Some General Questions

[TrackZ 16]

MB3 is looking great. I always prefered MB in my former HTPCs. I've been using streamer boxes for a while, but am ready to return to a real HTPC, hopefully with MB3. I have a few questions about it.

 

I'd be using the server and MB Theater on the same device. A Gigabyte Brix probably and accessing as well with iOS devices. Most of my media is full disc rip ISO/folder and I'd plan to use PowerDVD/TMT as an external player.

 

1) Many of the new UI elements (like reading scenes and generating thumbs, etc.) seem like they would require video files (like MKV). With these UI elements work with folder structures or ISO?

 

2) Will the streaming/transcoding to iOS devices work for media stored as folder structures or ISO? Will you get menus or will it play the main title, like a BD-light implementation?

 

3) I have a lot of content that are TV show boxsets ripped as full discs. In the old MB, I could add these to the library as a collection with custom meta data and be able to browse through shows on disc -> show name -> season 1 boxset -> disc 1/2/3/4 nicely. Is that possible in MB3? How would TV show box sets be structured and presented in MB3? This is a really important feature for media front ends that so often gets overlooked.

 

4) Will MB3 be able to scrape and present media info (like run time, codec, channel count, resolution, bitrate, etc.) from folder structures or ISO files?

 

5) Your media naming info talks about tagging movies as 3D types, but the types listed seems to correspond to 3D able to be stored in a video file. How are full disc Blu-ray 3D rips tagged and presented?

 

6) Can you post something that shows how multi-movie discs are navigated in the UI? Like, LotR EE for example has 5 discs per movie. You'd have each movie just show up once in the front end, but what's it look like to trigger playback of discs 2 - 4? It's fantastic that you have accounted for multi-disc folder rips BTW!

 

7) What the recommendation for structuring 3D vs 2D movies with MB3 of the same film? Would I preferably want 2 entries for the film in the library, one for the 2D and maybe with a (3D) in the name? Then store the 3D films together on my NAS and add them as an individual collection within MB3?

 

8) Are there any key elements of MB3 with regards to how it handles full discs rips as ISO vs folder that I would prefer to choose one storage over the other?

 

9) In the naming guide, where you have a multi-disc movie example as:

 

Multi-disc movie:
/Movies /Home Alone (1990)
/Home Alone Disc 1
/VIDEO_TS
/Home Alone Disc 2
/VIDEO_TS

 

Where does the meta data go? I would hope it goes under /Movies /Home Alone (1990). Is that correct? If so, that keep the meta files nicely separate from the actual folder rip files.

 

It's much nicer to keep the files from intermingling IMO. I'm this is the right placement, I'm thinking I'd rip even single disc movies like that as well:

 

/Movies /Home Alone (1990)
/Home Alone Disc 1
/VIDEO_TS
 

If I did that, will MB3 by default directly play that one folder rip for the film without any extra menu or prompting?

 

These questions will really help me figure out if I want to wait for MB3 or go down the road of XBMC. Thanks!

[Luke 42077]

Scenes, thumbs and transcoding are all hit or miss with folder rips and iso's. We try to do it, but sometimes it fails and there's really nothing we can do about it. We rely on well known tools like ffmpeg to accomplish this for us, but folder rips are just not much of a priority for them.

 

We are generally able to get media info for bluray folders and iso's pretty well, dvd not quite as much.

 

As far as navigation and playback goes, unless someone else wants to go and make screenshots, all I can say is, why not just try it?

 

We've done some pretty good work with folder rips and iso's - we have have our own internal iso mounting mechanism that doesn't require any third party tools. Very convenient for server-side streaming. But they still have plenty of issues, and the amount of time we invest in them is going to partially be dictated by the demand.