WMC7 & XBOX360 set up. Now what??

[CZ Eddie]

Hey folks,

I have DRM protected cable TV, dedicated WMC7 server (online 24/7), HDHomeRun Prime and XBOX 360 extender all up and running finally. Everything's working perfectly.

Now it's time to start recording TV & movies and build a music and MakeMKV blu-ray and pictures collection.

Should I stick to using WMC7 as the organizer of all this media?
I know it can't play MakeMKV so those will just be played by other PC's on my home LAN.

Or should I consider a 3rd party media organizer?
I'd like to be able to sort through movies and see some sort of IMDB ratings and covers for the movies.
Not sure how I want music & pics to be organized.

[jachin99]

For the purposes of WMC, all you really need right now is YAMM. What do you use for guide data? I believe metadata is packed into WTV files, and I haven't compared the two but I would be willing to bet EPG123 will give you much better metadata for your recordings than Rovi. For MKV file metadata is a little different, and you will likely only get the synopsis. With MMUI+, you will get rotten tomatoes scores as well. For automated ripping with make MKV, you can actually use a program called autorip and compress, which acts as a kind of front end for make MKV, and others. You setup the profiles in Make MKV, and auto rip & compress, and get a 1 click ripping process, or really close to it. There are third party metadata solutions but I don't know what benefit you will get from them. Look up Media Center Master and compare that to YAMMM as these are nearly your only 2 choices. I can tell you that I get coverart for everything, and I use YAMMM. I'm assuming your using Shark's codec pack for MKV playback?

If you subscribe to Amazon, there is a plugin for that as well that doesn't work on extenders (The Xbox has its own app anyway). If you like streaming radio then simple radio can add stations from a lot different sites. If you choose to go this route let me know, and I will share my station list with you but I also have a post around here about it. If you use emulators or play PC games, and you are willing to put in the work EMU Center is a native MCML application that can be used a gaming front end. Off the top of my head there is also Tubecore for playon & general DLNA sources, MCPandora for pandora radio, Ceton MMC (Which includes YAMM) for remote control from android or IOS, and VMC controller for home automation. I would say that in general your next goal should be to add content, and this is just a short list of what I have found. There is also Emby, and Emby for Media Center, which adds a lot of eye candy.

[Einstien]

You have the absolute premiere set-up. A dedicated WMC HTPC server, HD homereun Prime, and XBOX 360.
You might consider getting a HD Homerun Connect for additional OTA channels, WMC puts all your channels, cable and OTA in one easy to read guide. You will also have 5 tuners now instead of 3. Your OTA channels will have a little better resolution than the cable version, and OTA channels are free to copy, no copy protection.
I would recommend EPG123 for guide data and show information. Check out the EPG123 Gallery for examples. Rovi is unreliable, inaccurate and unresponsive to customers.
If you have Spectrum Cable, they have an app on Roku which will fill the "On Demand" hole in WMC. It works with your current Spectrum cable account. That way, you get it all.

[DavidinCT]

Just a tip.. You can use the Movie Library, search around to see the folder layout, it's said many times. YAMM is the easy way to set it up(as said), drop a movie in a folder it's watching and it will name everything with art. An Extender WILL play a MVK to a point. And on a 360, if any movies have subtitles in them, they could have problems playing.

Just watch your bit rate of movie rips...They will play on WMC machine fine but, Extenders will be a suddering or buffering nightmare. If your thinking about 4K...don't think about playing that content on a 360.

[bigjohn]

So.. my movie library has grown to 800+ titles.
Even with YAMM I was never able to get the regular windows sort options to work - i.e. by genre, or date added... and now, with all these titles, one slip of the finger on the remote and the thing can hang for 10+ minutes trying to sort the genre or whatever.

What's the recommended 'better than YAMM'?
Sorry for the threadjack - but this one mentioned EMBY and is my exact setup - 4 xbox360 + 1 HTPC.
Oh - my HTPC are using Colossus cards for TV recording... any suggestions for how that can work if the folks at Micro$$$$oft decide they're going to terminate us for using WMC7?

Many thousand thanks in advance.

[jachin99]

Are you using a standalone version of YAMM or the version packaged with MMC? What have you configured your cover art sizes to be? Do you have the retrieve additional info setting enabled? How many PCs do you have YAMMM installed on, and have you tried clearing the cache? Are these all MKVs or are they a mix?

I have an emby server setup, and I use Emby for WMC but I also had to pay for many of the features so if that isn't an option for you then you can explore what you get with the free version as well.

[bigjohn]

Are you using a standalone version of YAMM or the version packaged with MMC? What have you configured your cover art sizes to be? Do you have the retrieve additional info setting enabled? How many PCs do you have YAMMM installed on, and have you tried clearing the cache? Are these all MKVs or are they a mix?

I have an emby server setup, and I use Emby for WMC but I also had to pay for many of the features so if that isn't an option for you then you can explore what you get with the free version as well.

Thinking that was directed at me - I installed YAMM years back on WMC7. WMC7 is a quad core pc running windows7 ultimate.
YAMM configuration tool tells me artwork is set to medium.

I don't see a way to 'clear the cache' or remove data - wish i did because if I don't stop YAMM before moving a movie to another drive, i end up with it showing up 2x in the movie list.

EMBY for WMC seems to require me to install an EMBY server, and i think the free version of that is good for a very limited number of titles... ?

Thanks again
John

[jachin99]

Thinking that was directed at me - I installed YAMM years back on WMC7. WMC7 is a quad core PC running windows7 ultimate.
YAMM configuration tool tells me artwork is set to medium.

I don't see a way to 'clear the cache' or remove data - wish i did because if I don't stop YAMM before moving a movie to another drive, i end up with it showing up 2x in the movie list.

EMBY for WMC seems to require me to install an EMBY server, and i think the free version of that is good for a very limited number of titles... ?

Thanks again
John

Ok John, I have had unexplained issues with slow library loading in the past as well. Before starting, I want to advise you to attempt to backup your caches in case things go wrong, and you need your old metadata. You can do this by just copying, and pasting the folders i'll be directing you to later in this post to your desktop so they are easily accessible should you need to put them back. I also want you to go into settings, general, automatic download options and turn the "retrieve additional information" setting off. Microsoft discontinued this service, and it MAY cause a slight delay in the UI loading. It sounds like Gary from EPG123 is working on a new way to achieve the same functionality anyway. With that being said, I have noticed that when my movies UI slows down, a possible cause is that there is more than one cover, YAMM.xml, or JSON file for a given movie trying to load. This can happen over time as you add, or remove movies using more than one instance of YAMMM. If you have EVER had the retrieve additional information setting turned on, WMC may have duplicated some of the files that are stored in your metadata cache as well. Before starting, ENSURE YOUR MOVIE FOLDERS AND FILES ARE NAMED ACCORDING TO YAMMM'S SUGGESTED NAMING CONVENTION OF MOVIE (YEAR). I have had files and folders that were only named after the movie itself still get picked up by YAMMM on plenty of occasions but it can only help. I have also had YAMMM not grab the info for a few files but mostly it did. Here is what you can try to fix your problem. I assume here that you only store metadata for WMC, and not Emby, Plex, Kodi, or anything else in your movies folder. If you do use those other programs then let me know, and I'll try to adjust my instructions accordingly.

1. Turn off the retrieve additional info setting
2. Remove all of your movie folders from WMC, and stop the YAMMM service. You need to stop the service on every PC YAMMM is running on so that you don't have 2 instances of YAMMM trying to create the same files. You might also want to make sure you only have one copy of each movie, as having multiple copies may contribute to future problems.
3. Go into your movie library folder (This is separate from the cache) and make sure that there is only ONE DVDID.xml file for each movie. You can verify this by doing a search of dvdid.xml in your movies folder, and comparing how many files are there with how many movies you have. If there are more files than movies then that could be a source of your problem, and the issue likely exists in your cache as well.
4. In your movies folder perform a search of .jpg to see if there are extra covers as well and the same rule applies. Your movie count should equal your JPG count. Depending on whether or not you have YAMMM set to save original artwork, then resize it there could be a duplicate of each cover.

After you do all if this, and if you have found a greater number of files than there are movies then you know where one potential issue exists.

Now the rest is up to you but as long as YAMMM is able to replace the deleted files, you should be able to get most of your covers, etc. back. If at any point in time you used a different program to download metadata then the files created by said other program will be destroyed, and YAMMM SHOULD REPLACE MOST OF THEM but I can't promise they will all be replaced. Be advised that the files YAMMM creates will only give you cover art and a description. Any additional information beyond that was likely created by WMC's Rovi additional lookup via the Retrieve additional info setting, which hopefully Gary will have a fix for soon. Now to diagnose, and hopefully fix your issues you need to delete the old files, and generate new ones. Here are the steps....

1. Ensure you have removed all of the folders from your movie library. You should still have the YAMMM service turned off at this point as well. Its probably much easier to not have WMC trying to read files or update libraries while you do your work.
2. Delete all of the xml and jpg files in your movie's folder
3. Make sure you have the show hidden folders option enabled, and go to C:\ProgramData\YAMMM where you will find a folder named Cache, DVDCoverCache, DVDInfoCache, and Images. The same counting technique applies here. The number of files in each of those folders should be equal to your movie library size. YAMMM likely pulls all of the files located in these folders from your movie folders, which is why I suggested clearing everything out.
4. Delete the contents of these folders. When you startup YAMMM it should replace everything with only one xml and jpg file for a given movie.
5. Go to c:\users\YOURUSERNAME\appdata\Roaming\Microsoft\eHome and you MIGHT see dvdinfocache, and dvdcover cache. If you want to then you can count once again but clear those folders out either way. I believe this is where WMC stores metadata when you stick a DVD movie in your PC but I never really investigated too much. I don't even have any files in these locations and my YAMMM works fine. Clear out all of the caches here as well if they exit.
6. Configure YAMMM to download metadata for Windows Media Center and nothing else.
7. Configure YAMMM to download folder art (Folder.jpg), leave the image quality at 75 percent if you would like, tell it to download medium (300x420) images, and make sure Save original prior to resize or optimization is UNCHECKED.

Now your caches should be cleared, and its time to rebuild

1. Reboot your PC just to make sure everything is cleared out properly.
2. After reboot, the YAMMM service should start to run again, and it will hopefully start populating your movies folder with new cover.jpg, and dvdid.xml files
3. When YAMMM has finished generating new xml and jpg files in each movie's folder, and this could take a while, go ahead and add your movie folders back to the movie library.
4. Start WMC, and go to movies. You should see WMC updating, and its probably going to frozen and unresponsive until everything finishes. I would give it about an hour but I wouldn't be surprised if it takes longer. If the screen is still flashing it isn't finished.
5. Hopefully you will now enjoy much quicker load times but I can't promise anything. If I were in your situation this is what I would do, and I actually just did all of this last week.

As I said, make sure you backup all of your old files if you are concerned this might not work. I think what you need is just a fresh start, and in summary you get this by...
Disabling YAMMM service, and removing all folders from movie library
Deleting all metadata in a given movie's folder, and all metadata in your caches
Rebooting your pc to let yammm collect new metadata, and when complete adding movies back to your library.

While all of this work is going on your pc may become unresponsive so just let it sit and work through each step until it finishes. I have about 150 movies by comparison and the whole process outlined above takes probably an hour or two. If you have any questions, then please ask first, and good luck.

[bigjohn]

Wow. thanks for the complete instructions!
I've only one WMC pc - so only one YAMM - but I got 3 drives storing movies....
this sounds like a step by step project for next sunday...

[jachin99]

Its really not as complicated as it sounds but I wanted to make sure I didn't leave out ANY details. You basically delete everything but your movie files, and let YAMMM pick up new metadata. Gary Ryan, who maintains epg123 has said he is working on a solution for the extended metadata but I'm not sure if his solution will negate the need for YAMMM or not. Good luck with your fix, and it took a lot of frustration for me to finally figure this whole thing out. Hopefully I save others from too much of that.