[Answered] Best way to create a home movies series?

[breazile]

I have a few home movies (Christmas videos) that I would like to organize as a "series." I'm not sure if this is the best way to do this, so please advise. I tried creating a TV Series in MyMovies, but it does not seem to work properly. For example, I setup a Christmas series with Season 1 as 2013, Season 2 as 2014, etc. Then I added some individual videos as the episodes. I thought this would show up in CMC as a title, but it does not seem to recognize any of the videos.

I read the articles on how to create series (TV101-TV301), but my content does not come from a disc. I have not associated a disc or any episodes on a disc, so I'm wondering if that is part of the problem.

What is the best way to accomplish this? I'm using CME for the import, and the previous version to 4.0 (not yet upgraded).

[Pauven]

Try upgrading to v4.0, and use CCC instead of CME.

CCC has much better support for for offline titles, collections, and exporting TV Series that aren't fully mapped to disc. I think it will work for what you want to do.

Please share your results, I'm very interested. This is a novel idea!

[breazile]

That worked for me, but only on one TV. I have 2 copies of CMC, one for each TV. On my main TV I used CCC to import all titles from MyMovies, and was able to browse and play the TV Series I created.

On the other TV I pointed the config to the first TV's IP address, and did a sync. That seemed to work until the next time I restarted the PC. After the restart I get a constant error on CMC, and the library does not work at all. For some reason it wants to drill into the most recent title on start, even though I do not select anything. Then a popup error continually pops up for about 22 times and then I'm left with a blank blue screen. When I try to navigate it thinks I'm scrolling through the titles and I get another 22 error messages each time I use the arrow keys to move around. My second TV is completely broken now.

This is what the error looks like:

Error1.jpg (78.34 KiB) Viewed 4153 times

Error2.jpg (243.93 KiB) Viewed 4153 times

[Pauven]

That looks like a file permissions error - your 2nd CMC PC is trying to access the first CMC PC to get artwork, and doesn't have access.

Have you followed the setup guide exactly, step by step? viewforum.php?f=22

You can also delete the CMC_MovieDB.bin file on the 2nd PC, which will force it to do a refresh from the main PC. That may help.

[breazile]

I read the forum post before I upgraded to 4.0, so I did all of that. The first CMC setup is working just fine, and is where CCC is running.

I deleted CMC_MovieDB.bin, but it still gave me the same error when I started CMC. I think what might be happening is that the program is trying to sync with the DB when it starts. After deleting the file I got the same error popup 30 times in a row. I managed to go to the settings and verify connectivity with the first station. See screen shot below when I tested connectivity.

I'm letting it sync again to see what happens. I can see the spinning arrows up in the top even though there is an error popup.

I do not think that restarting had anything to do with the error, I think it was simply the second time I launched CMC and it is giving me an error on sync. When I upgraded to 4.0 on the second machine I was able to retrieve the titles, and things looked OK. I restarted just after that and saw the error upon the second start of CMC.

Error3.jpg (124.83 KiB) Viewed 4146 times

[Pauven]

Okay, try deleting the subfolder "MovieCache" on the bad PC, and see what that does.

Another idea is to try using the CCC PC's name instead of the IP address. Do this as a 2nd test, separate from deleting MovieCache, so we know which one had an effect.

[breazile]

None of those worked, but I found the problem. There was an entry in CMC_ErrorLog.txt that stated the Images folder was missing (C:\Program Files (x86)\Binnerup Consult\My Movies for Windows\Images. My Movie Cover Profile is set to My Movies, but it is not installed on the second machine. I probably uninstalled it a while ago. I was also wondering why I could not get the cover art to look the same as my first PC.

Once I created the folder I started to see icons, but the Blu Ray and UHD covers were missing so I copied the contents from my other PC. Not sure if there are other problems that I might run into with My Movies not installed on the second machine. I prefer the look of the My Movies covers.

This is what it looked like once I created the empty directory, then I went ahead and copied the whole Images folder. The bottom picture is my other PC.

Error4.jpg (191.92 KiB) Viewed 4140 times

Error5.jpg (243.09 KiB) Viewed 4140 times

Error6.jpg (272.03 KiB) Viewed 4140 times

[Pauven]

That's excellent detective work. Thanks for sharing the root cause.

One of the features of CMC v4.0 with CCC is that most of your user preferences are synced across all your PC's. This includes your Cover Profile.

I had anticipated this would be a problem at some point, that you could have the My Movies Cover Profiles on one PC but not another, but I didn't test to see exactly how this would fail.

Yes, copying over the Cover Profile files is all you needed to do. That is literally the only files CMC will ever require from a My Movies install, so you don't need to do a full My Movies install.

[breazile]

Great, thanks for the help. 2 problems both solved by moving to 4.0 (TV Series and covers)!