JRiver Media Center Owner's Thread - Page 22

Without going to sign up for interact and track yet another forum (yet?), does anybody have any answers to these questions?

There have been a couple of recent updates that solved some TV scan/guide issues. I don't recall now what the problmes where - but I belive it was related to people in the UK. However, you should take a look at the TV section of the forum and see if your problem is reported.
I have not had any issues with tv scans or the guide data using mc2xml (I.m in the USA).

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=11.0

Thanks for the link. I'm in the US and am using digital QAM and analog. Scan worked fine in WMC.. Picked up a lot of channels in a second scan.

Im trying jriver again for the second time and really digging into it this time. Before I didn't even give it a shot because of how ugly it is upon inital download. I normally use xbmc which is absolutly great as far as plugins and visually but lacks on the video and audio. I have it theater view wich is pretty nice but my question is how do I run scrapers for movie covers (just movie clip thumbnails showing) and is there exstensive official and 3rd party plugin repos like xbmc and differnet theater view skins? If there are a plethora of different kinds of plugins, mulrltiple great theater view skins and a decent scraper I think I might make the switch.

Try right clicking on a movie and choosing "Get Movie and TV Info".

There are some Theater View skins on our Third Party Board. Here's an example:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=70190.0

The Accessories Page has more plug-ins:
http://accessories.jrmediacenter.com...ccessories.php

If you know any XBMC skinners whose work you like, maybe you could let them know what you want. We'll provide them a license and a little help.

Il try that, is there a way to point the scraper at the folder where you keep your movies so you don't have to do them one by one, I have a couple thousand. That skin looks fairly nice as well, il have to check out the third party stuff. Man, if only you and xbmc could combine forces you would have the perfect media center. I looked at all of those plugins and they weren't what I had in mind at all. Of seemed like 90% were either what you guys call skins(more like themes or interfaces) screensavers, dev tools, or E.Q. type stuff. I hope I can find what I'm looking for in the 3rd party. I'm looking for external program launchers, game emukators, various video plugins like ESPN, amazon, crackle, vudu, Usenet, email, album/movie art, subtitles, song lyrics, band info, tv tunes, Pandora, grooveshark,torrents, rss, forums, browser, tv/program guides, fake cable, etc. I do love all your settings for audio/video, red October, netflix and hulu, remote control setup, and tv tuner setup. Speaking of that do you have any third party cable card tuner integration?

No Cablecard support yet.

You can select multiple files and do right click/Get Movie Info. But start with one or two first to make sure it's doing what you want. It's fully automatic when you select multiple files.

Thanks. Yeah I figured about cable card. Xbmc just recently got 3rd party cablecard support via vlc/psuedo tv. Good news about being to scrape multiple files at once. Where does it scrape from?

Why the lack of plugins and 10ft. skins? Is it just because jriver has mainly been an audiophile solution and not full blown htpc media center until semi recently, or lack of programmers? Are you guys working toward any of this, as it seems you have the auio/videophile biz down?

The 10' interface works just fine for me. I came from Windows Media Center and MediaBrowser and that combo had some serious bling and the ooh's and aah's from my friends. The JRiver solution, while it may not be as fancy (maybe it CAN be, I haven't played with it) is really nice and the way I see it if I can play just about any video format from within JRiver MC without external programs, etc, is having a 10' interface that's really fancy mean that much?

I'm never watching a movie or video and waxing poetic about how pretty the interface was that got me to said video.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking TheaterView at all, and it's come a long ways since I started using MC not even that long ago.

It kind of is important, that's the whole idea of a media center to me-the way it looks, and the aggregating of different local and cloud based media sources. If I didn't care about looks I could just use a bare bones media player and open my movie straight from the folder location. I use xbmc without any external programs and get hd audio. My main interest in jriver is the red October with lav and madvr. But I would like the bells and whistles too.

Have you used TheaterView? It's a really nice 10' interface when you use Cover Flow. It's not quite as fancy as some of the other interfaces but it holds it's own.

Yes I'm trying out theaterview, not sure if its the coverflow interface or not. It's definitly the nicest I've seen jr look.

I'm guessing that someone else could chime in with screen grabs faster than I can since my stuff is all at home.

The JRiver forums are also really good if you haven't been there before.

Unfortunately we live in a Apple/BestBuy world. People want/love the bling and eye candy.

Bling:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=69716.0

Bling:
http://www.pix01.com/gallery/F70A5EA...w_Blue_Puzzle/

Don't get mad at me.

But its good. Not great. But its a start.

Just my opinion. Others may disagree and that's fine by me.

Tough crowd.

I agree with you. However, it is a radical improvement for the bling-lovers over previous versions. I hope there is continued development in this area, not for my benefit per se, but because I love the JRiver MC software; I think the eye candy is necessary to get more customers than ever before. Red October was the first phase of the MC revolution, and more bling (without harming the usability) will be the next massive contributor to sales, IMO.

XBMC is very impressive visually, and its bling isn't blinding, but rather functional.

I completely agree. I wasn't trying to be harsh. Just trying to offer some constructive criticism. I think to take JRiver to the next level its visual appearance from a user interface standpoint is going to have to improve.

Like it or not not everyone knows or cares about the great things that JRiver does like Red October, Zones, etc. They care about how easy it is to use and how good the interface looks.

XBMC is popular because its free, looks great and has lots of plug-ins and apps. That's what the majority of people want.

That's just the world we live in. Now JRiver may choose not to appease those people and that's fine too if they want to limit their market away from those dollars/users (something I would completely understand and respect if they choose to do). But I think its a legitimate criticism of the software at this point that is at least something that should be improved upon (hopefully easier than not).

Ease of setup and eye candy are two of the most important requirements for an average joe like me...

I do own a jriver mc (V17) license, but only used it for audio for a while...

These days, I use traktor pro 2 for music playback...

Not that jriver is not great, but once again, it's all about the ease of setup et al...

My JRiver setup is used almost entirely for video and I don't use it much for music.

I did have a bit of a learning curve coming from WMC/MB where I had everything organized with cover art and folders and backdrops. It took me a while to wrap my head around organizing the Library.

JRiver actually took a couple of suggestions that I and others made to make Library organization easier, specifically auto-tagging imported files based on folder location and then later on using folder.jpg artwork that wasn't specifically located with the media files.

They do listen to user feedback and if you can come up with cohesive suggestions, they are open minded and make changes to their product that the users want, so I give them kudos to that.

That being said, I would love to see some more bling, but as the product stands now it works great with how I've gotten it set up so far.

I'm not ranting, so please don't get me wrong...

A good number of users (including myself) requested the possibility to organize media in folder structure, i.e avoid tagging et al... but this never came to being (at least up until now)...
Many of us in PAL land also requested DVB-S support and some (including myself) offered to beta test for free, but this didn't take off either...

Imagine what this program will be if on top of the automagic codec download and setup, you could choose between organizing your media in folder structure or letting the program do its thing as it currently does... coupled with a little more robust live TV support (DVB-T,S,C)... ah...

For audio, there is no discussion, it is simply the best available in a class of its own...

That will mean the end of windows media center for most us who have no choice but to live with whatever M$ has to offer...

DVB-S is already supported. The TV section in general is far from perfect in MC, but it now works acceptably, and improving.

If you follow the JRiver fourm, there is a lot of talk on what to "polish" up next. The JRiver people spend all their time on tweaking the "engine" and not as much on the "body". Sort of like the Sleeper muscle car of my era.
The two areas where I think you will see a lot of focus/improvement in the near future will be on the TV stuff and appearance.

Oh I agree, I've got all of my media set up in Folder Structure, and I continue to organize it via Folder Structure even while conforming the library database to my needs.

I would be in heaven if I could organize my files like I did in MediaBrowser where I just pointed something like Kid's Movies to a folder or folders and when I launched TheaterView it would all be there.

There's still more behind-the-scenes fiddling with stuff with the Library that I would love to avoid.

Just last night we went to watch a movie and it wasn't in my Movie list. Since I was on the couch using the remote, I was a little frustrated that I had to get up (I was comfy) and grab the keyboard from the entertainment center, quit TheaterView, find the movie that I wanted in the list, then fix the fact that it wasn't tagged correctly (not sure why) then F11 back into TheaterView and verify that the movie was there and launch it.

If it was organised by Folder Structure, just the fact that "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" was in the Movies folder would have meant that it would have showed up where I expected it to.

While I was fixing that tag, I noticed that 50/50 had the wrong info and cover, so when I selected Get Movie and TV Info (or whatever it's called in the menu) I noticed that the library function overwrote my Genre tag (that my TheaterView uses to organize what shows up where) and I had to switch that back or that movie wouldn't have shown up in my list.

Have you tried MC's Auto Import?
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Import

I've been using Auto Import since late v16, early v17. The addition of auto-tagging to it was marvelous. There's just little hicucps with it at times, at least on my setup.

Is there some logging that goes on, perhaps an "Event Viewer" that I could check out of curiosity?

I've also noticed that some of my IFO/VOB files aren't playing. It will play for about a second, then stop. If I convert that DVD to MKV, it plays fine. The problem with that is one of my streamers in the bedroom doesn't like MKV files, so I haven't bothered converting 400-500 movies from VOB to MKV. I was just musing the other day when I went to play a movie that wouldn't work that an Event Viewer would be nice to see if I could figure out why that particular movie didn't work.

Although for all I know there is that sort of logging functionality and I just haven't noticed it.

What is the full version of MC?

MC17.0.117 is here:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=23.0

MC has logging. It's under the Help menu.

That is fantastic news...

I will try it out over the weekend to see what it gives...

Here's a link to the latest:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=71161.0

It's slightly newer than the one on the download page.

There are more TV changes that will appear in the next week or two.