[Lot of ideas for future versions] Limiting export to some shares

[Pauven]

Good news. I downloaded JRiver 25, and with some new code I've successfully mounted and played a Blu-ray ISO to it from CMC.

The Alt+F4 also closed JRiver and returned me to CMC. So it is working as expected.

More testing and development to get other formats playing. But first, some questions:

The JRiver command line has a /Mode option. I'm thinking that Fullscreen or Theater would be good choices. I can also leave the assignment blank and it supposedly takes the current user's startup mode. Do you have a preference?

The very first Blu-ray ISO I played started with playing the main video (Title Playback), no Blu-ray menu. I had to right-click and select "Switch to Blu-ray Menu" (which was slooooow but did work). I then closed JRiver, and launched it again, and again it started in Title Playback mode, not Blu-ray Menu. I then checked JRiver's Video Playback Settings, and found an options for "Play Blu-ray discs using Menus:" with options for On/Off/Ask. I set this to ask, and tried again. Then time a JRiver prompt popped up with options for "Play with full Menu Navigation" and "Play Main TItle only", but these options weren't selectable with the arrow keys (not good for remotes), but Tab did work to change the selection, and Enter/OK pressed the button to continue with the choice.

So, long story short, you good with managing both a) the On/Off/Ask Blu-ray Menus parameter in JRiver, and b) configuring a Tab button if needed to choose Menu vs. Title mode? This is probably a silly question, because I don't know what I can do here anyway, as I don't see any command line parameters to control this.

[Pauven]

Playing an episode directly from a Blu-ray folder works too!

[Pauven]

CME Beta 21 is now available, fixes a bug when trying to write to Hidden or Read Only files: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185

[Manni]

Good news. I downloaded JRiver 25, and with some new code I've successfully mounted and played a Blu-ray ISO to it from CMC.

The Alt+F4 also closed JRiver and returned me to CMC. So it is working as expected.

More testing and development to get other formats playing. But first, some questions:

The JRiver command line has a /Mode option. I'm thinking that Fullscreen or Theater would be good choices. I can also leave the assignment blank and it supposedly takes the current user's startup mode. Do you have a preference?

The very first Blu-ray ISO I played started with playing the main video (Title Playback), no Blu-ray menu. I had to right-click and select "Switch to Blu-ray Menu" (which was slooooow but did work). I then closed JRiver, and launched it again, and again it started in Title Playback mode, not Blu-ray Menu. I then checked JRiver's Video Playback Settings, and found an options for "Play Blu-ray discs using Menus:" with options for On/Off/Ask. I set this to ask, and tried again. Then time a JRiver prompt popped up with options for "Play with full Menu Navigation" and "Play Main TItle only", but these options weren't selectable with the arrow keys (not good for remotes), but Tab did work to change the selection, and Enter/OK pressed the button to continue with the choice.

So, long story short, you good with managing both a) the On/Off/Ask Blu-ray Menus parameter in JRiver, and b) configuring a Tab button if needed to choose Menu vs. Title mode? This is probably a silly question, because I don't know what I can do here anyway, as I don't see any command line parameters to control this.

Good news re jRiver!

Regarding the mode, I usually start jRiver in Theatre mode, but of course if we launch it from CMC we don't want the browser mode, we just want playback to start right away. We also want a mode where the MCE remote works and allows to select all the options during playback using the arrows and enter. That's what makes it work like a standalone player, so you don't want to lose this.

If we can use the mouse during playback, the way I set jRiver is to play main title or menus (whatever I prefer, as set in video playback settings), and then with a right click of the mouse you can select the other mode and it changes on the fly, as you've discovered. I'm not sure why you say it's slow to do it like this. Here it's near instant (apart from the time needed to load the menus, but that has nothing to do with jRiver). I never use the "ask" mode because I find it annoying to have to choose everytime. I'm likely to set it to menus and play everything that way because that's the only way to get perfect forced subtitles everytime. I only set it to "main movie" when I do some testing, for faster access to the main title.

Long story short, it's fine to use the default startup mode and video playback settings for now. We want to see if playback is stable and if the remote works as expected. Once we've established that, we can always discuss possible options for jRiver in settings later.

Is there a build that would allow me to test this jRiver support in CMC?

[Pauven]

The next CMC Beta, 12, will have this available to play with. Should be available in the next day or two.

I've just figured out how to play both Blu-ray and DVD folders. Unlike pretty much every other player, simply passing the folder to it for playback doesn't work. Instead, I have to either pass "..\BDMV\index.bdmv" for Blu-rays or "..\VIDEO_TS\VIDEO_TS.IFO" for DVD's. Still need to figure out UHD 4K. Not a big deal in general, but to me it seems obvious that JRiver expects people to use its GUI to launch playback, not the command line.

Also, I'm not finding any way to launch a Title # or Chapter # directly. This is a common limitation, shared by PowerDVD and DVDFab Player 5. As far as I have found, only MPC and VLC can start playback at a Title/Chapter #. This means Episode Direct Play won't work for DVD's with JRiver.

So these work:

• Mounted Blu-ray ISO playback
• Mounted DVD ISO playback
• Blu-ray Folder playback
• DVD Folder playback
• Blu-ray Direct Episode playback (when MPLS # is mapped)

These doesn't work:

• DVD Direct Episode playback (no way to specify Title/Chapter #)
• Blu-ray Directo Episode playback without MPLS # (no way to specify Title/Chapter #)

These are untested:

• Mounted UHD 4K Blu-ray ISO playback
• UHD 4K Blu-ray Folder playback
• UHD 4K Blu-ray Direct Episode playback (I don't have any of these)

I'm not sure why you say it's slow to do it like this.

Ignoring the Menu vs. Title prompt, I'm saying it is significantly slower to load DVD/Blu-ray menus on JRiver than on PowerDVD (my main point of reference). Why am I saying that? Because on my machine, it is!!! If it works fine for you, that's awesome, but I definitely notice it being slower.

Also, out of the box, video quality is atrocious on JRiver. The worst player I've used by far. The main issue is screen tearing, and this definitely isn't something I'd choose over PowerDVD or MPC. Of course, I haven't done the LAV or madVR enhancements, and I have no idea if that would fix the screen tearing, or if there is another setting that would help.

[Manni]

jRiver picture and audio quality with LAV/madVR is as good as MPC-BE/MPC-HC with LAV/madVR. There is no tearing, although I'm mostly watching 4K UHD Blurays these days, I've done very little testing with bluray and even less with DVD, given that the main USP of jRiver for me is UHD BD menus.

I'll try to test the new beta over the week-end if it's available and I'll tell you how it works from a PQ/AQ point of view if properly configured with LAV and madVR.

I haven't used PowerDVD for a while, and menus with jRiver are faster than on a standalone player, so they might be slower your end for some reason. Menus are sensitive to the decoding, for example most of them don't work if you use D3D11 native, you have to use D3D11 copyback. That could be an explanation.

Did you check if it was slow / with tearing when using jRiver standalone? I had lots of stability/performance issue when I tried to use jRiver as an external player, so it might also be due to that.

[Pauven]

No, I'm brand new to JRiver, I don't know much of anything about it. I'll leave all the extra video/audio quality testing up to you. Hopefully launching it via the command line produces identical results to using the JRiver Media Center GUI, but if for some reason it doesn't that's probably beyond my control. I'm just using whatever few command line options they make available.

I just did some more testing, and on both Blu-ray and DVD's it took over 15 seconds after I clicked the button to play with menus before any video/audio started. The same discs with PowerDVD were closer to 10 seconds. Neither is great, but 50% longer is definitely worse in my book.

On the other hand, direct playback of Blu-ray episodes (stream files) was near instantaneous, so as good as MPC in that regard.

[Manni]

As I said I've mostly tested menus with UHD bluray, but the first video appears right away (whether it's a logo or a menu). I thought you meant slow navigation. There is no 10sec or 15s black, except if the content requires a HDMI sync, but then that depends on your display, not on jRiver. I only use folders for speed, so no ISO mounting time here, in case it makes a difference.

Anyway, I agree, let's leave this technical discussion aside, I'll test with a known working jRiver configuration and I'll report back. Thanks for implementing this so quickly!

[Pauven]

CMC v2.2 Beta 12 is now available, and includes the new JRiver external player option.

It also includes a new option to "Keep Offline Titles". When enabled, a SmartSync will not remove any titles it cannot reach. I don't have any offline servers, so this is essentially untested - I theorize there might still be errors related to scanned paths being offline, so let me know how that goes. Combined with the new option to filter the CME export by folder, this should at least get you up and going Manni.

Also, CMC v2.2 Beta 12 includes the new CME v1.0 Beta 22.

[Manni]

Great thanks, I’ll try this over the week-end and I’ll report back.