Better Media Organization / Browser

[skeptic]

Just for another view of how someone may do things..  I rip all my movies and TV series DVDs on my non-LMCE desktop.  I prefer having just the movie, not a full DVD image with menus and such.  I also like using H.264 instead of mpeg-2 for the huge disk space savings.  Unfortunately that means when I copy the videos to LMCE I have to tag each and every one.  The occasional movie isn't so bad, but any improvements (ie - automatic filling in of genre from a search, I don't think it's possible using Amazon) would be fantastic.  The real hassle comes when I buy a TV series.  For example, I have all 10 seasons of Stargate SG-1 at ~22 episodes each.  That's a lot of individual videos to manually search for, often changing the title, adding a genre, adding episode info (which I usually skip), setting media type, etc.

Not a complaint or a demand to be fixed, just some info on how I and possibly others use the system when looking at ways to improve the end user experience.

[Afkpuz]

I'd just like to throw my lot in with Thom and the others.  At first, I didn't understand those filters and didn't have my media tagged properly.  Thus, I was very frustrated at first with the browser.  If I had made any posts, they would have looked like some of the frustrated posts in this thread.  I then watched a screencast made by Thom about media navigation.  After getting all my media tagged properly and adding album art to it all, I now quite enjoy the media browser.  I'm getting very good at finding exactly what I want.  And from the looks of it, that pesky issue of tv episodes/seasons/discs is being worked on.  So my advice guys is three fold.

1.) Tag your media.  It'll take a long time, but once it's done, you're golden.  then, tagging new media will be quick and easy.

2.) Learn how to use the media browser
Watch this screencast by Thom to help http://www.localeconcept.com/pub/Using_Media_in_LinuxMCE_part_1.ogg

3.) Know that changes are being made and do what you can to help

[los93sol]

I agree that tagging media properly yields the most powerful search functionality, but I'd just like to toss a suggestion out there to see what people think and to see if it is possible.  Media centers I've used in the passed rely on a naming convention for your files, you can then choose to update your database and a parser will run against various sites like IMDB, etc. based on the naming convention and pull down the information for that specific file.  This effectively automates the tedious process of tagging everything.  Is it possible to apply this same concept to LMCE and let it go find the data based on a naming convention and tag our media for us?

[hari]

in the meantime there are tools like easytag that are optimized for such actions.

br, Hari

[los93sol]

I know this has been hashed over before, but I'd like to bring this up for serious discussion about the pros and cons of this.  Wouldn't it be simpler to integrate xbmc to handle media management/playback?  Their entire infrastructure is based around handling media and making it a simple and painless process for users.  They are, however, not interested in home automation at all so it is not a viable solution for me as far as a whole house aspect goes.  LMCE is only just now getting the tagging of media automated whereas xbmc already has this technique implemented, polished, and perfected.  They have now a MythTV client so the myth backend can run in the background and xbmc can provide the frontend to LMCE.  The biggest bonus I see is that it also adds some option for people who might not like the way things are done in MythTV because XBMC's developers have stated numerous times that their software is a client, and their TV frontend which is currently under development is being designed to work with any backend be it an HDHomerun, MediaPortal, MythTV, or any of the other client/server architecture options out there.  This gives the LMCE end user's options and potentially much less painful setups as they could slap the Hauppauge HDPVR card that has only beta drivers for Linux in a Windows box and maintain full support right now.  Of course that is just an example of how I see it being beneficial, perhaps I'm missing some other element, but instead of incorporating both Myth and VDR and maintaining both, wouldn't it be simpler and more robust to implement XBMC and let their developers deal with the rest?

[cirion]

Ouch...

los93sol, do you even understand what LMCE is?
I must say Xbmc looks nice, and I know a lot of other systems that are easier to work with than LMCE when only thinking of a PC connected to my TV.

But LMCE has a big error in it's name... The MCE part is what fools a lot of people in thinking it's just a Media Center Edition for Linux. I should have been called Linux Smarthouse or something similar. The original designers called it Pluto Home and they still make and sell it by that name. Media on a TV is just a small % of what LMCE was intended for when the designers made it.

What you want, is to destroy whatever LMCE is, and make it work on a PC on your TV with XBMC's UI and still have all the magic that is LMCE in the background. What do you want to do with all the other supported hardware's... Can XBMC be used on a PDA, Web pad, Mobile, Web browser and so on? How can those devices both control LMCE and XBMC. How does the UI control my house?

Who should develop the integration? Do you want to do it? Can you do it? Why do you think the XBMC integration would be easy?

What I think can be done with XBMC is to use it as a frontend on a standalone PC, and connect the shares from the LMCE server. That would be easy to do, and you can do it now. The server would still be able to do all the LMCE magic, and you have your XBMC frontend on your TV. But replacing today's UI with that of XBMC would require a lot of work that none of the developers here would want to do... They already have enough developing to do as the system is now.

I would love to se an improvement on the UI on my TV and media organization, and I that will come in time. I don't think XBMC will ever be able to replace LMCE's UI.

[tschak909]

In short. no.

We would have a humongous overlap in UI aspects, amongst other things. We have a far superior system that just needs to be debugged.

I've already been over this repeatedly, so I will not repeat myself.

There is absolutely zero upside in doing this.

-Thom

[los93sol]

Ouch...

los93sol, do you even understand what LMCE is?
I must say Xbmc looks nice, and I know a lot of other systems that are easier to work with than LMCE when only thinking of a PC connected to my TV.

But LMCE has a big error in it's name... The MCE part is what fools a lot of people in thinking it's just a Media Center Edition for Linux. I should have been called Linux Smarthouse or something similar. The original designers called it Pluto Home and they still make and sell it by that name. Media on a TV is just a small % of what LMCE was intended for when the designers made it.

What you want, is to destroy whatever LMCE is, and make it work on a PC on your TV with XBMC's UI and still have all the magic that is LMCE in the background. What do you want to do with all the other supported hardware's... Can XBMC be used on a PDA, Web pad, Mobile, Web browser and so on? How can those devices both control LMCE and XBMC. How does the UI control my house?

Who should develop the integration? Do you want to do it? Can you do it? Why do you think the XBMC integration would be easy?

What I think can be done with XBMC is to use it as a frontend on a standalone PC, and connect the shares from the LMCE server. That would be easy to do, and you can do it now. The server would still be able to do all the LMCE magic, and you have your XBMC frontend on your TV. But replacing today's UI with that of XBMC would require a lot of work that none of the developers here would want to do... They already have enough developing to do as the system is now.

I would love to se an improvement on the UI on my TV and media organization, and I that will come in time. I don't think XBMC will ever be able to replace LMCE's UI.

I'm not sure how you interpretted my post, but I'm only suggesting to run MythTV's backend in the background and to use XBMC as a frontend for it and any other TV backends as well as letting XBMC handle media and pictures whether than recreating the wheel to end up at the result that is already there.  To Thom's point though, I understand there are several issues with the UI integration.

[colinjones]

Ouch...

los93sol, do you even understand what LMCE is?
I must say Xbmc looks nice, and I know a lot of other systems that are easier to work with than LMCE when only thinking of a PC connected to my TV.

But LMCE has a big error in it's name... The MCE part is what fools a lot of people in thinking it's just a Media Center Edition for Linux. I should have been called Linux Smarthouse or something similar. The original designers called it Pluto Home and they still make and sell it by that name. Media on a TV is just a small % of what LMCE was intended for when the designers made it.

What you want, is to destroy whatever LMCE is, and make it work on a PC on your TV with XBMC's UI and still have all the magic that is LMCE in the background. What do you want to do with all the other supported hardware's... Can XBMC be used on a PDA, Web pad, Mobile, Web browser and so on? How can those devices both control LMCE and XBMC. How does the UI control my house?

Who should develop the integration? Do you want to do it? Can you do it? Why do you think the XBMC integration would be easy?

What I think can be done with XBMC is to use it as a frontend on a standalone PC, and connect the shares from the LMCE server. That would be easy to do, and you can do it now. The server would still be able to do all the LMCE magic, and you have your XBMC frontend on your TV. But replacing today's UI with that of XBMC would require a lot of work that none of the developers here would want to do... They already have enough developing to do as the system is now.

I would love to se an improvement on the UI on my TV and media organization, and I that will come in time. I don't think XBMC will ever be able to replace LMCE's UI.

I'm not sure how you interpretted my post, but I'm only suggesting to run MythTV's backend in the background and to use XBMC as a frontend for it and any other TV backends as well as letting XBMC handle media and pictures whether than recreating the wheel to end up at the result that is already there.  To Thom's point though, I understand there are several issues with the UI integration.

Write a DCE Wrapper for the XBMC UI, add the Orbiter logic to handle all the other stuff then make it an option to the orbiter during install... Really there is nothing stopping someone adding a new UI in parallel by making it a DCE device, so that send/receive the necessary DCE messages just like the current orbiter does.

but I think you will find (as Thom among others has pointed out many times in the past) that all the additional logic that the orbiter provides for intelligence, plus its communications interface through DCE would be a truly massive undertaking (much more so than the UI itself), and even if you achieved this, it would leave us taking a step backwards in terms of device-independence for the UI. The Orbiter/HAD is designed so that a common design can be used across all interface devices whether PC, PDA, mobile, VoIP phone, web browser, etc.... but I thought you had already looked into this and had moved on from this question??

[los93sol]

I have already looked at Orbiter/HAD and do understand the issue with the UI.  I do not understand what you mean by device independence though as I don't see the difference between xbmc's ui being visible and mythtv's UI being visible.  XBMC is far more powerful as a frontend than the Myth frontend which is how I ended up back at this again.  I guess I'm not fully understanding some of the terminology being used in this discussion.

[chrisbirkinshaw]

I think that to simplify things you could say:

Work required to integrate XBMC interface for all devices > (is bigger than) work required to improve LMCE media interface

So lets direct that effort at improving what we already have.

Regards,

Chris

[colinjones]

An even simpler way of looking at it is - how will you get the XBMC GUI engine doing graphics on a Nokia N70 mobile phone? And a Cisco VoIP hardphone? And a generic java capable web pad? etc, etc...

They simply don't have the capabilities to do the kind of graphics you are talking about. Thus you would need to develop completely separate UIs for different devices (ie not device independent UI) That is what is trying to be avoided. And that was the subject of the "UI3" discussion some time ago.

There are plenty of graphics engines we could use, but there needs to be some way of ensuring that if a more sophisticated one is used for the on screen orbiter, that any UI developed will work across all devices without having to build different interface for each. The current system allows this to happen pretty transparently as long as you have a PC, a web enabled device, a Symbian enabled device, a Java enabled device, etc...

[los93sol]

The same way it's done with Myth.  Creating XBMC skins is a breeze and something I'm highly experienced in...I did all of the original MC360 xml work for that skin.  Check out Team Blackbolt as a reference of my experience.  Anyways, the point is that you don't have to have all the flash that most XBMC skins do and I can create a skin with it that would work across all orbiter variations quickly and easily.  Within a month I could do complete ground up builds for all variations, and that would be complete custom builds to suit each device.  I understand the one size fits all mentality, but it does not work for UI's, that's why HAD has variations.  XBMC implements a fall through system that could be adapted for the purpose of variations with minimal work.  Would it make a difference to anyone if I go ahead and do a XBMC skin to match LMCE and in a format that is compatible across all orbiter variants?

[tschak909]

Do what you gotta do, but this is not something I am interested in at all.

-Thom

[Zaerc]

...like how XBMC has been doing it for years now... 

...
Within a month I could do complete ground up builds for all variations, and that would be complete custom builds to suit each device. 
...

Seems to me like you've had more then ample opportunity to put your money where your mouth is these past three months.