Does linking make the multipart videos behave as if they were only one file?
I don't think so. I want the mutipart videos to be virtually merged.
MC cannot do this. The Linking feature was developed in response to similar requests for Audio files, and it solves most of the problems without requiring major underlying changes to the Library structure. MC considers the file to be the database "atom", and always has, and this is not going to change. In the future,
maybe we can goad them into improvements in the Linking feature, but that's new, and they'll probably want to let it percolate for a while. I wouldn't count on changes here anytime during MC20's lifespan, anyway.
However, that's not to say that MC can't deal with multiple file videos without having to merge them manually. There are a few different strategies here:
* Simple mode: Just name them the same name, suffixed with "Part 1", "Part 2", etc afterwards. This is ugly but it works if you only have a few.
* More advanced mode:
- For all multi-part movies, tag them with the same [Name] (which is good because then the metadata lookup works right for them)
- Fill [Disc #] with 1,2,3,n
- Maybe disable [Use Bookmarking] for all but the first [Disc #] file.
For the latter, you can construct a Theater View that shows movies in a flat listing where when you open a single-part movie, it opens just that movie, and multi-part movies, it drills down to the "episodes". You can do this a few different ways. The easiest is to just add [Name] as the final Category to your view. You can change the file caption for Theater View to suffix the [Disc #] to the displayed name if it exists.
If you do this, though, you might want to consider making it also handle full "series" of movies (such as Indiana Jones, Star Wars, etc). I use [Series] and [Episode] to capture this information (and make them sort correctly in my Media Views). You can even, if you want, make them display in a cool "flat" list in Theater View with a special expression field. Here's one strategy for creating a Theater Media View that might give you some ideas:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=78198.0That method has some downsides, though, so I prefer to use clever captioning in Theater View to have them all show up together, but in the right order and labeled nicely. The same tricks work for Media Network Views so, you can use it with JRemote and whatnot too.
In the end, there are ways to deal with it. When you play them back, MC will play them back seamlessly (or darn close, assuming you have local access to the files and aren't transcoding them on the fly or serving them via MCWS). So, you'll be able to just "enter through" them and it'll play the files in order. You
won't be able to use bookmarking on the movie really ("further in" in the files than the first "disc" at least), but... Meh. If it is something I'd actually watch and re-watch over and over (which basically amounts to my kid's movies) I'd just merge them.
So, not perfect in every conceivable way, but you can deal with them in a decently slick method. I implemented most of this stuff before, and still have a bunch of them in my "archives" of old media, but I certainly don't rip discs that way anymore, so it has largely faded away. Now, if I
do end up with a
new split-into-segments movie that I actually care about (not way back in my cold storage or a delete-after-watching quality movie) I whip out mkvmerge and just merge them (which takes only a minute or two per movie, max).
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Topic: Q: Can multipart movies be virtually merged? (Read 3675 times)