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[yannis]

I meant to write this post for a while now, but 6233638 already covered many of my gripes, so instead of hijacking his thread, I'll just add here a few more things, mostly related to video, that I consider it's worth addressing. Please don't get me wrong, I think MC is amazing in most respects, and maybe that's why its few shortcomings feel so sore at times. Feel free to correct me where I'm wrong, and please do excuse my english.


General
1. Find and Replace is a blanket operation; in fact it should allow for skipping certain instances.

2. It would be great if we could mark specific pairs of files to no longer appear together in smartlists (eg dupes etc). There's an excellent way to do this in Calibre, so I guess it's feasible.

3. The wiki needs to be updated and expanded. A noob has no other way to find out what's possible in MC. At some point I spent countless hours manually cleaning up parts of fields, before I incidentally found out in the forum that there were ways to do it automatically.

4. ...And as I wrote elsewhere recently, it would be great if somehow all the tried expressions, views, smartlists etc that people have created over time were collected, sorted and made available for noobs - either in the wiki or preferably in MC itself. E.g. simple append/prepend operations, so common in tags editing, should be readily available from menus and not only through a cryptic syntax in the Tags window.


Importing
5. When importing video files, or while using the "Fill Properties From Filename", it would be helpful if MC could locate existing external subtitles and auto fill a custom field [Subs], possibly based on the naming structure (Dir - Title - Year - SubLang.srt). That should even be easier for subtitle streams embedded in MKVs.

Scraping
This is an area that needs to be the focus of serious effort. Even if legal problems don't permit the use of sources like IMDB, there are still ways to improve it. For example,

6. Scraping TMDB with multiple files selected does not take into account the [Year], so MC just picks up data for the first available title (usually the most recent), which results in the wrong info being stored: Raw Deal (1986) is preferred to Raw Deal (1948). Ideally, Get Movie Info should collect the correct film based on the pair [Title] - [Year] or at least offer us an opportunity to disambiguate (just like it happens when we scrape single files).

7. Similarly, when multiple files are scraped, if a title is not an exact match, it is skipped. I miss an option to pause and reshape the search term. As it is now, we have to manually search for each of the files not exactly matched in the first run.

8. While scraping, there's no way to selectively add info from sites; it's either Get All Fields or None At All. If it's too difficult to include tick boxes to select the fields to keep, you could at least include a "Fill Only Empty Fields" option.

9. (I'm not really sure about this one.) When the wrong info is imported, we can't clean all affected fields in one fell swoop. Esp. List type fields (Actors,  Genre, Keywords etc) need manual unticking of all the unwanted info which is tedious. Ideally, the Clean File Properties window should have a "Clean All Field Contents" option, to purge all imported data on selected fields. If that's not possible, at least an option to "Clean all fields except the file related info" (FPS, file size etc).

Theater View
10. Customizing the Info Panel should become even more flexible. I would love it if we could squeeze 2 or more short fields in one line (FPS, Duration etc) and change individual field/letter sizes, so as to minimize the need for scrolling.

11. I would have liked a more flexible Theater View. Among other things I miss is an on-off keyboard shortcut to show captions or not, and a way to show bigger thumbnails (Ctrl+Mouse wheel really changes the letter size and only relatively the thumbs, and this only up to a point).

11b. BTW Am I the only on to consider Ctrl+Mouse wheel counter-intuitive? In image apps, rolling the wheel forward zooms in (magnifies), in MC it's the opposite.

12. I'd love to see more video sites accessed through Theater View - maybe under a menu that would include YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion etc, ideally taking advantage of Couch Mode options.

13. BTW, at the end of YouTube files played in my browser I get a thumbnail list of possibly related videos; why is this not available when watching the same video in Theater View You Tube?

14. Just a wild thought: how difficult is it to implement "hot links" in Theater View? Wouldn't it be great to click on an actor in Info panel and jump to a list of his movies, or to click on a keyword to bring up a pane with all related videos?


And a cautionary note
15. When I first cami into MC, using the "Rename, Move & Copy" to restructure my library caused me long hours of work when I found out that all image files in my music folders were not moved along with my music. And although it certainly was my mistake, I think that until moving entire folder contents is available, it would be safer if the users were informed on the fly of the possible consequences.

[yannis]

So, no comments at all then?

Well, I'll just add another little thing:

11c. Ability to play video in Theater View by clicking on the image and/or the title.

[JimH]

Some of this is likely to come, but as you can see, it is a big world we're working in.  And your list is not likely to match well with some other users.

Thanks for putting it together.

[yannis]

Well, I went back to the list and I still think that my points are about extending MC's functionality, not curtailing or reversing it (except 11b, granted); so I can't see why they would conflict someone else's point of view. Unless you mean it in terms of priorities.

Anyway, thanks for considering these points; I can wait to see what happens, but I'd appreciate it if you could elaborate on your plans, esp. about scraping.

[rec head]

3. The wiki needs to be updated and expanded. A noob has no other way to find out what's possible in MC. At some point I spent countless hours manually cleaning up parts of fields, before I incidentally found out in the forum that there were ways to do it automatically.

I agree. Getting started was a challenge. I've been using for a few months and still probably get about 5% of MC. Also because it is so customizable I am probably not doing things the most efficient way.

[JimH]

Well, I went back to the list and I still think that my points are about extending MC's functionality, not curtailing or reversing it (except 11b, granted); so I can't see why they would conflict someone else's point of view. Unless you mean it in terms of priorities.

I only meant that your list is just a small portion of the many reasonable requests that are made.  There are thousands of you guys thinking up things for the five of us to do.

[Sesam]

Scraping
This is an area that needs to be the focus of serious effort. Even if legal problems don't permit the use of sources like IMDB, there are still ways to improve it.

Agreed, and I also think JRiver MC needs simple support for user "scraper plug-ins". So that like with other competing Media Center solutions, users can create their own scrapers and get the information from where they want. And also select what scraper to use (or set different priorities), if one scraper doesn't find any information it can fall back on a secondary.

The current scraper is rather limited as you can only expect it to work with mainstream movies and TV series. However when it comes to niche foreign TV series and movies you might have to get the information from other sources than tmdb or ttvdb. Not to mention things like Concerts, Adult Movies, Anime, Cartoons etc..

[DanielBMe]

14. Just a wild thought: how difficult is it to implement "hot links" in Theater View? Wouldn't it be great to click on an actor in Info panel and jump to a list of his movies, or to click on a keyword to bring up a pane with all related videos?

I love the way MyMovies handles this with WMC.  It's one of the things I miss most, next to being able to customize the screen a bit.

[yannis]

I only meant that your list is just a small portion of the many reasonable requests that are made.  There are thousands of you guys thinking up things for the five of us to do.

Roll up the sleeves then!  Just kidding. You're doing an excellent job, thank you.

But I'd really like to hear your thoughts on scraping.

[danrgleason]

My only wish for Christmas is that the handling of multi-artis CD's did not create the duplications of the cover art in my views. I have read and excercized the way to handle this by editing the tags, but I buy and rip a lot of CD's that are compilations and it is really frustrating to not have all the songs from a single CD just rollup into the one CD picture.
That's it for me, otherwise I have been a happy camper of MC for 6 years now...

[MrC]

My only wish for Christmas is that the handling of multi-artis CD's did not create the duplications of the cover art in my views. I have read and excercized the way to handle this by editing the tags, but I buy and rip a lot of CD's that are compilations and it is really frustrating to not have all the songs from a single CD just rollup into the one CD picture.
That's it for me, otherwise I have been a happy camper of MC for 6 years now...

This is really trivially done.  Open a new thread, and some one will provide a simple workflow for you.