Requests for Genre View and 1-row Box Set View

[RKEP]

Hi Paul

I have just got back from Sea and firstly would like to say what a great job the updates are in particular for me the Hot Keys and the option to set the basic background for the different sections.

With regards to the background FanArt request by "ANDYK48 » Thu Nov 01, 2018 6:01 am" brings me to a related couple of requests from myself.

In his Pic 1 the image is behind a cover row at he bottom. WMC let you set a fade in time as you currently do with "Details Pop up Display" in settings and a transparency setting for the covers, so as you moved over the cover depending on your settings the FanArt would fade in to the set time and if set to zero transparency the cover would disappear until you "select" or "scroll" to the next cover?

Also inline with that request, there currently isn't a selection for one row of covers. Please could we have one row of covers including in the box sets. The size of the covers in the box set is great and one row scolling across the middle of the screen is my preference and works well with my first request?

Thanks for all your hard work, greatly appreciated

Richard

[Pauven]

Hey Richard,

Welcome back to dry land, hope you had a good voyage.

I'm splitting your post into a new thread so that I don't loose sight of your requests.

The Genre or Categories view is something I hope to tackle this year, which is what is shown in that pic 1 you referenced (inserted below for reference). Your suggestions regarding fade-in and transparency are welcome, and features I hope to include in the Genre view once I implement it.

image.png (1.62 MiB) Viewed 20639 times

I hadn't thought about changing the # of rows in the Box Set view, but I see your point. I'll consider this, but as of right now there are many items in front of this request, including the Genre View which is a big development, so I'm not sure if I will get to it this year or next. Though if more users want this I could give it a higher priority.

Thanks!
Paul

[RKEP]

Hi Paul

Just to be clear. I was hoping we could have a single row of covers on every section ie Movies, Other etc and in the box sets. If you did understand that my apologies, it was just I wasn't sure from your response, thanks

Best Regards

Richard

[Pauven]

Yes, I understood. There's only two views in CMC, the main cover rows (regardless of selected All/Movies/TV/Music/Doc/Other Media Type), and the Box Set View which is also used for the TV Series legacy view, new TV Series View Discs view, and the Actor Collected Works view.

[mikemack]

I will second this motion if it helps at all to get it moved up in priority. I liked the way that this was accomplished in WMC and it sort of goes in hand with my UI Customization request here https://chamconsoft.com/cmc/forums/?w3= ... MmdD00OA==

Being able to scroll through custom categories in WMC that I created in MyMovies collection management and then select a category and then have the single row view with the fanart popping up behind the cover you are on was great.

My last Win7 WMC machine died this past week and it will be missed.

[Manni]

Following Paul's request, here is the feature request I posted in this thread https://chamconsoft.com/cmc/forums/?w3= ... QjdW5yZWFk (where there is more info about the ways I use the Dune player as well):

I got a new Dune player, and I've tested their collection software. It's complete cr@p (childish covers, doesn't find half the titles, displays bluray instead of 4K bluray, it's completely unusable), but it has something that I'd love to have on the CMC wall when we select a film, which is a summary of the key elements of the title (whether it's 4K bluray, bluray or DVD, HDR10, HDR10+ or DV, whether it has Dolby Atmos or DTS:X, etc. without having to drill into three different screens.

Here is what it looks like:

Movie Wall.jpg (633.93 KiB) Viewed 10528 times

There is definitely the room to do something similar with CMC ([EDIT: I'm talking about the one-line with tech info, which could be added to the existing movie wall], so if you agree it would be a nice addition I'd love to see this implemented.

[Manni]

I looked into jRiver's Media Centre 34 Theatre Mode recently as it has made a lot of progress, and that gave me a few ideas for CMC, so I thought I'd write them down here before I forget them.

A lot of the metadata displayed is extracted using Mediainfo, which I think would be a much better way to do it than to rely on MyMovies (the info is often missing, wrong or incomplete). In order to avoid the lag, which is a concern, I thought we could do a full metadata extract using mediainfo in CCC, adding an option similar to the one that checks if all the paths are valid (or we could even combien these if it doesn't make it too long). That's the only option/screen in CCC where the media shares are expected to be online, and it doesn't rely on MyMovies data either, so it would make sense to put it there so that the info is extracted for all titles at once and there is no lag in the GUI.

First of all, the grid view in Theatre Mode looks very nice and it's fully customizable, so I was able to add some useful info to the info already there, especially the full path and HDR metadata (HDR type, mastering colorspace, mastering lumimance and in a more recent version I've added peak luminance on another line below).

But out of the box, jRiver shows a line of icons that provide a lot of the info we want (4K HDR or 4K UHD, bluray, dolby vision, dolby atmos, etc). All that info can be parsed by mediainfo).

Here is a screenshot of grid view in Theatre Mode:

Metadata use in jRiver Grid view.jpg (702.15 KiB) Viewed 3981 times

All the icons in the lower right are standard. The info I added are the path and the HDR info below.
I really like some of the info they have too, for example "ENDS AT" and the time it would end at if we were to start playback now.

And here is what is displayed in the detail view for a title:

Metadata use in jRiver detail view.jpg (558.96 KiB) Viewed 3981 times

Same thing, all the icons at the top are standard, I added the path and HDR metadata at the bottom.

If we look at CMC's wall view, there is plenty of space to add such detailed info, here is a crude mock up:

CMC main wall mock up.jpg (760.55 KiB) Viewed 3981 times

Of course the font size is too small etc but just to give an idea of the info that could be added.

It's a bit more cramped in the detail view, but most of the icons could replace the existing bigger icons with only provide a subset of the same info, and there is space for the additional HDR info as well. Here is a crude mock up:

CMC details mockup.jpg (562.04 KiB) Viewed 3981 times

Anyway, that's just food for thoughts, no rush of course, and I'm not suggesting to rip off jRiver's design, just giving some ideas about the kind of information we could try to add to CMC and where it could go.

Looking forward to testing a revised CMC design in 8.x, whenever that might be!

[Jamie]

As Manni suggested in his post, I believe that it would be great if cmc could get the source data from somewhere else like mediainfo. Mymovies is becoming an outdated source and since they no longer want to update the windows app anymore, It would be better to source the data from a different place. The only problem would be if mediainfo charges for their data feed which I believe they probably do.

Jamie

[Pauven]

I'm not quite sure I follow the logic of writing the data to the media shares via CCC.

I put the path validation logic in CCC because CCC has the direct data feed from My Movies, and My Movies data can get corrupted due to bugs, so checking that each path from My Movies points to a reachable directory makes perfect sense.

But one thing CCC never does is write to media folders, or read from media folders. CME writes to and reads from media folders. That's the primary difference. I don't think I want to change this behavior, because I want people to be able to trust that CCC never writes to media folders.

If I were to add this to CCC, I would have it write to a local database, not to media folders. If I added it to CME, then it would make sense to write it to media folders.

Regarding using external metadata, licensing is a big concern. This past year I reached out to TheMovieDB.org for clarification on their terms of use, and they didn't even bother to respond. It's not really that their terms of use aren't clear, but rather that they aren't designed to address the way CCC works, updating thousands of titles in one go.

But I just checked on MediaInfo, and this doesn't even appear to be a metadata service. Rather, it is a file analyzer. It reads your files and extracts info from them.

While that's pretty cool, I don't think it does this for ripped ISO's, or for ripped to folder DVD's/Blu-rays. That excludes 99.9% of my collection. Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding.

I certainly don't want to speak for all CMC users, but my impression is that the majority of CMC users use similar movie storage methods, and thus this is not a solution for the majority of CMC users.

[Manni]

I suggested CCC because there is an option there that relies on the media being online (to check the file locations). I never suggested to write anything to the media shares (I agree it wouldn't be a good idea). I meant to write this information in the local CMC database (it's huge already, so it could store this information in some way along with everything else). I agree that it would only make sense to write this data in media shares with CME, but is anyone still using that?

I don't store my collection as ISOs (except for 3DBD, that I don't play anymore as my TV doesn't support 3D). I store all my titles as DVD/BD/4KBD folders, and jRiver CM gets all the media info (I'm talking technical data) accurately for each and everyone of these titles. The only exception is when the file is not readable/playable, which is actually a great feature. It allowed me to identify one 4K bluray and three files (I've started storing most of my non-essential bluray series in MP4 files a few years back to save space) in my collection that were not playable, so I could replace them with valid media.

The reason why I believe it's using mediainfo is because it's exactly the same information (with nice icons added). I wouldn't have suggested to use a metadata provider, because apart from the copyright issues the info can't be reliable (how would they know if we're talking about the bluray, DVD, 4K bluray, mkv or mp4 file?). Mediainfo is a great software, and it works reliably with 100% of my collection (majority of files for TV series as I converted many to MP4 or MKV and folders for movies).

Unfortunately, I'm getting some errors with CMC (including a crash error every single time I start the program) and I don't want to bother Paul with them as he has better things to do at the moment, so I've started moving my collection to jRiver MC. I've already implemented support for Vera Lights (you can play any command when a file starts/stops playback) and I've have helped them to implement WOL support for offline shares, so I'm 99% there.

The only thing I have to do is convert my TV series that are still disc-based to files, so that I can track episodes playback without relying on MyMovies disc structure (that keeps becoming invalid if you don't lock the titles), which is one of the great USPs of MyMovies/CMC for disc-based rips.

The added advantage of converting series to files (especially 4K TV Series, lossless to mkv) is to get Dolby Vision support from jRiver, which doesn't support DV in discs (folders or ISOs), only in files. I also discovered that the MyMovies app on iOS (V3 only) was able to launch playback of individual episodes to my Dune Player when ripped as files, which is another huge advantage to ripping series to files, as otherwise the app can't keep track of watched episodes and can only play discs.

As jRiver is the only player I use and as its interface (especially Theatre Mode) has improved a lot in the last couple of years, and as Paul doesn't seem interested in implementing improvements to the interface and provide technical metadata, it doesn't really make sense to have CMC as a middle man, when MyMovies and jRiver MC cover all my needs and add flexible views and precise technical metadata. I don't really want to have to manage two collections, so I had to make a choice. Obviously, one added advantage is that playback is instant as the player is already launched.

I'll also be ready when/if MyMovies CM on PC disappears, as jRiver can organise a collection without MyMovies. By the way, Jamie, Brian has just released a V5.41, so it's still supported for now. Brian is also planning to improve the SQL client/server model in an upcoming version by using SQLlocalDB and making no server/client distinction, which is a step in the right direction, so hopefully we'll have MyMovies for at least a few more years...

I'm fully aware that this option works for me because I only use jRiver as a player and I don't really use any of the other features in CMC, so clearly that's not an option for everyone.

Thanks everyone for all the help, especially Paul who has been such a wonderful developer to work with over all these years! I'm sure our paths will cross again on one forum or the other. I'll keep an eye on new releases of CMC of course, and who knows I might come back at some point depending on the software's evolution.

In the meantime, all the best!