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More => Old Versions => JRiver Media Center 19 for Windows => Topic started by: afzal on August 20, 2014, 03:05:06 pm

Title: Launching JRiver from MS Windows Media Center
Post by: afzal on August 20, 2014, 03:05:06 pm
Hi All,

New to JRiver, so my apologies in case if this is in the wrong place or has been discussed.

I have been using Windows Media Center for 5 years and my primary media center. Which runs through my audio receiver and feeds into Plasma. Recently I added a DAC so I want to have two separate inputs going into my receiver. JRiver solves this issue by using the Zone feature.

However, the issue I'm seeing is. JRiver is horrible in reliability and using for watching live TV and recorded programs. So I want to stay with using the WMC for TV but want a quick link from the WMC to JRiver to play music and Movies.

Does anyone know how I can configure the WMC to launch JRiver, I want the ability to use remote and not mouse and keyboard. So I do not want to exit the WMC, just have JRiver as one of the menu options and open JRiver in Theater view so I can just select to play music and movies. I know how to limit the Theater view to just those to functions.

Thank you,
Afzal
Title: Re: Launching JRiver from MS Windows Media Center
Post by: Matt on August 20, 2014, 03:06:28 pm
JRiver is horrible in reliability and using for watching live TV and recorded programs.

Could you post a crash log?  This isn't normal.
Title: Re: Launching JRiver from MS Windows Media Center
Post by: JimH on August 20, 2014, 03:32:27 pm
TV is not normally unstable.  This thread might give you some ideas:
http://tinyurl.com/ck9svg

Start with antivirus.
Title: Re: Launching JRiver from MS Windows Media Center
Post by: astromo on August 20, 2014, 04:11:15 pm
Could you post a crash log?  This isn't normal.

afzal, go here:
TV Cards and TV (http://yabb.JRiver.com/interact/index.php?board=11.0)
then look at this info:
How to send MC logs related to TV to developers (http://yabb.JRiver.com/interact/index.php?topic=52448.0)

From experience, the best response to TV issues is generally found by posting over at the TV board..  ;)
Title: Re: Launching JRiver from MS Windows Media Center
Post by: afzal on August 20, 2014, 08:41:30 pm
Thank you all for the responses. What I mean but unstable is it requires too much tuning to get this to work properly. I don't want to spend time writing scripts on how to separate movies from TV shows, or how shows don't show up in the order they were recorded. Its way too complicated to get things to work like they do within Windows Media Center. If any of you have used WMC, you know what I mean, you run through the wizard and everything gets setup. You can start tweaking but out of the box functionality is simple and easy to use. Everything gets organized as it should. You get movies where movies should be, videos where videos should be. JRiver, mixes everything together. I have 3TB drive for each, Movies, Music, Photos, 9TB of TV recordings across 3 drives. In WMC, I add the folders to each location based on TV Recording, Movies, Photos and Music, everything shows in proper place. Can't make this happened with JRiver, I've tried for the past two months.

So I am really hoping that JRiver 20 will fix these, otherwise I've spent $50 just for the convience of playing FLAC and MKV files withing having to install additional codecs for windows.

Now, back to the real question I have, anyone know how I can launch the JRiver from within WMC and have it on the menu?

My apologies, if I sound like I'm bashing JRiver, that's not what I mean, I have tweaked with a lot of program in my past. And I just don't want to spend too much time tweaking this, when I have something that runs very stable and for most part it does what I need. My hope was JRiver would give me all in one solution. I really do like the way movies and music views look.

Thank you.
Afzal
Title: Re: Launching JRiver from MS Windows Media Center
Post by: afzal on August 21, 2014, 01:35:44 pm
Ok, so I figured out how to launch JRiver from within windows Media Center. By using an app called relaunch, it creates a link under the Extra Library. I've set the JRiver to start in Theater Mode, and have the menu limited to Music and Movies.

One issue I'm noticing which I don't know if it's due to my Audio Receiver or function configuration of zoning. I'll explain.

As mentioned earlier, the goal of using JRiver for me was to use two outputs going into my receiver. So when I play audio, JRiver sends the the signal to the "DAC wasapi" device, and when playing movies, send the signal to "HDMI wasapi" device. Both of these devices are assigned to the same source on my Marantz receiver. The Marantz auto detects whether signal is coming from digital source (HDMI) or analog (DAC device).

The problem:
When playing audio (music), each time you click on the remote to navigate while the music is playing, the signal resets, therefore losing the sound going to the receiver for brief moment, the receiver then tries to determine again if the signal is analog or digital. When the receiver is in auto detect mode, I get distorted sound, until I cycle the receiver from auto to manual and back to auto detect.

Any thoughts?

Thank you,
Afzal