Jamesaevans’s Gaming HTPC Build Log

Thats awesome mate, applause go out to you and Grangey!

I was actually not intending to use XMBC but seeing this, might be tempted for the WOW factor and use MC and the rest for TV viewing etc!

Thanks!

Brilliant guide for games in XBMC, thanks James.

indeed, final post (197) should be very useful to many ppl here.

Glad to hear you all found the post on launching PC games from within XBMC useful, but the credit should go to Grangey as I just followed his guide and wrote down the details of the steps that I performed. :)

James
 
22 - Ripping and Playing Blu-ray and DVD Movies in XBMC

My preference is to rip my DVDs and Blu-rays as ISO images so that I have an exact copy of what was on the original disc, and there is no degradation of image quality. I appreciate that there are other methods of creating smaller files without losing image quality by stripping out extras and alternate sound tracks etc, but I’m happy with the ISO approach. I am using SlySoft AnyDVD HD as I was already using this application to enable multi-region DVD and Blu-ray playback on my HTPC and it also includes the functionality to rip both DVD and Blu-ray movies to ISO images.

1) Ripping DVD movies
To rip a DVD movie to an ISO image I followed these steps:
  • Place the DVD disc in the optical drive and wait for AnyDVD HD to scan the disc
  • Right-click on the AnyDVD HD icon on the toolbar and choose “Rip to image”
  • Select the destination folder e.g. C:\Multimedia\Movies\DVD
  • Create a new folder inside the DVD folder with the name of the movie e.g. C:\Multimedia\Movies\DVD\Spiderman
  • Set the name of the ISO image to be the name of the movie e.g. Spiderman.dvd.iso
  • The naming convention becomes important when configuring playback in XBMC
  • Click “Copy DVD” and wait around 15-20mins for the copy to complete

2) Ripping Blu-ray movies
To rip a Blu-ray movie to an ISO image I followed these steps:
  • Place the Blu-ray disc in the optical drive and wait for AnyDVD HD to scan the disc
  • Right-click on the AnyDVD HD icon on the toolbar and choose “Rip to image”
  • Select the destination folder e.g. C:\Multimedia\Movies\Blu-ray
  • Create a new folder inside the DVD folder with the name of the movie e.g. C:\Multimedia\Movies\Blu-ray\Fanboys
  • Set the name of the ISO image to be the name of the movie e.g. Fanboys.bluray.iso
  • The naming convention becomes important when configuring playback in XBMC
  • Click “Copy DVD” and wait around 45-60mins for the copy to complete

3) Configuring playback in XBMC
In order to create a fully functional HTPC I will be using a combination of XBMC and Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 for media playback. Based on a recommendation from Razor I will be using XBMC for all Standard Definition (SD) content and Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 for all High Definition (HD) content as follows:
  • Play DVD discs using XBMC
  • Play Blu-ray discs using Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5
  • Play DVD ISO images using XBMC
  • Play Blu-ray ISO images using Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5
  • Play other media formats using XBMC

Natively XBMC plays DVD discs, DVD ISO images and other media therefore the configuration focused on enabling Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 for Blu-ray disc and ISO playback. I did plenty of reading around and my approach takes inspiration from Grangey’s excellent “XBMC Setup, and Support” thread and the "ISO Mounter - third-party software for auto Blu-ray ISO / IMG image mount on Windows" thread in the XBMC forum (See post #92 by slingshot27).

As with many problems a simple approach is often the best, and this is the case when it comes to configuring XBMC for HD playback. There are two key elements to the configuration, which are as follows:
  • Two batch files to launch Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 for Blu-ray disc and ISO playback
  • An XML file to define two external players in XBMC and the rules for when the batch files should be called

Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 comes with two different user interfaces so you might like to try them both out to see which works better for you. The default user interface is “uLaunchTMT5.EXE” which gives you a feature rich interface which more suited to using a mouse when watching DVDs or Blu-rays on the monitor desktop computer.
5770441755_b5e6b07526_z.jpg


The second user interface “uMCEPlayer5.EXE” provides a simplified interface which is more suited to using a remote control when watching DVDs or Blu-rays on your plasma from the sofa, and this is the option I went with.
5770984018_bd2499066c_z.jpg


The final part of the puzzle is SlySoft Virtual Clone Drive which mounts the Blu-ray ISO image so that it can be played by Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5.


4) Setting up a folder to store the batch files
Two batch files are required to perform the following actions:
  • To launch Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 when playing a Blu-ray disc
  • To launch Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 when playing a Blu-ray ISO image

The first step is to create a folder to hold the two batch files
e.g. C:\FOR_XBMC\BATCH_FILES


5) Creating the batch file for playing a Blu-ray disc
I opened Notepad and created a batch file called PlayDisc.bat which I saved in the folder I created
e.g. C:\FOR_XBMC\BATCH_FILES\PlayDisc.bat

I then added the following text to the batch file:
Code:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\ArcSoft\TotalMedia Theatre 5\uMCEPlayer5.exe" D:
The first part of the text string is the path to the executable file for Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 and D: is the drive letter of my optical drive.


6) Creating the batch file for playing a Blu-ray ISO image
I opened Notepad and created a batch file called PlayDisc.bat which I saved in the folder I created
e.g. C:\FOR_XBMC\BATCH_FILES\PlayISO.bat

I then added the following three lines of text to the batch file:
Code:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Elaborate Bytes\VirtualCloneDrive\vcdmount.exe" /d=0 %1
"C:\Program Files (x86)\ArcSoft\TotalMedia Theatre 5\uMCEPlayer5.exe" E:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Elaborate Bytes\VirtualCloneDrive\vcdmount.exe" /d=0 /u
The first line mounts the Blu-ray ISO image using SlySoft Virtual Clone Drive. The second line calls the executable file for Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5. Of particular note is the different drive letter “E:” which is the SlySoft Virtual Clone Drive rather than my optical drive which is reference when playing the Blu-ray disc. The third line unmounts the Blu-ray ISO image once the Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 application has been closed.

Once you have created the folder and both batch files you should have something like this (click for high resolution):



7) Creating the XML file
For XBMC to play a Blu-ray disc using Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 it needs to know about it. To do this you need to create an XML which adds Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 as an external player and defines the rules for when this external player should be used.

Open Notepad and create a new file called “playercorefactory.xml” which (assuming that the user account is called "HTPC") must be saved in the following location for Windows 7
e.g. C:\Users\HTPC\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\UserData\playercorefactory.xml

Note: If you do not see the "AppData" folder then you will need to enbale "Show hidden files, folders, and drives" in the Control Panel

I then added the following text to the “playercorefactory.xml” file in Notepad:
Code:
<playercorefactory>
	<players>
		<player name="PlayISO" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
			<filename>c:\FOR_XBMC\BATCH_FILES\PlayISO.bat</filename>
			<args>"{1}" /fullscreen /close</args>
			<forceontop>false</forceontop>
			<hidexbmc>false</hidexbmc>
			<hidecursor>false</hidecursor>
		</player> 
		<player name="PlayDisc" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
			<filename>c:\FOR_XBMC\BATCH_FILES\PlayDisc.bat</filename>
			<args>"{1}" /fullscreen /close</args>
			<forceontop>false</forceontop>
			<hidexbmc>false</hidexbmc>
			<hidecursor>false</hidecursor>
		</player> 
	</players>
	<rules action="prepend">
		<!-- Bluray ISO -->
		<rule filename=".*bluray.*" player="PlayISO"/>

		<!-- Bluray Disc -->
		<rule protocols="bd" player="PlayDisc"/>
	</rules>
</playercorefactory>
The “players” section defines two external players and if you look at the “filename” parameter you will see that they reference the two batch files that I created previously. The “rules” section defines when the external players should be called. The “filename” parameter in the “Bluray ISO” rule is used so that the external player is only called when the Blu-ray ISO filename matches the rule e.g. Fanboys.bluray.iso The “protocols” parameter in the “Bluray Disc” rule is used so that the external player is only called when the disc is of the “bd” type.

Once you have created the XML file you should have something like this (click for high resolution):


8) Testing the playback of a Blu-ray disc
I am using the “Transparency” skin for XBMC so before I could see the Blu-ray disc in XBMC I had to enable the “Play Disc” main menu element from the “Settings” menu as it was not visible by default.

I then returned to the home menu and scrolled through the menu elements until I came to the “Play Disc” element which I selected. XBMC then launches Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 and begins playing the Blu-ray disc. When I closed Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 I was returned to the XBMC home menu.


9) Testing the playback of a Blu-ray ISO image
I navigated to the “Movies” element of the XBMC main menu and then selected a Blu-ray movie that I had ripped as an ISO image, in this case Prince of Persia:
5771510966_b54a952be1_z.jpg

This automatically mounted the Blu-ray ISO image using SlySoft Virtual Clone Drive, launched Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 and began playing the Blu-ray ISO image. When I closed Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5 I was returned to the XBMC home menu.


10) Useful Links:
When configuring XBMC to play Blu-ray discs and ISO images I found the following sites and threads to be useful references:

Hopefully this post will be useful to other forum members in setting up XBMC to playback Blu-ray discs and ISO images. :)

James
 
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That last post is awesome mate, just what I was after as i've just been looking at how to play bluray discs and ripped iso images using XBMC and this has saved some serious googling! :smashin:

Maybe it could be added to the XBMC guide so that everything is kept in the same place?
 
Great update, having just converted to XBMC those two posts will definitely come in handy!
 
Hi Dr Tim,

Yes the lack of bit streaming HD audio on the GTX 570 was a disappointment, and this was not helped by several reviews of the GTX 570 and GTX 580 stating that it could bit stream HD audio.

Now that I have the uncompressed PCM working it’s not that much of an issue to be honest and from what I have read there should be no difference in sound quality between bit streaming and uncompressed PCM audio. When playing Blu-ray movies it certainly sounds much better than the sound from my original fat PS3, but it would have been nice to see the bit streaming light illuminate on my amp.

This is my biggest bug bear with the GTX580, the fact that cheaper cards in the Nvidia line up do support it.

Apparently after asking around on some other forums, its not that the cards are incapable its just that Nvidia need to enable in the drivers and probably licence the codecs for these cards.

As you mention PCM is ok, but i'd rather being seeing DD-TruHD and DTS-MA shown on my Amp
 
This is my biggest bug bear with the GTX580, the fact that cheaper cards in the Nvidia line up do support it.

Apparently after asking around on some other forums, its not that the cards are incapable its just that Nvidia need to enable in the drivers and probably licence the codecs for these cards.

As you mention PCM is ok, but i'd rather being seeing DD-TruHD and DTS-MA shown on my Amp

Hi holtehero,

Interesting that you have found out that the GTX 580 (and I'm assuming GTX570) have hardware support for bitstreaming HD audio but that it is a driver / licensing issue. When I looked into this issue the feedback I found indicated that it was hardware related.

Unless Nvidia provide a formal statement on this issue or someone gets a hacked GTX560Ti driver to run on a GTX 570/580 and demonstarte bitstreaming of HD audio I guess it will be difficult to prove one way of the other. Either way it does not work and it should work.:mad:

I would also like to see DD-TruHD and DTS-MA shown on my Amp given that I invested in an Amp that is capabale of decoding bitstreamed HD audio. That being said Uncompressed PCM is providing significantly improved sound quality over my PS3 that I was previously using to play Blu-ray movies. The improvment is most noticable in the speach which is significantly clearer that before.

James
 
22 - Ripping and Playing Blu-rays and DVDs in XBMC

James

Hi jamesaevans,

i tested your tutorial, but it doesn't work for me.
When i start to play an iso only this happend:
2zdzzw5.jpg


I can press ok, but Total MediaTheatre 5 does not pop up.

When I take a look to the xbmc.log I see the following lines:
10:55:14 T:5756 M:4294967295 NOTICE: CExternalPlayer::ExecuteAppW32: "c:\FOR_XBMC\BATCH_FILES\PlayISO.bat" "z:\BLURAY\Daylight.1996.BLURAY\daylight-bluray.iso" /fullscreen /close
10:55:15 T:5756 M:4294967295 NOTICE: CExternalPlayer::ExecuteAppW32: WAIT_OBJECT_0
10:56:05 T:5756 M:4294967295 NOTICE: CExternalPlayer::process: Stop
10:56:05 T:5756 M:4294967295 NOTICE: CExternalPlayer::process: Showing XBMC window TOPMOST
10:56:05 T:5756 M:4294967295 NOTICE: CExternalPlayer::process: Reclaiming audio device 2

When I enter the following line in a command box: "c:\FOR_XBMC\BATCH_FILES\PlayISO.bat" "z:\BLURAY\Daylight.1996.BLURAY\daylight-bluray.iso"
Total MediaTheatre 5 starts and plays the video fine.

But why does it not start from XBMC?
I tested the batch also with PowerDVD. Then It works, but why doesn't it work with TMT5?
Please Help.
 
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Hi jamesaevans,

i tested your tutorial, but it doesn't work for me.
When i start to play an iso only this happend:
image


I can press ok, but Total MediaTheatre 5 does not pop up.

When I take a look to the xbmc.log I see the following lines:
10:55:14 T:5756 M:4294967295 NOTICE: CExternalPlayer::ExecuteAppW32: "c:\FOR_XBMC\BATCH_FILES\PlayISO.bat" "z:\BLURAY\Daylight.1996.BLURAY\daylight-bluray.iso" /fullscreen /close
10:55:15 T:5756 M:4294967295 NOTICE: CExternalPlayer::ExecuteAppW32: WAIT_OBJECT_0
10:56:05 T:5756 M:4294967295 NOTICE: CExternalPlayer::process: Stop
10:56:05 T:5756 M:4294967295 NOTICE: CExternalPlayer::process: Showing XBMC window TOPMOST
10:56:05 T:5756 M:4294967295 NOTICE: CExternalPlayer::process: Reclaiming audio device 2

When I enter the following line in a command box: "c:\FOR_XBMC\BATCH_FILES\PlayISO.bat" "z:\BLURAY\Daylight.1996.BLURAY\daylight-bluray.iso"
Total MediaTheatre 5 starts and plays the video fine.

But why does it not start from XBMC?
I tested the batch also with PowerDVD. Then It works, but why doesn't it work with TMT5?
Please Help.

Hi punish,

It took me a few hours of trial and error to get his working, so let me see if I can help you to resolve this issue.

Firstly which of the two TMT5 executables are you using and have you tried the other one? I found that the MCE version worked more reliably so if you are not using this one give it a go and see if you get the same result.

Also worth making sure you have the latest version of XBMC and TMT5 just in case any bugs have been fixed recently that might be causing you issues.

James
 
Hi James,

I've been trying to get this to work also (using an external player to launch TMT3). I'm using the Aeon skin but can't see where within the settings I switch on the 'Play Disc' option on the main menu. I can find the place to show/hide the other options such as Movies, Video etc and assumed the Play Disc option would be in the same place, but can't for the life of me see it. Does it only appear when a disc is actually inserted or something? Or should I use a different skin? Or is it hidden somewhere else?

Cheers
 
Hi James,

I've been trying to get this to work also (using an external player to launch TMT3). I'm using the Aeon skin but can't see where within the settings I switch on the 'Play Disc' option on the main menu. I can find the place to show/hide the other options such as Movies, Video etc and assumed the Play Disc option would be in the same place, but can't for the life of me see it. Does it only appear when a disc is actually inserted or something? Or should I use a different skin? Or is it hidden somewhere else?

Cheers

Hi Hooblue,

I thought that the "Play Disc" option was a standard XBMC feature that would be part of all skins. However, it is possible that the person who created the skin you are using decided to remove this option and not give you the option to re-enable it. Might be worth posting the question in the appropriate "Skins" thread over at the XBMC forum to see if anyone else has found how to enable this option for this skin.

I'm using the "Transparency" skin which includes the "Play Disc" option once it has been enabled from the "Settings" menu, so may be give this skin (or the default skin) a go and see if either of these work for you.

James
 
Thanks James!

I might have to give Transparency a try if I can't get Aeon to work.

Some great guides btw! :thumbsup:
 
Hi punish,

It took me a few hours of trial and error to get his working, so let me see if I can help you to resolve this issue.

Firstly which of the two TMT5 executables are you using and have you tried the other one? I found that the MCE version worked more reliably so if you are not using this one give it a go and see if you get the same result.

Also worth making sure you have the latest version of XBMC and TMT5 just in case any bugs have been fixed recently that might be causing you issues.

James

I'm using the MCE Player, like in your Tutorial.
This is my batchfile
Code:
"c:\Program Files (x86)\VirtualCloneDrive\vcdmount.exe" /d=0 %1
"c:\Program Files (x86)\ArcSoft\TotalMedia Theatre 5\uMCEPlayer5.exe" M:
"c:\Program Files (x86)\VirtualCloneDrive\vcdmount.exe" /d=0 /u
I also tested it with ulanchTMT5.exe, but it also won't work:
Code:
"c:\Program Files (x86)\VirtualCloneDrive\vcdmount.exe" /d=0 %1
"c:\Program Files (x86)\ArcSoft\TotalMedia Theatre 5\uLaunchTMT5.exe" M:
"c:\Program Files (x86)\VirtualCloneDrive\vcdmount.exe" /d=0 /u
I'm using the latest version: XBMC 10.1 and Arcsoft TMT v5.0.1.87

Did you make any special configuration in XBMC? I deleted xbmc appdata directory in the users folder to reset my whole configuration.
Then I also installed Transparency Skin.
But It won't solve the playback problem.

Then I also reinstalled TMT5, and deleted the user settings.
But this also didn't solve the problem.

The strange thing is when I minimized xbmc manually by hitting the windows button on my keyboard, I can start the command line from the xbmc.log (that i copied before) without any Problem and TMT5 starts playing the movie.

And as I already said when I'm using PowerDVD instead of TMT5 as external Player it also works.
But I like TMT5 much more than PowerDVD, so it would be perfect to get TMT5 run as external Player.

Before I forgot, I also tested: deactivating my virus scanner NOD32, deactivating Windows Firewall, deactivating Windows Defender but without any success.

EDIT: I also can see on the History from Virtual Clonedrive, that XBMC mounted the iso. So i can definitely say that the batch will be executed from xbmc, but TMT5 pop up does not happen.

EDIT2: I have a temporarily solution.
I added a line in the batch.
Code:
"c:\Program Files (x86)\VirtualCloneDrive\vcdmount.exe" /d=0 %1
ping -n 5 127.0.0.1
"c:\Program Files (x86)\ArcSoft\TotalMedia Theatre 5\uMCEPlayer5.exe" M:
"c:\Program Files (x86)\VirtualCloneDrive\vcdmount.exe" /d=0 /u

So when XBMC starts the batch, I have time between the 5 pings to press the Windows button on my keyboard to get back to Windows, then Arcsoft plays the movie fine and dismounted again.
When I not press the Windows buttom to get back, nothing happend.
 
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I'm having exactly the same problem with playing iso's. I'm using TMT3 rather than 5 though. I can play the file no problem manually but when I try to execute from within XBMC I get the same pop-up saying an external player is active.

I've followed the instructions but can't figure out why it won't work. Very strange...
 
Hi punish and Hooblue,

Sorry to hear you guys are still having problems getting everything to work in XBMC. I didn't make any other configuration changes to XBMC, so I would expect what you have to work correctly.

I think the best way to resolve your issue is to post on the "ISO Mounter - third-party software for auto Blu-ray ISO / IMG image mount on Windows" thread on the XBMC forum as there are a couple of forum members who regularly check that thread, and who have much greater XBMC experience that I have.

Sorry I can be of more help, but I'm sure one of the guys on the XBMC forum will be able to help you to resolve your issue.

James
 
Thanks James. I've actually just managed to sort mine! I switched to the other TMT3 .exe file. I was using the MCE one as per your guide, but switched to the other one and it's working without problems now! :smashin:

Thanks for the help. Not sure why punish is still having problems though as I think he's already done that.
 
23 - Ripping and Playing TV Shows in XBMC

Having configured XBMC for PC games and the playback of movies from both discs and ripped images, the next step was to configure XBMC for TV Shows. XBMC makes it easy for you to navigate your TV Shows including selecting individual seasons and episodes within seasons. However, in order for this functionality to work, each episode needs to be a separate media file. Therefore, ripping a DVD disc which contains multiple episodes from a TV Show box set as an ISO image is not the best approach.

I am using SlySoft AnyDVD HD as I was already using this application to enable multi-region DVD and Blu-ray playback on my HTPC and to rip DVD and Blu-ray movies from the original disc.

When researching this topic I found these threads to be useful sources of information:

1) Ripping the DVD
For this example I will be using the 80 TV Show &#8220;Star Fleet&#8221; which was originally created in Japan where it was called &#8220;X-Bomber&#8221; and ran for 24 episodes. If you have not seen this show before, think of Thunderbrids crossed with Star Wars and you are not too far off. If you want to find out more about Star Fleet I would highly recommend that you check out SFXB the Star Fleet (X-Bomber) homepage.
5793844165_1cd1b3d702_z.jpg



For me picture quality is more important than disc space, therefore as with ripping movies, I wanted to maintain the original video files and did not want to apply any compression to the media files. Therefore, I will be extracting the individual episode .VOB files from the DVD disc rather than ripping an ISO image of the complete disc.

To rip the .VOB files from a DVD I followed these steps:
Place the DVD disc in the optical drive and wait for AnyDVD HD to scan the disc
  • Right-click on the AnyDVD HD icon on the toolbar and choose &#8220;Rip Video DVD to Harddisk&#8221;
  • Select the destination folder. I typically create a separate folder (e.g. DVD_1) to rip each DVD from the box set to before transferring the files I want to keep to the final folder
  • Click &#8220;Copy DVD&#8221; and wait around 15-20mins for the copy to complete

When the copying has completed you should see something like this (click for high resolution):


I then repeated this process for each of the other three discs in the Star Fleet box set, ripping each to a separate folder (e.g. DVD_2, DVD_3 & DVD_4) so that I can sort and rename the files before moving them to the final location on my NAS.


2) Setting up the TV Show Folders
In order to make it easy to navigate the TV Shows and for XBMC to use scrapers (e.g. Online TV Database) to display fanart and episode information it is recommended to organise your TV shows into a hierarchy.

Unfortunately, Star Fleet only ran for one season because it was not very popular in Japan and all of the props, puppets and sets were destroyed in a warehouse fire shortly after the first series was transmitted, so my hierarchy will only have a single level.


3) Naming the media files
Before placing the files in the correct location in the file hierarchy, the next step is to name the files so that XBMC can identify which season and episode each file relates to. Looking through the various files that you have ripped from each DVD it should be straight forward to identify the individual episodes as they should be the largest .VOB files in the folder.

If you want to double check that you have the correct files you can always open them with a media player (e.g. e.g. Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5) that is capable of playing .VOB files that have been ripped from a DVD.

In the case of Star Fleet this was rather more complicated as each episode was spit across two separate .VOB files. The first and larger .VOB file (e.g. VTS_04_1.VOB) contained the opening credits, recap from the previous episode and most of the current episode. The second smaller .VOB file (e.g. VTS_04_2.VOB) contained the last few minutes of the current episode, a trailer for next week's episode and the closing credits.

The current build of XBMC does not support the use of episodes that are split across multiple .VOB files, therefore I used a utility called &#8220; VOBMerge&#8221; to combine the two .VOB files into a single file .VOB file that XBMC could work with. Further research identified that there is a 1GB .VOB file size limit on DVDs, so this may be an issue with other box sets as well.

The &#8220;VOBMerge&#8221; utility is very easy to use and works very quickly with no degradation in image quality as it is doing a simple join of two files.
There are a number of standard naming conventions which XBMC and TheTVDB scraper support. For more information on supported naming conventions see: XBMC Wiki: TV Shows (Video_Library)

My personal preference is to use the following naming convention "Series_Name.s##e##.VOB" where &#8220;s##&#8221; is the season number and &#8220;e##&#8221; is the episode number.

As Star Fleet has 1 season and 24 episodes the media files in my folder will be named Star_Fleet.s01e01.VOB through Star_Fleet.s01e24.VOB. Once I had merged and renamed each pair of .VOB files I moved them to the final location on my NAS as shown below (click for high resolution):



4) Configuring the Source
As this was the first TV Show that I had added to XBMC it was necessary to set up a content source to point to the TV Shows folder on my NAS. To achieve this I followed these steps:
&#8226; Go to &#8220;TV Shows&#8221; and "Add Source"
&#8226; Browse to TV Shows folder on my NAS
&#8226; Set the content type as &#8220;TV Show&#8221;
&#8226; Run a library update


5) Configuring Fanart and Episode Information
If XBMC is able to correctly identify the series the TV Shows scraper can download Fanart and episode information. However, I wanted to have complete control of the fanart used for each of my TV Shows.

Therefore I placed the image that I wanted to use as fanart in the Star Fleet folder. The image was 1920x1080 sized and named &#8220;fanart.jpg&#8221;
e.g. C:\Multimedia\TV Shows\Star Fleet\fanart.jpg

The image below illustrates the Star Fleet series home screen in XBMC with fanart, episode list and plot summary for the currently highlighted episode (click for high resolution):


And a screen shot showing episode 1 of Star Fleet playing through XBMC (click for high resolution):


James
 
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19 - QNAP TS-412 NAS Delivered

Today my QNAP TS-412 NAS was delivered from Graham Myers at www.my-htpc.co.uk who is an assured advertiser here on AVForums. The NAS has been equipped with four 2TB Samsung F4 drives which have been configured in RAID5 to give a total of 6TB of usable storage. It looks to be a really nice piece of kit and the build quality has certainly exceeded my expectations. :thumbsup:

The Box:
image


The NAS:
image


Hopefully I will get the NAS set up this weekend along with my new Netgear GS608 8-Port Gigabit switch which was also delivered today.

James

Hi darling

I love our super big NAS and thank you for loading all my MP3 music files onto it. It's also a very cute NAS but if 6TB is not enough then can I get a matching cute NAS as well? :)

Poppet01
 
Thanks your wonderful sharing.

I also want to play *.mkv with PotPayer,and i had been installed PotPlayer.

I try to use XBMC to call PotPlayer program, but it failed.

It always run (TotalMedia Theatre 5) program.

What can i do?

Thanks.:)

My scripts:
playercorefactory.xml
Code:
<playercorefactory>
    <players>
        <player name="PlayISO" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
            <filename>C:\xbmc_bat\bdiso.bat</filename>
            <args>"{1}" /fullscreen /close</args>
            <forceontop>false</forceontop>
            <hidexbmc>false</hidexbmc>
            <hidecursor>false</hidecursor>
        </player> 
        <player name="PlayDisc" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
            <filename>C:\xbmc_bat\bddisk.bat</filename>
            <args>"{1}" /fullscreen /close</args>
            <forceontop>false</forceontop>
            <hidexbmc>false</hidexbmc>
            <hidecursor>false</hidecursor>
        </player> 
                  <player name="PotPlayer" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
      <filename>C:\xbmc_bat\mkv.bat</filename>
      <hidexbmc>true</hidexbmc>
      <hideconsole>false</hideconsole>
      <hidecursor>false</hidecursor>
      <playonestackitem>true</playonestackitem>
            </player>        
    </players>
    <rules action="prepend">
        <!-- Bluray ISO -->
        <rule filename="*.iso" player="PlayISO"/>
        <!-- Bluray Disc -->
        <rule protocols="bd" player="PlayDisc"/>
        <rule protocols="*.mkv" player="PotPlayer"/>
    </rules>
</playercorefactory>

mkv.bat
Code:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\PotPlayer\PotPlayerMini.exe"
 
<rule protocols="*.mkv" player="PotPlayer"/>

needs to be

<rule filename="*.mkv" player="PotPlayer"/>

I think
 
<rule protocols="*.mkv" player="PotPlayer"/>

needs to be

<rule filename="*.mkv" player="PotPlayer"/>

I think

Hi Graham,

I believe that you are correct, assuming that all of the MKV files have a ".mkv" file extension. I did find that the external player rules did not always work in the way I was expecting them to, so it will take a bit of trial and error to get everything working.

The QNAP NAS is working perfectly and I am very happy with my purchase:
5782908215_02cbb5c5b8_z.jpg

Best wishes

James
 
Glad you are happy with the QNAP :)

I had fun getting bd disc playback via powerdvd for a customer. Took me a couple of goes to get it correct.
 
Excuse me for my noobish question, James where are you getting all your artwork from? Did you say you're not using scrapers?
 
Excuse me for my noobish question, James where are you getting all your artwork from? Did you say you're not using scrapers?

Hi EvanUnisil,

The artwork is from multiple sources, for the TV shows and Movies I am mostly using scrapers. However, for the video games section I used Google image search to find wallpaper images and added them locally to my HTPC.

Hope that's helpful.

James
 

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