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[imcardle]

Hi,

I'm new to J River MC.  I think I am among a number of people who are looking for a good alternative to Windows Media Center now that Microsoft seem to be giving up on it.  It seems that when we upgrade to Windows 10 we will be forced to ditch WMC completely, so J River has a unique opportunity to poach their customers!

Needless to say that, coming from WMC, I am mainly interested in the Theatre View mode of J River - although I am happy to switch to the Standard View for doing the initial configuration settings.

Having used the trial for about a week now, I must say that I'm very impressed.  J River is without a doubt the best alternative to WMC that I've found (and I've tried a few!).  However, as a newcomer, it is inevitable that I will find a few things have been done differently to WMC.  Here are a few of the things that I miss about WMC - maybe it is because I haven't yet figured out how to do these things, but if someone could kindly point me in the right direction that would be great:

1.  Recorded TV:  What happens when I start to run out of disk space for my recordings?  Will I be warned that my disk space is getting low?
2.  How are recorded programmes managed and cleaned up?  Can I specify, for example, that I only want to keep the last 5 episodes of a series?
3.  If a recording fails or is missed (perhaps because the PC was turned off) where can I find out which items were missed?  This would be useful so that I can go and find the missing episodes on iPlayer.
4.  Number 3 reminds me, can we have BBC iPlayer integration in J River for the UK?
5.  When I press the Recorded TV button on my WMC remote, it takes me to various places (seemingly dependent on where I was at the time when I pressed it).  In WMC it always takes me to the list of recorded TV shows.  How can I make this work as expected in J River?

Ian.

[CountryBumkin]

Hi,

I'm new to J River MC.  I think I am among a number of people who are looking for a good alternative to Windows Media Center now that Microsoft seem to be giving up on it.  It seems that when we upgrade to Windows 10 we will be forced to ditch WMC completely, so J River has a unique opportunity to poach their customers!

Needless to say that, coming from WMC, I am mainly interested in the Theatre View mode of J River - although I am happy to switch to the Standard View for doing the initial configuration settings.

Having used the trial for about a week now, I must say that I'm very impressed.  J River is without a doubt the best alternative to WMC that I've found (and I've tried a few!).  However, as a newcomer, it is inevitable that I will find a few things have been done differently to WMC.  Here are a few of the things that I miss about WMC - maybe it is because I haven't yet figured out how to do these things, but if someone could kindly point me in the right direction that would be great:

1.  Recorded TV:  What happens when I start to run out of disk space for my recordings?  Will I be warned that my disk space is getting low?

I'm not sure about this one - I have my inital recordings saved to a Folder called "TV Recordings" on a small 1TB drive, then I do "my maintenance routine" where I check the recording's from the past day or two, add any missing metadata, coverart, correct Season or Episode numbers if needed, etc., then move the ones I want to save to a "permanent storage folder on my RAID. so the Recoding's Folder never fills up (it  could, I suppose, if I went on vacation or such, but have not come across this issue yet).

2.  How are recorded programmes managed and cleaned up?  Can I specify, for example, that I only want to keep the last 5 episodes of a series?

You can specify to "only keep X number of episodes",  "delete after X days", or "keep forever".

3.  If a recording fails or is missed (perhaps because the PC was turned off) where can I find out which items were missed?  This would be useful so that I can go and find the missing episodes on iPlayer.

You would need to track/know outside of JRiver what is scheduled to record, then check to see if it did. JRiver does not know how many epsiodes are available versus how many it has recorded. If the PC is off, JRiver would not (automatically) know something was missed. There is a listing in the Television section of "To be Recorded" and a listing of "Recordings" so you could compare the two to see if something was missed.

4.  Number 3 reminds me, can we have BBC iPlayer integration in J River for the UK?

Not sure about this one. JRiver has Users in UK using the software and making recordings. I don't know anything about iPlayer.

5.  When I press the Recorded TV button on my WMC remote, it takes me to various places (seemingly dependent on where I was at the time when I pressed it).  In WMC it always takes me to the list of recorded TV shows.  How can I make this work as expected in J River?

I'm not sure what your asking here. In JRiver when you have Live TV (Guide) open, if you want to record you can press the "Record" button on the remote or use the direction keys to go to top of page and select Record (either One-Time or Subscription). Then a popup menu asks some questions, like do you want to record this show at all times and all channels, do you want to start recoding early and end late (i.e 1 min.), and similar. You can preselect answers to these questions, or go through each one every time you setup a recording.
At the top of the screen there are some "tabs" one is called "To Be Recorded" this one lists all your recordings that are scheduled (and you can edit them if needed).

Ian.

[Yaobing]

Thank you CountryBumkin.

On question 1.  Yes, we do warn on low disk space condition, but most likely we warn only when you start using TV.  It makes sense to check disk space whenever a user makes a recording schedule.  I will make sure it does.

On question 3.  No, MC does not log recording failures, but it is on my to-do list (though not very high on the list, but I will eventually get to it).

On question 5.  MC goes to Video\Shows in Theater view when you press Recorded TV button.

[imcardle]

Thanks CountryBumkin and Yaobing for your replies to my questions.

Regarding question 1:

Yaobing:  Yes, we do warn on low disk space condition, but most likely we warn only when you start using TV.  It makes sense to check disk space whenever a user makes a recording schedule.  I will make sure it does.

Thanks, any kind of warning will be really helpful as I have deliberately limited the disk space available for recording TV programmes.  I limit it because I know that if I have terabytes of space I will fill it up with loads of stuff that I'll never get around to watching!  I prefer that I'm forced to have a clear out every now and then.

Regarding question 2:

CountryBumpkin:  You can specify to "only keep X number of episodes",  "delete after X days", or "keep forever".

Cool - That's exactly what I am looking for, except that it took me a few minutes to figure out where the option is!  I eventually found it hidden in a chain of about half-a-dozen nested dialogs, via the "Configure Subscription" menu.  I don't understand why I need to answer all the other questions before I reach the "Cleanup mode" where I can choose how many episodes I want to keep.  I'm sure this can easily be improved by presenting the questions as a list in the first dialog so that I can jump directly to the option that I am interested in.  Maybe I'm missing something - is there a faster way to reach this setting in Theatre View?

Regarding question 3:

Yaobing:  No, MC does not log recording failures, but it is on my to-do list (though not very high on the list, but I will eventually get to it).

OK - that's fair enough.  Is it possible for me to "vote up" this feature?  For a newcomer, I think it would really help them to understand what's going on, and why their favourite (sorry, English spelling there!) programme didn't record.  Without the history you are left scratching your head a bit.

Regarding question 4:

CountryBumpkin:  Not sure about this one. JRiver has Users in UK using the software and making recordings. I don't know anything about iPlayer.

That's understandable if you're outside of the UK then maybe the BBC iPlayer is not so interesting for you.  However, this is a very popular streaming service in the UK for catching up with recent episodes of the BBC programmes.  I have other ways that I can access it (e.g. via my Google Chromecast dongle) so it's not a show stopper for me - but it would be nice if I didn't have to leave J River MC to use it.

Regarding question 5:

Yaobing:  MC goes to Video\Shows in Theater view when you press Recorded TV button.

Hmm - that's not quite what I'm getting.  I have changed the names on my setup, so that instead of the default menus I have something like this:

TV (renamed from Video)
     Guide (still called Guide, but moved up to first position in the sub-menu)
     Recorded TV (renamed from Shows)
     ...

What I'm seeing is that when I press the "Recorded TV" button on my WMC remote it jumps to TV/Guide - which just happens to be in the same position as the default Video/Shows.  Is it possible for me to re-configure J River MC so that it jumps to TV/Recorded TV instead?

[Yaobing]

Regarding question 2:Cool - That's exactly what I am looking for, except that it took me a few minutes to figure out where the option is!  I eventually found it hidden in a chain of about half-a-dozen nested dialogs, via the "Configure Subscription" menu.  I don't understand why I need to answer all the other questions before I reach the "Cleanup mode" where I can choose how many episodes I want to keep.  I'm sure this can easily be improved by presenting the questions as a list in the first dialog so that I can jump directly to the option that I am interested in.  Maybe I'm missing something - is there a faster way to reach this setting in Theatre View?

The functionality is there.  There are a few of things you need to do in order to make it easier the next time you schedule to record.

1.  Schedule a recording or edit an already scheduled recording in Standard view where you will not have to go through many steps.  The Cleanup mode is on the last page.  Once you have all settings set correctly, you can click the "Save settings as default" button.  That will save all settings on that page as default.  The next time you schedule a recording, these settings will be used as default.  Of course you will still have chance to change settings for each individual scheduled recording.

2. On Tools > Options > Television, there are a number of subscription recording default settings you can set under Recording section.  Again, once set, these will be applied each time you schedule a subscription recording.

3. In particular, there is a setting called "Ask me about the following detail settings when scheduling to record in Theater View".  You can choose which item(s) you want to be bothered with each time you try scheduling to record in Theater View.  If none is selected, all default settings will be automatically applied.  If you later decide to modify a recording in Theater View, you will have to go through each step one by one because there is no way for the program to guess which setting you intend to change when you click the "Configure Recording" button.  So it would be easier to make such configuration changes in Standard View, as described in 1. above.

Regarding question 5:Hmm - that's not quite what I'm getting.  I have changed the names on my setup, so that instead of the default menus I have something like this:

TV (renamed from Video)
     Guide (still called Guide, but moved up to first position in the sub-menu)
     Recorded TV (renamed from Shows)
     ...

What I'm seeing is that when I press the "Recorded TV" button on my WMC remote it jumps to TV/Guide - which just happens to be in the same position as the default Video/Shows.  Is it possible for me to re-configure J River MC so that it jumps to TV/Recorded TV instead?

It is quite possible that Theater view customization done by you made this feature not working.  There are some areas of MC that are programmed to be dependent on a certain fixed naming hierarchy.  It is obviously not quite friendly to users who want to customize Theater view.  We will have to make some changes, but it may be a bit messy.

[imcardle]

On question 2:  Perfect.  The "Ask me about the following detail settings..." option was exactly what I was looking for.  Now I can set a default number of episodes to keep, and change it easily if I don't want the default.  Thanks for that!

On question 5:  Yes, I can see how my customization might have screwed things up if the software is relying on the names of the menu items to find its way!  Never mind, I'll wait patiently for the changes you mentioned.

I think you've answered all of my questions for the time being.  Thanks for your help!   

[imcardle]

Hi Yaobing,

Please can you update me regarding the status of the changes that you mentioned at the end of your last post for handling customized theater view menu commands?  Of the few issues that I had when moving from Windows Media Center to JRiver MC, I think this is the only remaining issue that I have not been able to find a satisfactory solution or workaround for.

[Yaobing]

Sorry I have not been able to get to this yet.