MyMovies episode mapping with external player(s)

[Teddyboy 1]

I’m a long time WMC/MyMovies user starting with XP Media Center 2005. I stayed with WMC until it was EOL, and continued to use it on Windows 7 until Total Media Theatre was EOL and stopped working due to windows updates. At that point the platform was no longer viable. I started looking for alternatives and settled on Chameleon Media Center which is still very new 3 years in development going on four. It’s pretty stable and it handles external players well, but the 10 foot interface is still a little rough around the edges

Part of my requirement is to have the ability to play pack full rips with full (dvd and Blu-ray) menus because I like watching the bonus materials and having complete control over how I watch movies. All my movies and tv shows are 1:1 rips to my server. JRiver and MPC-BE do that for separate reasons. JRiver handles 4k UHD, Blu-ray, and dvd play back very well.I use MPC for episodic tv shows because it has the ability to go directly to a tile/chapter or mpls# that is passed to it via the command line from CMC. JRiver can’t do title/chapters, but it can do mpls# for Blu ray tv shows. 
 

This specific episode information is pulled directly from the MyMovies database through it’s API. A separate CMC app extracts this and all other relevant data for the title into its own database separate from the media folders or exported into xml files that’s put into the media folders at the users choice. I really like this feature as it allows me to just rip my disc at 1:1 without any remuxing, and go into the cmc interface pick an episode with a synopsis and a pic from the episode and watch it. You have to have bought MyMovies full 2500 points in order to have access to the api to get that data. 
 

Has there ever been any thought in doing something like this for Emby? Embys interface is very nice and slick. I like how the media is presented. CMC will eventually get there in another 1-2 years, but emby has the interface and does so much more. This feature would be nice to have, but it wouldn’t stop me from getting a lifetime subscription. Worse case I could remux all the episodes which is very time consuming, or just use the menu structure to navigate the ripped tv show media. 
 

im also curious about people’s experiences using JRiver as a external player inside emby theatre. Which is the main reason why I’m interested in using emby.

Edited April 23, 2021 by Teddyboy

[Carlo 4330]

Hi, no Emby won't support your disc menus as it focuses on STREAMING not local disc playback.  That kind of went the way of the dinosaur.

If you don't mind ripping your content you can rip the main movie and then create EXTRAs for the other content and have it linked to the main movie.
You won't get the disc menus but can still have all the content if you want to rip it.

Many people do this for those special discs that have good extra info on them.

 

[Teddyboy 1]

I was not clear. I’m interested in people’s experience using Jriver as a external player in emby theatre. My content is already ripped to my server as a full 1:1 rip. I may in the future break apart tv series into separate episode files that emby likes, so they can have meta data applied to them and be able to watch them however I want. 
 

Reading the knowledge base I also learned that DVD and Blu-ray folder structures for tv series shows are supported which is what I have, and it gives a example folder layout to help emby with downloading episode metadata. I don’t have to use it that way, but it states that metadata would be more accurate if you used that structure. I’m not quite sure how that works. For example how does one distinguish in a bdmv folder which stream file season 1 episode 1 is located in using the example structure in the knowledge base. One disc rip can have 6-10 episodes or more per ripped disc. Same thing for dvd folder structures. Can you point me to a working example? 

Edited April 23, 2021 by Teddyboy

[Carlo 4330]

What might be best is to take a read through a couple of threads on DVD abd BR setup and use.

 

See if you can find the info you need in those 2 threads.
But these formats are limiting and not ideal so you will want to consider converting to MKV files for each part of a movie or tv series for best performance and functionality.

[Teddyboy 1]

Thank you for the information. The threads tou provided still don’t explain tv series mapping with folder structures which is what I’m really after. I am not nor will I ever transcode anything. For actual movies whether UHD, HD, or DVD I’ll be using JRiver to play them through emby theatre. I may experiment with a small tv series and see how it does.  If it’s to temperamental,  I’ll break apart the episodes with CloneBD/CloneDVD and follow emby naming conventions. Im not streaming media when I’m out of the house. If I go down this path, I may in the future create remuxed media into smaller stream able file formats that would allow for streaming remotely separate from my full rips. 

[Carlo 4330]

I personally have no idea how you would set this up to play these back via JRiver, so I'm not going to be a help disc layout wise.

Maybe someone who used the DISC formats and/or JRiver can chime in.

[Teddyboy 1]

I appreciate your input. Setting up Jriver as an external player is easy for ripped movie folder structures within emby theatre. I can’t seem to find any practical example that uses the folder structure for tv mappings in the knowledge base. I don’t know how it works. Once you set it up do you just import it into emby? An example would be very helpful.

[Luke 37068]

Hi, there isn't any support for mapping of individual episodes within a full bluray folder structure. It will just show up in Emby as S01E01-E04, and then when you play it, the path to the bluray folder will be passed to the external player, and that's really it. There's no way for Emby to tell the external player to select a specific episode from the disc. Does that answer your question?