Movie library replacements?

[3rob3]

You got it backwards....Emby is free, MyMovies is paid.

Is there any 3rd party program or Codec that will make an Extender play every format just like Windows does ?

Not that I have found, which is why gave up and quit using extenders.

[3rob3]

With this being said, Now does Ebly plug in for WMC work on an Extender with out having to exit WMC or is it a Xbox 360 app that I need to exit WMC to use ?

Install Emby server and point it at your movies, install Emby Classic which gives you the Media Center integration, and no, you don't leave the Media Center interface.

[DavidinCT]

You got it backwards....Emby is free, MyMovies is paid.

Is there any 3rd party program or Codec that will make an Extender play every format just like Windows does ?

Your right, I was thinking about Plex....D'oh ! (in Homer Simpson's voice)

With this being said, Now does Ebly plug in for WMC work on an Extender with out having to exit WMC or is it a Xbox 360 app that I need to exit WMC to use ?

Install Emby server and point it at your movies, install Emby Classic which gives you the Media Center integration, and no, you don't leave the Media Center interface.

Even on Extenders ?

[3rob3]

Yep.

[DavidinCT]

Yep.

Ok, thanks, I am installing My Movies now, I'll check it out and if it does not work out, I will give it a shot..

[DavidinCT]

So far my Experience with My Movies.... about to trash it....

http://www.mymovies.dk/forum.aspx?g=pos ... 33&#194833

[Sharks]

Hello David,
I'm not sure if you've looked at the options listed in the greenbutton 3rd party apps wiki, but there are a few options for media libraries in there. I'm not sure any of them will serve your exact purpose but figured it was worth mentioning as it might have a option or two you might not have tried. http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/wiki/index ... er_Add-ins
Hopefully you find a program that works for you, and won't result in a fiasco like what your My Movies experience was lol.

[joecrow]

So far my Experience with My Movies.... about to trash it....

As a MyMovies user and regular watcher of their forum I was a little surprised and disapointed at their lack of initial response to your original post. Maybe the approach was that if you gave it a try that would answer some of your questions, whatever, I am pleased they have now responded! For my part I am very, very happy with MyMovies it is way beyound the crappy standard Movie library although like you I almost gave up on it at first. I still find it not very intuitive, but barring a few user (me) created problems it has always worked very well out of the box so to speak, and that is over several years and at least 2 major upgrades (I don't use extenders) . All I can say is I believe it is well worth perservering with!

[mcewinter]

^ What he said...every word. I have the full feature set and love the software.

It's experiences like yours that inspired me to ditch the extender ideal. Shared guide and shared recorded TV, or lack there of, can be worked around. The added(?) benefits of a PC are worth considering unless money is the concern. I have Silicondust tuners so it might be easier for me to make the suggestion, otherwise the option becomes a lot more expensive or difficult depending on the cabling of your home.


Good luck.

[DavidinCT]

So far my Experience with My Movies.... about to trash it....

As a MyMovies user and regular watcher of their forum I was a little surprised and disapointed at their lack of initial response to your original post. Maybe the approach was that if you gave it a try that would answer some of your questions, whatever, I am pleased they have now responded! For my part I am very, very happy with MyMovies it is way beyound the crappy standard Movie library although like you I almost gave up on it at first. I still find it not very intuitive, but barring a few user (me) created problems it has always worked very well out of the box so to speak, and that is over several years and at least 2 major upgrades (I don't use extenders) . All I can say is I believe it is well worth perservering with!

^ What he said...every word. I have the full feature set and love the software.

It's experiences like yours that inspired me to ditch the extender ideal. Shared guide and shared recorded TV, or lack there of, can be worked around. The added(?) benefits of a PC are worth considering unless money is the concern. I have Silicondust tuners so it might be easier for me to make the suggestion, otherwise the option becomes a lot more expensive or difficult depending on the cabling of your home.


Good luck.

Right now, My Movies is a piece of junk, It seems to work on extenders but, very sluggish, if I open it on the HTPC, it ONLY shows 1 movie and even that is incorrect (yea, I know I gota edit the DB), as I only setup 197 movies, even in the DB it only shows 195, so there are movies missing and I didn't even add all my movies yet.

I have not given up 100% on it yet, If I can get the movies showing up and enable the trial, I'll give it a shot for like 2 weeks or so, if it is that much better and faster performing, I MIIGHT buy it. Again, it has to be a LOT better.

The Extender model for me is here to stay, When it connects it works perfect for record tv, live tv and general media center features, this is easy 90% of the usage of the extenders. The ONLY problem is Movies, this is what I am trying to resolve.

Adding another HTPC is a mess of problems waiting to happen, I did a test last year, on my office machine from my HTPC. This is all hardwired with gigbit lan with cat 6 cable. After the folders were setup and set as a watched folder, When I open recorded TV on the Office machine, it took about 2-5 min for all the shows from the primary Media Center to show up (one by one they would pop up in the list), then another 3-4 min for all the thumbnails to show up.

In the real world, this sucks, Never mind needing another tuner (cablecard tuner with monthly fees for a another cablecard), my infinity 4 does not support sharing tuners in a pool, so I would have to assign a tuner to that and that could cause problems on busy recording nights where MCE cant access the tuner when it needs it. Yea, I could upgrade to a 6 but, more costs when I don't need it right now.

So far not crazy impressed with My Movies, the menus and meta data is ok, a little better than WMC's menu (yea, I know it has more feature) but, I confirmed that the transcoder does ONLY DVD movies (VOB or ISO), it does nothing with video files or MKV files. SO I am back to square one as that goes.

Anyway about it, the Extenders are here to stay, I just need to find a work-around for this problem. I guess it's looking like I was have to re-encode video on about 10 movies (primary kids movies that are watched on the extender), as it really does not look like there is a way to resolve this issue.

any other thoughts ?

I can find out the exact codecs used in the problem videos, maybe there is a work around for it

[3rob3]

If you are stuck with using extenders than you will have to re-encode to MP4 or AVI for 100% compatibility. Though I think even with that the performance still sucks compared to full HTPC.

[mcewinter]

A server is also ideal to simplify file sharing and makes for a decent plex server (which is not subscription based by the way, they have two pricing models). Any PC introduced to my network has access to TV and my movie collection. Extenders only frustrate the experience as they only address an ideal solution for TV in a home that enjoys movies.

Most people give up on transcoding, that's why the subject rarely comes up these days. I don't see an easy solution for you, at least by your criteria. Kodi makes for a great movie player if that can be worked as an option, but the point is you have a lot of work ahead of you to make it work with what you have, you may have to think outside of the box...pun not intended, but hey.

[DavidinCT]

VERY INTERESTING FIND ! So my 90%+ of movies are ripped in MKV format. So I imbed the subtitles to them (my wife is little hard of hearing). So today I wanted to try something on a kids movie that would not play at all. So I installed mkvtoolnix, Edited the MKV, removed the subtitles (takes about 3-5 min to remove the subtitles on each movie)and after a delay and a few studders here and there, the MOVIE PLAYED ON THE 360 !

The movies with the problem are MPEG-4p10/AVC/h.264, these should play on a extender. They are grainy on the 360 (not even close to the main HTPC) but, they play, I will try a few more "problem" videos and see if this resolves it.

The cable ran to this extender is a cat 5e, unshielded cable. It does cross some power lines in the wall(it's about a 50 foot cable that goes a long way to get to the Extender), I have been thinking about changing it to a shielded Cat6 cable, I bet this would resolve sudder problems on high bit rate videos. Everything on my network is gigabit.

This is progress... and a very good sign...

After I figured this out manually, Of course I found a info that shows this issue (poor performance but, seems to resolve this person's problem)

http://shark007.net/forum/Thread-Xbox-360-Extender

[newfiend]

Hey David.. I recently switched to Windows 8.1 on my HTPC. When I used Windows 7 I installed LAV Filters and xy-vsfilter for subs. After installing Windows 8.1 I installed LAV and xy-vsfilter and had problems with .mkv playback in Emby (Media Browser) that would just crash playback completely after a few minutes of video play.
After some tinkering I noticed that the files that were crashing the playback had subtitle files that weren't displaying at all like they did in Windows 7.
I removed LAV and xy-vsfilter and installed Shark007's Advanced codec pack, enabled the extender support as you do when it prompted me and then set up bitstreaming to my AVR.
I tested Emby on my Xbox 360 and a lot of the files that I previously had issues with will play now. Like another poster mentioned earlier what seems to slow Emby down on the 360 is background images, If you can turn that option off for the extenders to increase performance Emby might still be an option to look at that may fit your needs.

I, Like you have a lot of .mkv files with DTS audio because I like 5.1 surround sound so I totally understand why you don't want to convert all your files.

.MKV Merge GUI is great for looking inside your .mkv's to see what's there.. Removing the subtitle files from them or even setting the default track flag on them to off might even be an option for you. That way you can keep the sub's in the .mkv but have them "not" play by default and see if that works??

This is also a great little tool I install so I can right click any media file and see what's inside without having to drag and drop a file into .mkv Merge GUI. https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo
With this you can quickly and easily see what's contained in the file and what codec's it needs to play.

Emby launched from within WMC on an extender isn't the fastest option but disabling the backdrops on the extender should speed it up considerably as that seems to take the most time to load.
It's funny that what seems to hang up your extender playback and what crashed my Win 8.1 playback was subtitle files... I did also notice that sharks pack had an update I installed yesterday.. Once I switched to Sharks pack everything seems to play fine including subs. I use MCE Remote Plus 1.3 and set up my harmony remote with a button to toggle subtitles on and off at will on the HTPC. http://www.headsoft.com.au/?category=mce

The movies you are having the biggest issue with I would recommend converting with Handbrake to a .mp4 or .m2ts container, especially if they are kids movies that get played a lot. for the most part they will just work. One other thing that stinks about WMC and Extenders in general is the lack of FF and REW for file formats other than .WTV. There are options (although not free ones) that will allow you to convert your movies to .WTV files that would enable FF and REW capability on both the HTPC and Extender... But I am sure you knew that already.
newfiend~

[DavidinCT]

Hey Curt !

I have been using MediaInfo for years now, great little tool. It's on my list of 5 apps that MUST be installed to any WMC machine. Even when I was building custom machines for my customers, I would install it, as when they would call (this is PRE-Shark007) about a problem playing a video, I could remote in, fix/install the codec and reboot the box.

I've been using the MKV format for a long time, I love that MKV Merge GUI program(been using it for years too), easy to do, drag and drop almost subtitles, audio tracks and you don't have to re do the whole file, a 45gb Blu-ray rip takes about 10-12 min to do..

Not sure I would move to mp4 or m2ts as I lose this flexibility on my videos. With converting frame by frame to a new format (and in most cases that will need to be done), you will lose quality in the conversion and 1-4 days for each video (depending on the CPU used), is not something I want to deal with.

I found a little batch file (on Shark007's site) that will go through all subfolders, check each MKV file and if it has subs in it, it will remove them and move on to the next one. I was thinking about setting it lose on my movie folders, this could resolve this problem once and for all.

Yea, these MKV files lose FF and REW, If you try to do it, the Extender will give an error about codecs(and need to close WMC and reopen on the extender , I guess we can live with that one, as Pause still works fine. If your watching a movie odds are you don't REW or FF too much but, pause is used a lot. A downfall for sure but, playing in the first place is more important.

I wonder now if there will be any advantage to go to Windows 8.1, I don't use anything besides WMC on my HTPC, Windows 7 (32 bit)runs fine. I have a 8.1 with WMC that I demoted to a VM (moved to a SSD and I had to remove one OS from my triple boot, so I VMed it, running 7 and 10 on my desktop). With the lost compatibility and the always on top and start with the computer, I decided to skip 8.1 on the HTPC. As I now have a spare license, it crossed my mind a little. Really hoping they put WMC in Windows 10 with the same feature set or minor bug fixes, as that will be a no brainer...

As for remote controls, I don't use a Harmony, I have setup TONS(more than I can count) of them (when I was doing custom Home theater installs), I never really liked them, I found too many limits. I have a Philips Pronto Pro and I just upgraded (picked up, need to program yet), Professional series TSU9600, This allows a full touch screen that you can use any image file as buttons, UNLIMITED macros, custom pages and it can even connect to WMP (WMC) via wi-fi and view songs and playlists right on the screen.... Very cool remote but, very complex to program, I have done a few of these and even though I have looked for months at different remote options, NOTHING replaces the Pronto series (unless you want to spend $2k+).

I still have My Movies installed on my HTPC, I want to get it working 100% (still buggy as crap but, I want to worth through the issues) and give it a fair shot. I am going to try Emby at one point but, depending on where I get and how long I live with My Movies. The Max package is $100, and with no discount on it, odds are I will try it for the 21 day trial (once it's fully working) then remove it (it's too expensive and for what I need only offers minor upgrades over the Built in Movie Library). The Transcoding feature does NOTHING for MKV files or other video files, Only DVD and DVD ISOs so they can be played back on a Extender...

Sigh, at least I have SOME progress on it...I guess one day at a time :-/

[newfiend]

I have a old WHS 2011 PC I built that holds all my Movies I would say 90% are in .mkv.. I also love that container. I have some old ones that are .avi, .mp4 etc. My HTPC has three HDD's that hold my music, TV Shows and Games. The Shark pack seems to allow most of my .mkv's to play on the 360. (I haven't tested them all,.. too many movies and too little time.) but I was pleasantly surprised to see them playing on the extender via emby. I don't use FF and REW either much, Emby in WMC will allow you to skip forward and back in an .mkv just fyi.. but of course no FF and REW.

Windows 8/8.1 Media Center has some missing features that you listed earlier. But I also like the ability to install apps from the store for TV Viewing on the start screen.. Like Disney XD app etc for the kids. Yes you need a keyboard and mouse for that but I use a Lenovo N5902 for navigating the apps and it works well. I'm also liking XBOX Music which I use on my Phone, Tablet, Xbox and now HTPC. I used to have my Win 7 machine boot/wake to desktop anyway so the loss of having WMC open automatically wasn't a loss for me.. I just hit the Menu button on the Harmony One (remapped to Green Button) to launch WMC.

Windows 8 does boot and wake much faster and the networking backend improvements in Windows 8 over Windows 7 are noticeable. My Pc seems much faster on the same hardware with Win 8. I'm not missing Windows 7 at all and all my extenders are 360's so everything's working swimmingly.

I use Emby on my HTPC, Windows Phone, and Surface and it transcodes to all those devices very well. Just keep it in mind as an option if you decide to give up on My Movies. I've heard good things about My Movies but the lack of transcoding support to extenders for .mkv wouldn't work for me in your situation. Hopefully you can find a way to work around that.
If you do decide to try emby and need help just let me know.
good luck!!
newfiend~

[DavidinCT]

Our uses of our HTPC vary a little. I want my HTPC as more of an appliance than a computer, I like the feature to be able to fully control the system via remote but, if I want to tweak or add a feature, I can pop out my OLD Media Center Keyboard (the old IR XP based keyboard, works great still but, needs IR so not good for your uses) and get it done or RDC to it.

My HTPC has all the storage in it, about 6tb for movies (only using about 2 or 3tb at this point) and another 2tb for current recorded shows, I was thinking about storing them on the servers (run 4 2008 r2 servers using ESXi 5.5) but, I didn't want to take the chance of dealing with any network based issues and it was easier to manage to have them all on one box. ALl movies are on a single drive at this point for best performance.

I wonder....In Windows 7, you used to be able to change the "shell" to eHome, this way Exporer.exe would not load on startup, WMC would (would actually make WMC load a good 30% faster and no desktop). This would make it like an appliance. The only downfall, if your running desktop based apps, they would not run unless you start explorer.exe(could cause a problem with Blu-ray software, etc). If you needed to fix a problem, CTL+ALT+DEL, task manager, run command and put Explorer.exe and you would be good to go, till next reboot. I did this for a few clients when I was building custom boxes (because kids would exit out and use the desktop that caused problems, virus, spyware, etc). If this can be done, I might actually try Win 8 on my HTPC..

No question there is subsystem performance enhancements in Windows 8/8.1 but, as using a dedicated HTPC for WMC, it always made me question it...and it will boot faster as well (this was more of MS tweaking services that made this happen, something they started in Windows 7)

Sorry didn't mean to get to far off topic.

After disabling UAC on my HTPC, My Movies seems to work, need to really understand the Movie management program but, it's working now and showing all movies. I see the advantage, it's a lot more customizable than the built in library, everything can be tweaked or you can download their data for meta data and pictures. It requires a SQL DB on the C drive, so this could cause a space problem in some time (need to upgrade my 90gb SSD I run, that only uses under 30gb for WMC). The downfall, I used to use Yamm, it pulled everything from the IMDB site, so 99% of my movies were accurate and if not, I would go to the IMDB, find the movie, copy the exact name, rename the folder/movie file and in about 5 seconds it was fixed, it just worked.

Tweaking my MKV files to remove subtitles has seemed to resolve the issue, for at least playing MKVs on the extenders, so I can live with the problem right now. Although I wish performance was a little better but, I might run a long well shielded cat 6 cable to test if that fixes the performance issues (then replace in the wall , if it does help)...

My goal is to beat up My movies for a little bit, then I might try Emby but, the Movie Library is the only feature I want to tweak and it has to be better and perform better for me to even think about it.

[DavidinCT]

OK, so far, My Movies is a POS and a buggy mess, still.... Here's my list of issues so far. I wanted to give it a fair shot but, at this time, I don't think I am even going try the full trial product as these issues are with the product itself and the trial only adds features.

My current Pre-My movies setup is with the default movie library in windows with YAMM to provide meta data and image (for the most part works good), I have it rename folders and files, so each movie is stored \Movies\Movie 1 (2001)\Movie 1 (2001).mkv etc.. This folder/file layout is based on the IMDB entry....Easy right ?

1. Some movies not detect correctly under a year, For Example I have "Beauty and the Beast" from 1991 (Disney animated movie), My Movies will detect it as 1946 "Beauty and the Beast", even though the folder is named \movies\Beauty and the Beast (1991). There is about 5-6 tiles like this and as My movies offers a lot of customization features, it a little of headache to deal with to fix each movie. If I do a re-search for new movies, they just change back(even if I change it manually).
2. There is a bug when first searching movies, When I first installed it let it search for movies, it would only find 120 out of 195 in one folder, I had to remove the "(" and ")" from one of the folders then it would continue to search, another time consuming task.
3. With UAC enabled when I try to run My Movies from WMC, it would not load and get an error of "The My movies start menu strip 1 program has stopped responding and you will now be returned to Windows Media Center" and would never load, disable UAC and it runs fine.
4. It shows "Play Disc" on almost every movie (and if selected it will prompt for a Physical disc to be put in) even though there has never been a disk in the drive(all rips) and it causes problem with the kids, according to My Movies staff, this can not be removed at this time.
5. Out of 250 or so movies total setup in My movies, there is STILL 2 movies that it wont detect or find for some reason, this will force me to go movie by movie, folder by folder to find the ones that is not there to attempt to fix (YAMM finds 100% of them and is 99.8% accurate).
6. When it installs, it creates 2 entries in the WMC start menu, "Movies" and "TV series", I don't use the TV series and there is no way to remove it, if I change it in WMC (unselect the row to show up) after a reboot it just comes right back.
7. Performance, If I open the Built in Library, it takes under 1 second to open and maybe 2-3 seconds for all movies to populate with art and metadata, If I select "My Movies" from the WMC menu, WMC hangs for about 7-8 seconds before it finally opens. WMC just hangs like it's locked up while waiting for My Movies to load up (machine has decent specs and the OS is on a really fast SSD).

Here is my thread at My Movies on these issues.
http://www.mymovies.dk/forum.aspx?g=posts&t=40430

Although the product has some good possibilities, it's even more buggier than the Built in library and has a load of issues. It does have some nice features but, with the performance issue, something I wanted to resolve, it might be just too buggy to replace the built in library.

For others using "My Movies" do you know work-arounds for these issues, or is it just the product itself ?

As for running MKV files on an Extender, I removed the subtitles and Chapters from a MKV file that would not even play. It does play, looks terrible (move is a 1080p movie, looks awesome on the HTPC but, on the exender it sometimes looks worse than a 480i movie) and will freeze every once and a while for like 1-3 seconds then continue to play. I tried to replace the cable (just a long cable direct to the extender), with a CAT6 shielded cable (heavy duty cable), this made no change at all.

Ugh...

[joecrow]

Hi

No workarrounds for the problems you encountered as I have not seen them. Maybe because I am a long time user of MyMovies so have built up my not particularly large (about 250) movie library over time rather than integrating an existing one in one go. What I can definitely say is that I do use MyMovies also on my desktop Win 7 x64 with UAC enabled (default setting) and have no problems with it, UAC is disabled on my HTPC but for other reasons!
I do have some DVDs and rips from tv series and have to say I would rather see them included in the Movie strip rather than seperately in their own (where I always forget about them), so I somewhat agree with your issue with the TV series strip.
No problems with the play disk option (my kids now have homes of their own anyway) but I also see that option for .mkvs in my collection and if I do click on it it plays exactly the same as if I pressed OK, i.e. it does not prompt me to insert a disk! So not sure what your issue is there, what player are you using?
On a quick check directly after resume from sleep, it takes about 3-4 seconds for MyMovies to open and display all the thmbnails, I also have an SSD (low-mid spec.for my other HTPC specs see my profile), which I regard as satisfactory.
Regarding the status of MyMovies I have always seen it as a fully functional free program with additional options that can be earned by contributing, or purchased individually, rather than a trial (time imited or otherwise) with limited functionality, depends on your point of view I guess. Their trial is in fact a time limited version with all the bells and whistles which includes the integration of MPC-HC as an external player for EVERYthing except BD 3D, a feature which for me is very important.

I hope you will keep us up to date on your progress regarding other programs particularly if you try Media Browser, as my own, allbeit not recent, impression of that was, to say the least, not positive.
Good luck

[DavidinCT]

Ok, now that I have officially gave up on My Movies because of the issues I had on my machine, so, maybe I will try Emby. So the question is, with everyone knowing now what I am looking for, a replacement for the Movie Library, will this do what I need or does it have a lot of fluff ?

IS there a step by step install for it to get my desired results ? Everyone is saying it's a little complex to setup so really don't want to re-invent the wheel here just trying to get it setup in WMC...

IS "Open Media Library" any good ? I know it's old and has not been updated in along time... does it work on Extenders ?