Looking at TV Series DVD rips (VIDEO_TS) in XBMC

If you have ever tried to add TV Series DVD rips that are in VIDEO_TS folders or .ISO images in to the XBMC TV Shows Library, then you know its not easy. Generally XBMC does not support this and the general consensus on the XBMC forums seems to be to re-encode all your DVDs and create individual episode VIDEO files like .avi or .mkv. This is obviously allot of work to do, so I have been looking at other possibilities.

I did try adding TV Series DVD rips that are in VIDEO_TS folders back in XBMC V11 Eden, you can read about that here. What I found is that if I added a new SMB source to point to my TV – DVD folders on my WHS server and selected TheTVDB scraper in XBMC it would add an entry for that TV Series in the XBMC TV Shows Library as seen in the first screen shot below, however when you clicked in to it I was unable to start the playback of the DVD as seen in the second screen shot below.

XBMC Eden – TV Shows Library (Pokoyo DVD rip)



Unable to play the TV Series from the XBMC TV Shows Library, no episode information present.



However when using the XBMC Video files area instead of the TV Show Library, I could browse to the Disk1 folder, if I right clicked this and selected Play the DVD would play fine.



I recently tried adding TV Series DVD rips that are in VIDEO_TS folders again in to XBMC V12 Frodo and similar behaviour as above was exhibited and again I was unable to play the DVD disc from the XBMC TV Shows Library.

Someone on the XBMC forums then kindly pointed me to a hack / workaround. Which you can see here. There is also a Wiki page here which explains more about it.

The hack is a two part deal, I had to edit my XBMC advancedsettings.xml file in my user directory and add this section:

And I had to rename the Disc folders on my WHS server, below is an example of how my folder structure was previously setup for the Planet of the Apes TV series.

It is the Disc folders in bold I had to rename.

\\Server
         \TV
             \DVD
                   \Planet of The Apes
                                              \Disk1
                                                       \VIDEO_TS
                                               \Disk2
                                                        \VIDEO_TS
                                                \Disk3
                                                         \VIDEO_TS
                                                 \Disk4
                                                         \VIDEO_TS

Below you can see my renamed folder structure. Disk1 contains episodes 1-4, Disk2 contains episodes 5-8, Disk3 contains episodes 9-12 and Disk4 contains episodes 13-14.

\\Server
          \TV
             \DVD
                  \Planet of The Apes
                                        \Planet of the Apes.S01.E01E02E03E04
                                                                                         \VIDEO_TS
                                        \Planet of the Apes.S01.E05E06E07E08
                                                                                         \VIDEO_TS
                                        \Planet of the Apes.S01.E09E10E11E12
                                                                                         \VIDEO_TS
                                        \Planet of the Apes.S01.E13E14
                                                                                         \VIDEO_TS

The name of the TV Series is critical, for example Planet of the Apes.S01.E01E02E03E04 the name of the TV show in red must match identically with the name of this TV show as in TheTVDB.com database website.

I initially had my folders named like this:- Planet of The Apes The Complete TV Series.S01.E01E02E03E04 and this didn’t work TheTVDB scraper in XBMC did not add any episodes.

So once you have your new folder structure setup with the renamed Disc folders, you can try and add this TV Series in to the XBMC TV Shows Library. If its already present in the library? You need to remove it and re-add it.

Your TV Series should then look like this in the XBMC TV Show Library. You can see each episode is correctly listed with the episode number and the episode title.



If you select Show Information on episode 1 you can see that it has the correct synopsis / description



If you select Show Information on episode 2 you can see that it has a different synopsis / description relating to that particular episode.



Playing the DVD Disc

Now this is where it falls down when compared to Windows Media Center and My Movies. As we know episodes 1-4 are on Disc1. If you click to play any of the episodes 1-4, DVD playback will be started, but it does not start the playback directly of the episode you selected. It simply starts the playback of the DVD and you will have to then manually select which episode you wish to watch from the DVD’s title menu. Also all four episodes 1-4 will be marked as watched (The tick) even if you just clicked to play episode 1.

If I selected to play episode 5 the DVD Disc 2 would be played, as we already established episode 5 is on Disc2.



Here you can see the DVD Disc1 title menu and this is where I have to select which episode I want to watch.



 Short comings and issues

This is clearly not as good as My Movies in Windows Media Center, because My Movies have something called TV Episode Disc mapping, you can see how this is handled in My Movies in their tutorial video here, which shows the process of mapping chapters and titles on the DVD disc to the correct episode numbers.

From the My Movies website:-

“For TV Series on DVD to be displayed correctly in the tv series library, the episodes of the DVD must be mapped to the title and chapter structure of the disc. In this video, you will see how to map the episodes of the disc to the structure, by using the Collection Management program and Windows Media Player, allowing the DVD to be supported for the TV Series functionality.”

So when I click on an episode in My Movies / Windows Media Center that episode is actually played directly and I never have to use the DVD Discs title menu and manually select the episode I want to watch.

It is extremely unlikely that this episode mapping functionality will be added in to XBMC, as it is geared up for TV Series in VIDEO files and not on DVD discs.

So you may decide this solution I have just demonstrated is not good enough, if you want to click play on an episode within XBMC and for it to play directly, you have two other options as far as I can see it:

1. Re-encode all your TV Series DVD discs and split out each episode in to an individual episode VIDEO file like a .avi or .mkv, this would be very time consuming on large collections.

2. Download your TV Series again from the Internet, how you do that and if its legal is up to you? But it could be quicker to simply download the TV Series so they are in individual VIDEO files which XBMC works well with and to remove your TV Series DVD rips from your server!!

My Movies.dk metadata for XBMC

Note: Regular XBMC users who are not also using MyMovies.dk you can ignore this next bit. 

I am still using My Movies database for metadata on my WHS server and I use the My Movies Collection Management program to edit and update titles in my collection. Now My Movies also has some short comings with XBMC. It is true that My Movies supports creating metadata aka .nfo and .tbn files for Movies so you can also add these titles in to the XBMC Movie Library. This generally works well. BUT My Movies does not currently support metadata for XBMC for TV Series.

This  is not a massive issue for TV Series that are in VIDEO files, as you can simply use the inbuilt TheTVDB scraper in XBMC and all is well.

But there is an issue with My Movies and TV Series DVD Disc titles in Collection Management. So what’s the problem?

When you enable metadata creation for XBMC in the My Movies settings, for some reason for TV Series that are DVD Disc titles, Collection Management creates a movie.nfo and movie.tbn file. It does not do this for my TV Series that are in VIDEO files so they are displayed OK in XBMC TV Shows Library, it only creates these .nfo files in the VIDEO_TS folders of my TV Series DVD rips. This has a bad affect in XBMC.

Here is an example of a movie.nfo file created by My Movies for this TV Series on DVD rip.

If you look at the <title> its called “Planet of The Apes: The Complete TV Series” and the synopsis reads as:

“It changed the face of television forever.
Based on the enormously popular and successful Planet Of The Apes movies, the 1974 TV series has become a true cult classic. Now all the 14 episodes (in...</outline>
<plot>It changed the face of television forever.
Based on the enormously popular and successful Planet Of The Apes movies, the 1974 TV series has become a true cult classic. Now all the 14 episodes (including "The Liberator", which never aired during the show's original run) have been compiled and are available to own for the first time.
After their spacecraft travels through a time warp, two astronauts (Ron Harper, James Naughton) from 1981 crash-land back on Earth in the year 3085 - a time when intelligent apes rule and humans have been reduced to servants or pets. Captured by the apes and sentenced to death, they are saved by a curious chimpanzee named Galen (Roddy McDowall). But now all three are on the run, trying to keep one step ahead of the gorilla army led by General Urko (Mark Lenard), who is determined to kill the renegades.“

Now because of the presence of this movie.nfo file created by My Movies it has a negative affect in XBMC. You can see now that all the episodes have “Planet of The Apes: The Complete TV Series” in the title, rather than their individual titles, as shown in the previous screen shot above.



Also each episode having its own unique synopsis / description is now lost and all the episodes have the same generic synopsis as in the movie.nfo file.

Episode 1



Episode 2



Episodes 1 & 2 have the same synopsis as do all the episodes.

I’m not sure I even need these movie.nfo files that My Movies creates, as when I removed them the Planets of the Apes series looked correct in both Windows Media Center and in XBMC. The problem is Collection Management / My Movies for WHS will automatically regenerate these movie.nfo files for TV Series that are DVD Disc titles, so unfortunately the My Movies developers will have to look in to this and they have no plans in the near future to look at their XBMC integration again. What I think we need is a settings option to stop the creation of these movie.nfo files and related files like movie.tbn for TV Series DVD Disc titles.

Final Thoughts

I am quite pleased with this hack / workaround for XBMC and if it wasn’t for this issue with My Movies and these movie.nfo files, I think this would be my preferred final solution.

Getting TV Series DVD rips to be displayed correctly in the XBMC TV Shows library has always been difficult and now I finally have a possible solution, I have hit a bit of a wall with the My Movies back-end system. Hopefully this will be addressed in the future at some point, fingers crossed.

OrigenAE M10 Mini-ITX HTPC Build

Quick post today looking at a new HTPC Build I just did. I plan to install Ubuntu Minimal and XBMC !

HTPC Case – OrigenAE M10
Motherboard - Intel DH67CF
CPU – Intel 2nd Generation Core i3-2100
Aftermarket Cooler – Akasa K25
Zalman Fan Mate 2
RAM - Corsair 4GB DDR3
SSD – Crucial 64GB M4
Blu-ray ROM – Sony BC-5650H (On its way from Hong Kong)

OrigenAE M10 case – this particular case has a right of centre eject button for the optical drive, I’ve seen some of these cases where the button is on the left, so make sure you get the right slot loading optical drive which is easier said than done. I can’t seem to source any new slot loading Blu-ray drives in the UK, they are either second hand or refurbished. So I have a new one coming from Hong Kong thanks to my Chinese friend I know who is sending me one.

It also has the VF310 SoundGraph VFD/IR display, which I have read is extremely difficult to get working under Linux, unlike the VF210 version of it. Not looking forward to that!





I read that the rear intake fan was a little noisy running at full speed, so I bought a Zalman Fan Mate 2 to I can slow down the speed of this fan and make it quieter! If I still lived in a hot country I wouldn’t do this.







There is no doubt that the OrigenAE M10 is the original beautiful looking Mini-ITX HTPC case and I have always fancied having one, but the internal layout is a bit of a let down and could have been done better, you can only install one 2.5” SSD drive and it screws to the side of the case as shown in the next three pictures.



Outside of the case (Lid off) looking in at the SSD.





Cases some in Black or Silver.



PICO PSU and External Power Brick are supplied with the case.



External power brick next to a Harmony remote.



Rear connections and ports on the Intel motherboard, you can also install a low profile PCI-E card.



Installing the Mini-ITX Motherboard



I’m sure the stock CPU coolers are decent these days but old habits die hard, so I opted for an Aftermarket Akasa low profile cooler.



It spins quite slowly and I can hardly hear it. I am only using the Zalman Fan Mate 2 on the rear chassis fan and they recommend you be careful if using them on a CPU fan for obvious reasons if its set too low and not doing its job properly cooling the chip. 

You can see I have the single Corsair 4GB RAM chip installed as well now.



This is interesting, don't think I have seen this before, the circuit board you can see in the below picture is for the SoundGraph VRD, there is a switch on it, the default position is SoundGraph, the other says Philips. There is also a pin connector which says Philips IR, I am guessing if you don’t want to use the SoundGraph IR receiver you can set it to Philips and use a standard internal IR receiver board. Not sure where the IR window is, presuming its built in to the LCD Display some where.





Optical drive bay now installed, but I have no optical drive at the moment to put in to it. If you look at the bottom right you can see the circuit board for the front power switch arrangement.





I had to put on the Power LED cable the other way round as to what is shown in the Intel motherboard diagram, reversed the pins – / + etc.



After realising my TV was on the wrong HDMI input and a brief panic, I was then able to see the boot screens and get in to the BIOS.



Quick Summary

Very nice, good build quality and great looking Mini-ITX HTPC case. If you want this style of chassis with an LCD display then this is probably the one to go for, budget allowing. If your not bothered about an LCD I would recommend a fanless solution like the Streacom FC8. The OrigenAE M10 came with one of those daft iMon Pad remotes, would like to see it shipped with a decent MCE remote. Internal design around the optical drive bay could be better, you are limited to what types of slot loading drives you can use, due to button position and mechanism and I think they could have made it so you could install two 2.5” hard drives.
Next I need to install an OS, I have decided to install Linux Ubuntu and XBMC with a view to migrating all my HTPC’s away from Windows 7 / MCE in the long term. Will let you know how that works out? As I am new to Linux so it could be a bit of a learning curve. So keep reading the blog to find out. Or leave a comment if you have recently moved away from MCE.

WHS 2011 Remote Web Access–Music Player Black / Blank Silverlight app problem

I’m looking for users who have had this problem with the Windows Home Server 2011 Remote Web Access - Music Player Silverlight app, on larger music collections when you attempt to play an album the Silverlight app is launched in the browser popup window but the album does not play and you just get a black / blank window. Or sometimes the Silverlight popup app will just quit out and exit.

Full details here on the Home Server Show forum.

What it should look like:

I'd like to hear from users who have suffered with this bug.

Thanks

CallerID made Simples! with W7 Caller ID

I have tinkered with CallerID solutions for Windows Media Center over the years using programs such as Vista CallerID & TapiRex however it was always a bit of a black art to setup and get working properly. However now thanks to Stan Berghici developer of W7 CallerID its simples!

I recently migrated to a new HP Microserver running WHS 2011 away from my old home made WHS V1 PC and wanted to get CallerID working again. First thing you need to do before you even start is ensure you have the CallerID service enabled on your land line? I contacted BT and requested the feature be added, some telco’s may add a small monthly charge for this service.

To see a list of W7 Caller ID features click here, you may also want to view some of the various demo videos that are on the website.

W7 Caller ID

One of the features is “Bluetooth support of the following smart phone brands: iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7.5 Mango and Blackberry.” I haven’t currently set this up so will not be covering these feature, maybe in part 2.
Next get yourself a compatible modem, Stan has some recommended modems on the website here, however I am in the UK and I got one of these modems off of eBay:

“Conexant USB 56K V.92 Fax Modem W2K/XP/VISTA/7 CALLERID”

Chipset set: Conexant 93010


Then head over to the W7 Caller ID website and download the software here. There are three main components of the software, Server, PC Client and MCE Client. There is also a Media Portal add-in. It is also possible to send notifications to XBMC and Apple MAC using Growl.

Read the Setup Guide here.

I installed W7CallerIDServerSetup.msi on to my WHS 2011 server. W7CallerIDClientSetup.msi on to my Windows 7 laptop and W7CallerIDMCESetup.msi on to my Windows 7 Media Center PCs.

W7 Caller ID Server: Settings



My USB modem was automatically detected, I did not need to change any settings such as the Caller ID Command. I did however click in to the modem name and rename to “Harrison Home” as the name of the modem gets displayed in MCE on the popup notification.





Bluetooth tab is for pairing a Smart Phone via Bluetooth to receive notifications. I will skip this part for now but its all covered in the Setup Guide.

The Network tab is used to configure a network listener for use with Notify Pro, again covered in the Setup Guide.

Targets tab – In here you specify the list of remote targets, these are the PCs you want to receive the notifications, in my case I have two Windows 7 HTPC’s with the W7 CallerID MCE addin installed, these use port 8000. My Windows 7 laptop / workstation only has the W7 CallerID PC client installed and this uses port 8020.



In the E-mail tab I simply added my Gmail details, using my email address in both the From and To fields, I now get notifications sent to my inbox when someone has phoned the house.



On the Import tab you can import contacts from Gmail and Outook. I did not user this feature and manually added my contacts in to the Callers List, see below.



Other tab. This is an important tab! You must ensure that you correctly configure the Phone Mask and Alternative Phone Mask before you start adding contacts in to your Callers list or the formatting of the phone numbers will be incorrect. I added my contacts before I had properly configured these Phone Masks and found I had to delete and recreate all my contacts after I had properly set the Phone Masks.

The Phone Masks you can see below are correct for the UK. (I think)

Phone Mask - 0xxxx-xxxxxx

This means the area code will start with a zero and is 5 digits long, e.g my towns area code is 01423 the X’s after the dash denote how many digits the rest of the UK land line phone number is. My phone number is 6 digits long as are all my contacts phone numbers. (Maybe they are longer in big cities?)

Alternative Phone Mask - 07xx-xxxxxxx

Is for mobile numbers, as far as I am aware all UK mobile phone numbers start with 07 and the prefix is 4 digits long, the rest of the mobile phone number is 7 digits long. Again all my contacts in my Callers List all have mobile numbers start with 07 and that length of digits.



Other things you can enable on the Other tab is MCE Pause / Continue Playback, so when a call comes in MCE will be paused and playback resumed when the call has finished, I find this works sometimes but not others, I need to test it some more. You can enable Speech so that the name and number of the caller is read out and set the Speech volume level.

It maybe worth noting the location of the Callers List database file on my server is in the Administrator users Documents folder and the file is called: W7CallerID.sdf

W7 Caller ID Server: Caller List



In the Callers List you can manually add your new contacts.



Adding a new contact, enter their name phone number and upload a picture if you wish. I am not sure what the Type field is for and have not used it.



W7 Caller ID PC Client

If you want to install the PC Client on your laptop / desktop there is not much at all to configure, just enter the host PC name of the PC Client (Not the Server). And enable Speech or not.



Logs - in the screen shot above you can see there is a Logs option, in here you can view a log of all call history, you can filter on the last number of days.



This is what the W7 CallerID PC Client – Notification looks like when it pops up



W7 Caller ID MCE add-in

After installing the MCE add-in there is nothing you can see in MCE, no new icon etc, its just a background service that runs in MCE.

This is what the MCE notification looks like when it pops up



Summary:

I think W7 CallerID is great, its certainly the most easiest CallerID program I have ever used. Quick and easy to setup. W7 Caller ID is not a free solution but is reasonably priced at $19.95. I found the developer Stan very helpful and quick to answer any questions I had, there is also a user forum here. Which I have just noticed has more details about supported modems, here is the modem I am using.

Overall if you are looking for a CallerID solution which you can integrate easily in to your Home Theatre PC’s or other PCs / Laptops and even mobile devices you can’t go far wrong with W7 CallerID.



www.phaze1digital.com