local drive, JR builds these from embedded cover art, from covert art in folders and/or from a predetermined location. See Options - File Location to see where the cover art is being located. Cover art and thumbnails are different items.

4) There is not direct support for this, but there are ways. One way is to copy the name of the movie into the Series field. Then for instance change all your James Bond movies to Series James Bond. If you then sort all your movies by Series the James bond will be group as one (until you open the group) and all the others will be single items. More on this if you need help.

5) For this I would again look at what the tags are for Series and Episode.
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DanielBMe

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Re: Problems/Questions with Theater View
« Reply #2 on: November 03, 2012, 11:27:29 pm »

Quote
2) It could be the drive is powered down (sleep mode) and it takes a bit to spin up. My NAS does this. Once you access the drive does the delay go away
?
I guess what I am trying to determine is when browsing my movies or music library, would this cause my drives to spin up or is JR using thumbnails stored locally to display?  Do all movies and music get thumbnails created on import?  If so how and where can I confirm this? I have the cover art stored locally from what I can see in the settings.  However, I only see cover art for music not movies. 

Quote
4) There is not direct support for this, but there are ways. One way is to copy the name of the movie into the Series field. Then for instance change all your James Bond movies to Series James Bond. If you then sort all your movies by Series the James bond will be group as one (until you open the group) and all the others will be single items. More on this if you need help.

I was reading up on this but the one concern I have is what happens for a single movie that is not part of a boxed set?  If I hit enter on a single non boxed set movie, will it take me right to the movie details or another item/image I have to click?
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kensn

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Re: Problems/Questions with Theater View
« Reply #3 on: November 03, 2012, 11:41:01 pm »

2) I guess the answer is yes. I believe it is verifying the files exist, may be looking at the XLM files for info and/or getting the cover art to display. I am out on a limb here, I am just theorizing. My drives also display this behavior when they have not been accessed for a while.

4) Yes it does require 1 more Enter button to get to the watch screen, the first enter will give you the same screen again, next enter is the details for a single movie.It was a trade off I was willing to do.

Ken
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DanielBMe

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Re: Problems/Questions with Theater View
« Reply #4 on: November 04, 2012, 06:15:03 am »

Quote
4) Yes it does require 1 more Enter button to get to the watch screen, the first enter will give you the same screen again, next enter is the details for a single movie.It was a trade off I was willing to do.

I'm quite surprised that this is the case.  I was having this problem with Meedio something like 5 or 6yrs ago and they managed to include an option to skip single items.  You would think that something this basic would have been implemented a long time ago.

Do you know if this is being looked at by the developers?

Just curious, if I have a movie name that I want to modify the display name of how do I modify it without changing the actual folder name?

Oh and getting back to the Theater View Wall dvd cover art and font, any ideas where I could find the answer?  Is there another "official" way to ask that question or is it only via the Forum?

BTW is boxed sets handled any better in MC 18?
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DanielBMe

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Re: Problems/Questions with Theater View
« Reply #5 on: November 04, 2012, 07:17:20 am »

I also noticed that Date is unpopulated for almost all my movies.  In MyMovies it was populated for every movie.  What would be the best way to get it to populate for all my movies.  I have about 700.
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csimon

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Re: Problems/Questions with Theater View
« Reply #6 on: November 04, 2012, 07:35:30 am »

I also want to do the same thing with boxed sets, in particular James Bond! I also have Planet Earth.

4. No, there is no better handling of boxed sets in MC18. You can only do it by having an extra level of drilling down, i.e. use Series, Grouping, or any other field to provide that level of a boxed set. The only issue is that single disks will have that extra level that you'll have to drill down into. Some views, e.g. the web services for Gizmo, automatically skip levels if only one value is returned, so making this boxed set category transparent. But this is not consistent amoingst clients. For example, the DLNA views do not have this facility. I think Theater View does, not sure, so if Theater View is what you want to use then you might be OK.

The way I've done it for the moment is not fill in the Genre field for James Bond movies, populated the Grouping filed witgh "James Bond" then added a rule on relevant views to exclude files where the Genre is empty. Then I have a separate view for James Bon, selecting files where Grouping is "James Bond", and then sorting the files by Year rather than alphabetically (I do this by having a single Category called Name which consists of an expression "[Year]: [Name]". So I have an extra menu item for James Bond and I get the films listed chronologically.  I have one global view that just listgs all movies alphabetically and all James Bond movies appear here, alphabetically, not in a boxed set.  There is no real easy way of doing it.

5. I have one folder called Planet Earth and each episode is one .mkv file in that folder named as follows:

Planet Earth.S01E<epiosde nbr>.<episode name>.mkv

MC18 then imports the files correctly with no further intervention, tags are filled in correctly, artwork for the whole series is found AND for each individual episode. My own standard view for TV shows (with categories of Season and Episode) display it correctly but Theater Views has two views by default, one which displays the episodes in the wrong order ("Series") and the other which does it correctly ("Season").  The first seems to use a tag called Program which in my library is not populated.

Anyway, if you are getting an extraneous folder level then you need to look at what tags are populated for each of your episodes then compare it to the particular view you are using to see what it is using. It is likely there is a mismatch, i.e. there are tags that the view expects that are not populated in your library or they are populated with the wrong values. In my library, for Planet Earth, I have:


Series: Planet Earth
Season: 1
Episode: <episode nbr>
Name: <episode name>

It doesn't actually matter what your physical folder structure is on disk, unless you have told the import to fill in tags based on folder names.  Naming TV shows with the above convention allows MC to automatically fill in the corrrect items and look up metadata from the net.
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csimon

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Re: Problems/Questions with Theater View
« Reply #7 on: November 04, 2012, 07:37:57 am »

I'm quite surprised that this is the case.  I was having this problem with Meedio something like 5 or 6yrs ago and they managed to include an option to skip single items.  You would think that something this basic would have been implemented a long time ago.

Do you know if this is being looked at by the developers?

It was implemented in some areas but not others. People complained that they didn't want it (although I don't know why it can't be an option) and also that it is up to the client not the server to do this. Yes, I come from Meedio and I really miss that Skip Single Items option.

Quote
Just curious, if I have a movie name that I want to modify the display name of how do I modify it without changing the actual folder name?

Change the Name tag in the library.
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DanielBMe

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Re: Problems/Questions with Theater View
« Reply #8 on: November 06, 2012, 02:48:11 pm »

In regards to the size of the displayed dvd's in Wall View while using Theaterview
Quote
1) I do not know of a way, but that does not mean it can not be done.

Do you know where one would be able to look into this?  Is there an xml file somewhere that can be edited?
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