Windows 7 Media Center : Setup Guide, Knowledge Base & Support - Page 53

You're welcome. In most cases, it's better to rip and remux locally. Writing and deleting many files causes unnecessary fragmentation on your NAS storage. By doing this locally, windows can defrag the drive. When done store the completed movie on the NAS. Network speed will also slow things down considerably when you're demuxing and remuxing over the network.

I wanted to say thanks for this great guide, it has helped me alot in getting my new htpc build going.

I am having some difficulty with the customization side of things though and was wondering if anyone had any suggestions. I am running Windows 7 HP 64bit and followed the guide here for my setup.

I got media center studio and have been playing around with adjusting the 7mc start menu. The problem is that ive had very limited luck in my changes actually being applied to 7mc. Now maybe this is just a limitation of the studio currently, but some changes either are ignored or MC becomes unstable and wont launch at all.

Maybe someone can suggest a better what of setting things up, so ill list the scenario im after:

1. I want to modify the Movie section by disabling the standard entry points (library, search, play dvd) and add in new entry points (MB link to Movies and TMT3 link to playback dvds or blurays). So I used MCS and unchecked the old links and then added the new entry points i wanted. I saved it and then launched 7MC. Nothing was different, my points werent added and the standard ones were still showing up.

2. I want to seperate the Pictures and Videos section. I went in MCS and added a new line and then moved the 'Video Library' link to that new line along with a link to the MacroTube app. I named it 'Videos' and saved it. Than I went back and renamed the old line to 'Pictures' and saved again. This time, I know its doing something becuase the name change applied when I loaded 7MC. The 'Video Library' link was also gone from that line, but the new line I made was no where to be seen.

3. Id like to remove the Sports line altogether. I went into MCS and unchecked that line and saved, but its still there when I load 7MC.



So am I missing something here or am I trying to do things that just arent possible with the software currently available. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

oh and this is surely a simply thing, but I cant figure out how to point MB to launch tmt3 when trying to play movies i have ripped to bdmv folders. When I choose such a movie, the screen flashes for a moment and then goes back to MB. I assume thats becuase its trying to use 7MC to play it back.

thanks for looking into this Green. but it didn't work (for me at least).

i gave up. i am going to rip the AAC track and convert it to AC3. a little more work, but probably have a chance of working. thanks again.

Yup. That's definitely what I'm seeing. Well, as long as the bug is just that ReClock is reporting it wrong, I'm fine with that.

Hi GreenEyez,

Thanks for your guide and your help previously with 108024p! To make a long story short, I nuked and paved Windows 7 and reset up MPC-HC according to your guide (using ffdShow), but added ReClock into the mix. Everything is working great now, though I have not tried 24p again, as I really messed up my system trying to do so the last time...

I have never used any kind of front end before (including 7MC), so I installed Media Browser (no plugins yet) as recommended in your guide. I started out by creating a test location for my movies like this:

F:\\Movies\\Alice\\Alice.FLAC.DTS.mkv
F:\\Movies\\Anaconda\\Anaconda.FLAC.DTS.mkv
F:\\Movies\\Beauty and the Beast (2009)\\Beauty and the Beast.FLAC.DTS.mkv
etc. (one movie per folder, all of them .MKV)

I have a total of 26 movies that I put in this area in order to test out MB's meta data retrieval. I only included the year in parentheses for a couple of the movies that might confuse MB (like Sherlock Holmes and Mysterious Island). When MB was finished downloading, I only had 6 entries in the window out of 26. I tried using the "update Library" tool, but that didn't help.

Do you have any idea why MB found only 6 of the titles (and BTW, the ones it found did not have a date)?

Another question - Is Media Center Master an alternative to Media Browser or something that should be installed in addition?

Also, where is the metadata kept? For some unknown reason one of the titles "Sahara (2005)" MB has retrieved cover art for a James Belushi film. I of course wanted the Matthew McConaughey film and I would like to replace the data manually. I can not find the James Belushi film either at Netflix or IMDB.com, so I have no idea where MB is getting this info from.

Media Center Master is a metadata retrieval tool. You can use it to gather your metadata for your movies for Media Browser to use instead of relying on Media Browsers internal. I prefer using a 3rd party metadata tool (I use metabrowser) for gathering metadata, and then use Media Browser as my front end (launching MPC for my Blu Ray mkvs)

Thanks for the tip, Damian! I am glad that you explained that to me as I would be getting frustrated very quickly if I had to rely on Media Browser's internal metadata retrieval abilities. I have a HUGE library of ripped Blu-ray .MKVs, and before I go to the trouble of putting them all into individual folders I want to make sure that the metadata can be retrieved fully and correctly...

Here is a writeup I did a while back on using metabrowser to gather metadata for MediaBrowser ( I have about 400 movies and 1600 tv shows):

http://www.mediasmartserver.net/2009...h-metabrowser/

One thing to mention, the new metabrowser (2.0) is not free, however the metabrowser version I used in that guide is still free (and I actually still use it to this date). You can download the free version here if you want to try and follow along, or you can try Media Center Master

Wow, nice writeup! I am going to watch a movie right now, but I will try out your guide tomorrow. Thanks again!

Stupid noob question but when the guide says the following, just what is being installed?

Installation:

-> At the Setup Tab, choose Custom instalation
-> From the dropbox, disable the following : DirectVobSub , AC3 filter, Xvid, DivX MKV, Haali, Thumbnail components.
-> Select Next and Complete.

Thanks, GreenEyez!

Yup, MCM did the trick very nicely. You know, I had read your guide over several times and did not know whether the use of MB and MCM was an "either" or "or" situation, and I did not want to install anything more than I absolutely needed. Now I know - you NEED MCM or other similar program like dbone uses. I was going to try out dbone's guide, but I already had MCM in hand so I took the lazy route.

As far as the 24p situation is concerned, it was not your fault... The old Catalyst drivers that I was using just had too many problems, and rather than update the drivers, I figured I would nuke and pave since I also had too many codecs installed. Now I have a nice lean machine with no extra baggage to screw things up and it is working perfectly, though like I said, I have not yet tried 24p. I probably won't bother, either, since all audio and video is silky smooth and in sync (maybe because of ReClock?).

I am going to play around with MCM today to try out the automatic naming and organizing that you informed me about. If it works properly it will be a HUGE convenience, as I have a quite a large library of ripped Blu-rays that need to be put into folders and may possibly require renaming.

I guess the most important thing is that I am now having FUN instead of frustration...

I cannot get my Dinovo mini to work with mpc-hc. I followed the instructions but the pause, play, forward, etc buttons are not recognized.

Did you put your Mini in MCE mode?

I can rename files just fine, but how do you "move/organize your files to folders" using MCM? I tried reading the Wiki, but it is very incomplete.

I was able to get the job done using "file2folder GUI" from dbone's guide, but I was under the impression that MCM could do that without the need to use an external program.

Thanks alot for that tool, that at least allows me to remove the strips i dont want. Hopefully MCS can be fixed becuase it has alot of potential. I still cant add strips though. I can rename existing ones and sort of make it work, but custom new strips dont show up at all.

I saw a few 'hacks' to try and allow MCS to work normally again, but none worked for me.

Thanks for looking into it.

Just a follow up on the Media Center Studio issues.

For anyone that is struggling to get it to work, I have found the method that worked for me to get most functionality back.

Use MCS and reset MC to default

Rename all files in the folders:
C:\\ProgramData\\Microsoft\\eHome\\Packages\\MCEClientU X\\DSM
C:\\ProgramData\\Microsoft\\eHome\\Packages\\MCEClientU X\\DSM-2 (Note: I did not have this folder on my system)

Create a new text file with the same name as the old file. (StartResources.dll)
Set as read-only.
Change permissions to not be inherited from parent directory.
-Go to Properties>Security tab>Advanced>Change Permissions>
-Uncheck the box 'Include inheritable permissions from this object's parent' and then choose 'Remove' on the box that pops up
-Apply and close windows

Load MCS and recreate your custom layout

Launch MC



The above method allowed me to add custom menu stripes and such, although I still cant change the order of the menu stripes. Those changes dont show up in MC.


UPDATE:

Well I was wrong about moving the order of menu stripes, I can now do that too, so Im very happy now lol.

Thanks, GreenEyez! I will give it a shot on the next batch. I learned a lot today because I found that MCM could not identify quite a few of my movies by the way that I had them titled. I also found that a couple of the movies had no cover art, and even one title had to be misspelled in order for it to match up with IMDB...

I would like to try out your "Black and Titanium" theme, but I don't know how to get it into MB. The only way I could find to install themes was from the MB configurator, and it does so by downloading from a list. Your theme is not on that list, so I figure that I have to manually copy the files in your archive to somewhere, but where?

Also, if you load, let's say, 5 themes via the configurator plugin, what happens? Which theme will MB use? Or will it create total chaos? I'm good at creating chaos...

Oh, and where is your donation link?

I have tried this on (3) different systems, all W7 Ultimate, (2) 64 and (1) 32 bit. Every time I try to import a .mct file, MCS crashes with a 'stopped working, CLR20r3' error message. MCS version is BETA 0.0.6.5. I have tried different .mct files that I downloaded here from the forum.

Any idea what I am doing wrong?

TIA!
____
Axel

Everything is working smooth as silk...

Duh...It was right in front of me.

Stupid question...but where do I do that? I cannot find it in SetPoint