How to play concerts etc.? Blu-ray not possible

[Dragon777 2]

Hello,

how do you play concerts and other media where you need a menu to navigate? I am seldomly watching a whole concert on a blu-ray, but mostly I am picking some songs and jump between them. The blu-ray menu is super handy for doing so.

Emby server is installed on my QNAP TS-453D NAS and it does not play blu-rays. When I try to play them via cast to my Oppo blu-ray player, the main movie starts without giving me access to the menu at all. And once I start it, my NAS jumps up to 50% CPU for whatever reason. When I stop playing back, the task in the NAS is not stopping and still going crazy. After trying 2 movies. CPU is at 100% and I have to stop the Emby server alltogether. So blu-ray ISO and folder playback seems to be of no use at all.

So how do you guys play concerts? Converting them to mkv is not an option as the menu will be missing.

Thanks for help
D

[Carlo 4561]

Hi Dragon777,

Emby is not going to give you menu option as it's not a DVD or BluRay player. It's a streaming media server.

What I do for concert discs is use MakeMKV with them and select the different videos I want, name them properly uses "extras" folders and add them like movies to my system.  That's what I found to work best for me.  Now I can navigate to the different videos but I changed the disc to a streamable format and use the features of Emby like "extras".

[pwhodges 2012]

I've also made a single video file of a concert and manually created chapter markers for each song.  This doesn't enable me to create a playlist, but it does enable fairly easy switching to a specific song.

Paul

[Deathsquirrel 745]

I rip the main concert video as the 'movie' and put the misc stuff in as extras.  Then I add them to a concerts collection in my movie library.  I could make a separate library but I try to keep my main library screen pretty lean.

[Carlo 4561]

8 minutes ago, Deathsquirrel said:

I rip the main concert video as the 'movie' and put the misc stuff in as extras.  Then I add them to a concerts collection in my movie library.  I could make a separate library but I try to keep my main library screen pretty lean.

That's what I do as well.

[Dragon777 2]

Thanks for the suggestion.

But none of them gives me an experience as easy and nice as the original Blu-Ray menu with overlay menu, track titles and all that kind of stuff.

It´s a pity as my Oppo blu-ray player can play BDMV folders and ISOs with menus without problem. I would just need a media library manager which tells the Oppo to play the files by itself (instead of emby playing them and casting to the Oppo).
Any ideas whether that´s possible?

[Carlo 4561]

That is true but we aren't living in a disc world anymore either.  Now you can search across your whole collection in the blink of an eye and grab an extra quite quickly.

So some pros, some cons but disc menus are a thing of the past for streaming systems.  Best best for full support of disc or ISOs is an http environment.

It for sure is a different experience.

[Dragon777 2]

Well, I agree for all things movies and series. But for concerts, there is no good solution, yet, in streaming systems.

[Carlo 4561]

Not sure I'd agree with that.  You can of course RIP the main concert.  Then you can rip the extra or "chapters" and name them basically the same as what they would be on the menu on disc or could use a better name.  You then put this is one of the special type folders.

Now you have your main concert as the PLAY item, have all your "extra" show up under it.  I've yet to find a concert disc I couldn't do this with from Pink Floyed, to Rush to Yanni.  It's different but still quite usable and after a while just seem easier then menu system which are kind of "old school" these days.

I admit I hated this at first as I had much stuff like this stored in ISO and it was an easy way to rip a disc and have it as a disc and it works well on htpc setups but not well for streaming devices.  After a while you get used to doing it different but there is more upfront work.  Now I prefer the main concert and "extras" and wouldn't want the menu systems.  It's whatever you get used to.

[Dragon777 2]

Ok, so maybe I am not toally getting what you mean when you talk about "extras".

What I would need is the main concert, but easy access to the chapters in the main concert (which are an equivalent to the multiple songs in the concert). And those chapters should be accessible by name of the song. Is that possible?
I don´t care too much about the extra footage on the blu-ray dics beside the main concert.

[Carlo 4561]

I have not personally done that.  I didn't do song chapters because there isn't an easy way to name those chapters.  I can do it but it's not worth it to me type thing.

When I watch a concert video I tend to watch the whole thing not advance to certain songs (my way of watching) so that was not important to me.  So for me it's not important to be able to use a chapter mark to jump to "Tom Sawyer", "Spirit of the Radio" or "Limelight" while watching a Rush concert ripped from disc.

But what I did want to capture is the "documentary" footage or other content that is available via menus on the disc. So I convert them to a an "extra" file.

[Dragon777 2]

Well, for me it´s the other way round. I skip through my concert videos at night, watching 2 or 3 songs from different bands each and so on.
So I guess I will be stuck with skipping Emby and streaming by blu-ray folder directly through the Oppo.

[rbjtech 5284]

See the post #3 from Paul - this is effectively no different to a movie with chapters.  Convert the ISO to MKV but keep the chapter points.  They should exist as that is generally what the Blu-Ray 'Menu' uses to jump to.   The key is the naming of the chapters - if the Blu-Ray has been authored with song 'names' as the chapter points - then you are good to go - but if you find they are called 'Chapter 1, Chapter 2' etc - then you just need to rename them in something like mkvtoolnix to match the song title.  Hassle I agree - but you'll then get a 'menu' as such listed when you open the chapter points and you can then pick the song you like to jump to.

So as an example -

..if I scroll down ..

.. I can see and play the 'Extras' that were being discussed in this thread and jump to 'chapters'/song titles if I so wish ..

.. scrolling left/right shows me all the chapters/songs ..

This is achieved by renaming the chapters correctly in the MKV.  This is what mediaInfo shows for the above -

 

I hope that helps - yes it's not as fancy as the Blu-ray menu - but it keeps navigation in-line with the rest of Emby and is functional.

 

Edited August 21, 2020 by rbjtech

[Dragon777 2]

That looks pretty cool.

Do I have to activate "enable thumbnail image creation" in the library options to make that happen?
Because with my MKVs, I don´t see any chapters in Emby on the detail page like in your example. Do I have to activate something?

[rbjtech 5284]

2 minutes ago, Dragon777 said:

That looks pretty cool.

Do I have to activate "enable thumbnail image creation" in the library options to make that happen?
Because with my MKVs, I don´t see any chapters in Emby on the detail page like in your example. Do I have to activate something?

Yes - exactly that.  It's a per Library setting.

 If there are chapter points, then Emby will create the thumbnails based on those points - if there are no chapters, then it will do it every 10 seconds.

[Maisy 37]

Certain movies, like the Lord of the Rings film series do best with named chapters, like so. Easy to do in mkvtoolnix-gui . 

I also have bluray for the music from the movies which I name like this: which is also what one can do with a concert video.

[Dragon777 2]

Ok, I gave it a try, but I ran into several issues:

I converted some concert Blu-Rays to MKV via MakeMKV. But unfortunately the chapters have no names. So I have to name all chapters/songs manually which is quite an effort for about 100 concerts.

When I have set the Emby app on my android tablet to cast to the Oppo blu-ray player and I tap to play one specific chapter, the stream starts at the beginning for a couple of seconds and only then jumps to the correct chapter.

When the chapter is playing and I am clicking on a different chapter to jump to a new song, the stream on the Oppo is stopped. The app shows that it´s still playing, but nothing is being cast to the Oppo anymore. The same happens when I click the next button to skip to the next chapter.

The audio channels list mostly shows the 2ch PCM as "default". Where can I change this default?
But anyway, even when I select a different audio channel (e.g. 5.1 True HD) and select a chapter to play, it still starts playing with the 2ch default.

When I hit the 10 seconds forward button, often the whole movie/concerts starts again completely from the beginning.

It sounded like a nice way to do it, but this way it´s not really usable. So what´s going wrong here?
Thanks for help!

[Carlo 4561]

When you used MakeMKV to pull the different items from disc did you process them after this to get them in a streaming format with h.264 or h.265 video?

When you're currently playing back your test MakeMKV versions what is the dashboard or stats for nerds showing?

[Dragon777 2]

Hi cayars,

not totally sure what you mean.

Attached you can see what VLC shows me as codec info and what the Emby interface shows after the MakeMKV extraction.

[Carlo 4561]

If you don't cast to the Oppo how does it play back locally doing the chapter jumps?

[Dragon777 2]

Playing locally on my desktop in Firefox (via NAS access) and in the Emby app on the tablet, the 10 second forward buttun works just fine.
But in both apps, when playing the video, I have no access to the chapter overview anymore. Therefore I cant jump chapters. I am also missing the skip buttons.
Am I overlooking something?

[Carlo 4561]

That would typically indicate that there isn't any chapters in the video.

[Dragon777 2]

No, I start the playback by accessing a chapter, but on local play it turns fullscreen and I can´t see the dashboard with the chapter view anymore.
I tested the same files I used for the chapter switch while casting to the Oppo.

But, anyway, I need it to work with casting to the Oppo, not on local play.

Edited August 22, 2020 by Dragon777

[Carlo 4561]

Understand but from a diagnostic standpoint we need to figure out what works, what doesn't and where the problem is located.

[Dragon777 2]

Well, I assume it´s only when casting. When playing locally, it jumps directly to the chapter without the  couple of seconds from the beginning of the movie. And the 10 second skip works.