[clue-tech] Linux Media Center options and applications

[Angelo Bertolli]

Thanks for the detailed response.

Michael J. Hammel wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-09-08 at 14:51 -0400, Angelo Bertolli wrote:
>> Which one is the video directory?  
> 
> Look under Settings->Video Settings->General Settings.  I'm actually
> using the Classic menu theme so the location for the Video Settings menu
> might be different for you.  

My life has been easier with this too since switching to the Classic menu.


> Note that you can drop a JPEG or PNG in the each directory named
> "folder.jpg" or "folder.png" and that will be the icon used for the
> current directory when browsing the video gallery.

Thanks for that tip.  I'll definitely have to give that a try.

>> Is there an easier way for me to do this with MythTV?
> 
> Drop the files into the Videos directory and use the Video Manager to
> work with the files.

Yeah, I'm using the Video Manager now, and it's much easier.  I would
like to be able to create playlists, or somehow tell it to play an
entire directory of videos sequentially.

>> I'm finding that MythTV will do everything I want, the only problem is
>> understanding their millions of options and menu items.  It's definitely
>> not the most user-oriented system from a setup/maintenance standpoint.
> 
> Every system has weak points.  I'm not crazy about MythTV's themes
> interface.  I think there should be an easier way to customize the
> interface.  And MythMusic is just plain klunky.  But MythTV itself (the
> TV recording and playback interface) is excellent.  MythVideo is very
> good but the Video Manager starts to be a pain if you have large numbers
> of videos (as I do).  It needs a easier way to find the video you want
> to edit.  It's fast but the search is linear.  It also needs better
> handling for videos that are not found in IMDB and/or TheMovieDB.org.

Yeah, about that:  is there a way for me to look up my movies/tv shows
that are in the directory, but not in the database, and maybe include
them in the database?

I was thinking the way to do this might be through importing from
MythArchive.  But if that is true, then how does it work?  It has a
different directory than MythVideo.  Does it move or copy videos from
its directory to the MythVideo directory?  I don't want it to copy... or
does it just keep them in the MythArchive directory?


>> I want to group some videos
>> together so I don't have to scroll through hundreds of titles in order
>> to find the one I want.  
> 
> The Video Manager doesn't have a way to group titles that I know of.
> It's just one long list.  But it's possible there is a feature there I
> haven't discovered to deal with this.

The subdirectories work for me to this end.  Does each directory support
the folder.jpg file, or just directories with a file in them?  What if I
have multiple files in a directory?  I only get one folder.jpg file?

One thing I kind of miss from having these in the recording section is
the little preview I got when I was selecting the show.

>> Which one of those would you guess is the type
>> of grouping to choose?  I'd pick "playback groups" but I'd be wrong.
>> Playback groups are really more like settings.  The winner is "recording
>> groups."
> 
> Again, Playback Groups is part of Live TV recordings (re: part of the
> core MythTV features) and not related to the Videos feature (which is
> part of the MythVideo plugin) and you really want your AVI files to be
> under the Videos features.

Hmmm, MythTV has a special place to set up a LiveTV directory, and a
DBBackup directory.  I'm guessing DBBackup is somewhere it dumps the
mysql stuff.  What's special about "LiveTV" as opposed to the default
recordings directory?


>> All-in-all, I'm pretty happy with the fact that it works well though.
>> Once you learn how to do the stuff you want to do, it's relatively easy.
> 
> Exactly.  It's feature rich because all plugins are installed with most
> distributions (like Fedora).  That can be confusing.  For example, I
> don't use MythArchive (used for archiving TV recordings to ISO images,
> for example), MythDVD (I just use my DVD player to play DVDs from disk),
> MythGames, MythPhone, MythZoneMinder, etc.  So I have lots of menu
> options that I simply ignore.  They'd be cool to use, but I don't need
> them right now.  I could remove the plugins but they simply don't get in
> my way enough to do that.

Oh, I haven't even tried to get into MythGames yet.  I want to do that,
but that seems like a whole other can of worms.

> My biggest problem is that I think my external 500GB USB disk with most
> of my Video recordings may have died.  Not sure what happened but it
> happened right after I plugged in two more external USB drives (a 500GB
> and a 1TB).  I wonder if having three USB drives off the same USB port
> might have caused that disk to fry?  Anyway, I may be busy trying to rip
> all the DVDs again.  *sigh*

Yeah, I'm worried about that too.  I'm thinking of ultimately just using
an rsync mirror, which means double the space.  But I think it's worth
just buying something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111033

rather than having to rip everything again.  I mean how much is your
time worth anyway?  Plus, rsync is a good way to go because chances are
the stuff you care about doesn't change very much.  (I don't think RAID
1 is necessary or desirable, your bottleneck is USB anyway.)


So my main issues with MythTV now are:

(1) Volume Settings
I thought I knew how this worked.  You can modify some settings in the
General settings area (3rd page) and I set my starting Master and PCM,
and chose Master as my volume control.

But no matter what I set there, when something starts playing, MythTV
sees it as the max.  In other words, I can only turn the volume down
from the initial setting.  I'd like to have it so it starts in the
middle, at a normal-to-quiet volume, and I can turn it up from there.

(2) Video Playlist
I'd like to be able to play more than one video in a row.  I'd be happy
with just playing everything in a particular directory, but actually a
real playlist might be nice.

(3) Adding Meta-data to Videos
I'd like to be able to download the metadata for videos are are just
dumped into a directory automatically from the net.  Even if I had to
select the appropriate show from a menu of "good guesses" it would be
nice to have.



Angelo