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[Spike1000]

After many years of ripping audio, tagging and customising views I'm embarking on my doing the same for my Video (DVD) collection.

Things are pretty much as you'd expect having cut my teeth on audio tracks. There are some differences though eg a lot fewer tracks but a lot more meta data (thankfully much of it scraped automatically!).

I have a couple of questions that could save me a lot of time as I'm trying to "do it right do it once". . .  (something I didn't manage with my CD collection; think I ripped that at least twice in the end  )

1) I do rip some of the extras. eg Main Film - 1986.mkv and Main Film - Making of - 1986.mkv I'm grouping these together using the 'Series' tag ('Main Film' in this case)  and using a TV series style view so I just get one thumbnail for a given film displayed. Is this the best way? It works but there might be a better alternative I've not discovered yet

2) Is there anything you know now that you'd wished you'd known when you started. . .? Getting things right from the start can save hours and hours in the long run.

Cheers

Spike

[alb]

I'm in the same boat as you.  I'm always reading how exceptional JRiver is at organizing and arranging media and right now the only additional Library View I've created is 4K Movies.  I've got to believe that some people here have some awesome way of cataloging their movies and I'd like to try and get it right in the beginning...rather than have to start all over in a few months.  I was a little surprised that we can not create our own Media Sub Types.  I would have created one called "Extras" or "Bonus" - something along those lines - to keep track of all the movie extras I have.  As far as music is concerned, I already gave up.  It will be easier for me to just stay with the software I was already using, even though I wanted to consolidate movies & music into one application.

[Spike1000]

I would have created one called "Extras" or "Bonus" - something along those lines - to keep track of all the movie extras I have.

That would be a good idea. . .  However, as you pointed out, (and it's come up before) the media sub types are fixed and that isn't going to change as I believe it's fairly 'hard coded' into the design and would be a big re-write for a small gain. I can understand this situation and don't have a problem with it.

When I ask these types of questions I find I get few replies, I'm not sure why. First of all thank you for yours, feedback +ve or -ve can help to change things. You have to work a bit with MC to get the best out of it. That's not everybody's cup of tea. But if you do work, ask some questions, you do get some great results out of MC. I've been a user since MC20 and I'm only tackling video now  Many people would have given up 4+ years ago as they want results much much sooner. But that's sort of how MC is. Technically outstanding, but information on how to use it, really hard work, and only for the dedicated. I find this odd that they don't blow their own trumpets, show off people's implementations, have tips of the week, produce any videos or walk throughs; I really think they are missing a trick. But I can't see that changing either. Shame. There are some very helpful and dedicated users on the forum and I (we?) owe them a lot for their kind and dedicated support.

So to answer my own question (a bit anyway)

Put a couple of hours into it last night and have made some progress.

Am sticking with the 'Series' tag for now as it seems work for me (and I don't have any better ideas yet)

I did try some regex on auto-import but didn't get that working. Need to revisit that

I've created a 'Recent Videos' view. There's one for audio (Recent Albums) but there's not one for video. That really helps find the newly imported stuff that will need a bit of tagging. I view as categories and order by 'Date Imported' under Name. (The Recent album just orders under Album by Date Imported') You can set a filter on "Set rules for file display too" (based on media type)

I've created a Panes view and added the Categories that I typically need to tag or at least look over. Series, Name, Media Type, Media Sub Type, Dimensions, Episode and Season and maybe one or two more. This helps find things that need fixing really quickly.

Oh and I re-ordered the tagging options and put all the things I want to see under 'general' for each of the different templates as it makes them much easier and quicker to find (mainly the tags above) . Now that's a subtle trick that 95% of people probably miss. . . Left click the 5 pointed star and select Customise. . . .

That's where I am at the moment. Still a good few things to find, change and tweak, but it's taking shape. Will post more detail when I'm further down the road.

Still interested to see if anyone has any ideas, suggestions or tips.

Spike

[drmimosa]

I recently started organizing DVDs and extra features as MKV rips and ran into the same problem. I'm using the Media Sub Type "Other", but it would make much more sense to have "Extras" or "Extra Features" as an option.

[rec head]

In theater view I have added an "Immersive Audio" expression column that I can set to ATMOS or DTS:X that will trigger a zone that bitstreams. Then I have a 3D tag and a UHD tag. You can create your own Expression Columns and use playlists and other ways to just show you certain Expression Column views

I guess I'm just not that picky. But for the most part I only rip the movies. Any extras that I do rip are shorter than movie length and end up in Shows.

Then in Theater View I have Video -> Movies (1080 and under), 3D, UHD.

Within each view I can then select to view by Name or Recent. I'm pretty sure there are a lot more ways to view but those are the only 2 I ever use so I deleted the rest.

I'm probably not answering your question at all and you would probably freak out if you saw how I tagged my songs: Insert disc, get info, rip. Done.

[tij]

i never rip extras ... just movie (and Directors cut if its available on same disc ... notable examples are alien series) ... hence chose mkv ... lossless remuxing

if i were to rip content with extra features in mind ... i would probably do iso ... probably easier to navigate through thise extras using disc menus

[fitbrit]

I use series for movie franchises with multiple films, eg Avengers, Rocky, Matrix etc.
For the rare film whose bonus or extra material I care about, I just stack these with the movie they belong to.

[ErikN]

I started using watch TV and recordings exclusively through a PC using Windows Media Center when it was first released back in 2005. I switched to JRiver once WMC fell off the Microsoft’s road map thus some of what my family uses was influenced by WMC.

Organization is highly subjective. However, how you store/organize your files on disk is a real pain to change. But, if you properly tag your content and backup your data, changing how JRiver presents your content is pretty easy.

(1) My data (video, audio, etc.) always lives on storage discrete from anything else, particularly the OS. This makes backups, system upgrades, and restorations easy.

(2) As an aside, I also backup cover art from JRiver’s roaming data. For reasons that mystify me, JRiver does not back this up as part of the library backup nor migrate on upgrades. I custom edit some of my cover art, custom select much of it, and thus preserve it too.

(3) For movies, I do not care for special content so my file organization is simple:
           Movies/
               MovieName/
                        moviename.mpg
                        thumbnails, sidecard, etc.
This actually works well for your Series approach but came about because WMC required each movie to be in their own subdirectory.

(4) For other video content I break up files into a course directory classification:
            Video/
                HomeVideos/
                      <year>
                Kids/
                      <series name>/
                Instructional/
                      <series name>/
                Series/
                       <series name>
With JRiver you could lump kids, instructional, series all into one bucket but it predated for me. “Kids” is obviously kids shows. “Instructional” is content like exercise videos, how to use you vitamix, etc. “Series” sounded better than “NotKids”.

(5) Under a ‘series’ directory I lump all episodes and seasons since the metadata sorts this out. However, as an ultimate fail-safe for recovery I always name files:
    <series>-S<season>-E<episode>-<name>

(6) I do like special content for some Series, primarily “Gag” reels ,thus make these the largest episodes for a given season. You could use episode the same way to preserve a specific ordering between movie and aux content within a “series”.

(7) For JRiver menus in theater mode under ‘Video’:
      Movies
      Shows — the kids, instructional, series content
           Tree: Series => Season => Episode
      TV Recording
           Tree: Series => Date Recorded
           - This matches any video with a “Date Recorded”
           - Thus anything I record off TV shows up both here and in Shows under the proper series
           - If I choose to keep it, I simply clear the “Date Recorded” tag (not only in shows).
             Otherwise, I delete the video.
      HomeVideos