MediaBrowser Q&A Thread

[Cheesegeezer]

Hello fanart.tv members. I would like to introduce myself as one of the developers from MediaBrowser. MediaBrowser have a long standing relationship with fanart.tv and i have recently added a blog entry which will be a continuation on a weekly/fornightly basis.

http://fanart.tv/2014/01/mediabrowser-a ... t-harmony/

You can use this thread for me to answer any questions or concerns you may have.

Thanks for your time.

Cheese

[Kode]

Welcome to the fanart.tv forums cheesegeezer, thanks for taking the time to post

[akovia]

OK then...*Rubs hands together briskly*

First interrogatio...err.. question.

One of my pet peaves with XBMC is the inability to mix content for browsing or in playlists.

To be more precise, you can't make a playlist of tv-shows and movies together.
This prevents browsing by genre. So if I wanted to browse all my westerns for instance, I would have to browse westerns in both tv and movies.
This also prevents me from making a playlist of playing back a tv series that also has movies in order. Since I am an anime junkie, this really sucks. There are many series that have quite a few movies that go along with them and I would like to make a playlist that incorporates both.

Can this be accomplished in MB3?

[Cheesegeezer]

OK then...*Rubs hands together briskly*

First interrogatio...err.. question.

One of my pet peaves with XBMC is the inability to mix content for browsing or in playlists.

To be more precise, you can't make a playlist of tv-shows and movies together.
This prevents browsing by genre. So if I wanted to browse all my westerns for instance, I would have to browse westerns in both tv and movies.
This also prevents me from making a playlist of playing back a tv series that also has movies in order. Since I am an anime junkie, this really sucks. There are many series that have quite a few movies that go along with them and I would like to make a playlist that incorporates both.

Can this be accomplished in MB3?

Ok, let me have a go at this interro...... question(s)

You'll have to forgive me as I'm not a user of XBMC. I'm going to use MB Classic as an example as it's the Client I know best and develop for.

Firstly, you don't create Playlists in MB-Classic, you create the collection you want in MBServer Dashboard. Your playlist is based on the collection you are browsing.
So in MB you can set up your libraries how ever you want, For instance I would imagine you have a movies folder and TV Shows folder on your HDD, each of these folders would have subfolders containing your movies and shows. However for your Anime Folder, you have mixed content, so when you set this Collection up in the library configuration you simply say that it's a mixed folder. When viewing this in MBClassic you simply click on your Anime Collection, go into the Anime Show/Season and this will allow you to access the context menu and select play all function.

Apologies if i've misinterpreted, but hope i've answered your question

Cheers

[Kode]

No, I think what he would have is this structure:

TV
- Bones
- Anime Series

Movies
- Charlies Angels
- Anime movie

Playlists allow you to say I want to play episode 1, episode 2, episode 3, or movie 1, movie 2, movie 3 and it would play them in order, but you can't mix them, what akovia is asking is is there a way in MB to say you want to play episode 1, episode 2, movie 1, episode 3

Or at least that was my interpretation

[akovia]

Thank you Kode,
I've been thinking about how to reply to this and you took the words out of my mouth.

The only difference is my folders are laid out a bit differently but that shouldn't matter. They are very organized so it would be easy to adopt another structure if I needed to.

To add on to what Kode said, I also wondered if you could browse mixed content. So if I had an Anime "Collection" that consisted of both movies and tv series, could I browse those together?

[Cheesegeezer]

Absolutely

You would create an Anime Collection, then point that collection to your various anime folders. Then set the folder type to mixed.

Alternatively you can create shortcuts in a folder to create even more custom setups without having to take up more disk space. Simply copy the folders you want to a main folder, and then select the paste shortcut option in the windows context menu(right click menu). You can then set the new folder you created with the shortcuts as a new collection within MB.

[akovia]

Absolutely

You would create an Anime Collection, then point that collection to your various anime folders. Then set the folder type to mixed.

Alternatively you can create shortcuts in a folder to create even more custom setups without having to take up more disk space. Simply copy the folders you want to a main folder, and then select the paste shortcut option in the windows context menu(right click menu). You can then set the new folder you created with the shortcuts as a new collection within MB.

Wonderful!! (This is a huge plus for me)

Of course it would be symlinks in my case on Linux.

Next ..*ehem*...question

Would I be able to try this out along side XBMC without worrying about data loss?

Does it write/overwrite anything in the data folders?
Does it support nfo files already there?
Will it use existing art?
This kinda stuff.

Don't worry about explaining it all here if it's documented already. A link would be fine. Just want to ask the kind of questions a native XBMC user would ask if thinking of migrating. (Hope you don't mind)

Cheers

[ArieS]

Yeah akovia, learn as much as you can so I can ask you questions after

[Cheesegeezer]

Absolutely

You would create an Anime Collection, then point that collection to your various anime folders. Then set the folder type to mixed.

Alternatively you can create shortcuts in a folder to create even more custom setups without having to take up more disk space. Simply copy the folders you want to a main folder, and then select the paste shortcut option in the windows context menu(right click menu). You can then set the new folder you created with the shortcuts as a new collection within MB.

Wonderful!! (This is a huge plus for me)

Of course it would be symlinks in my case on Linux.

Next ..*ehem*...question

Would I be able to try this out along side XBMC without worrying about data loss?

1. Does it write/overwrite anything in the data folders?
2. Does it support nfo files already there?
3. Will it use existing art?
This kinda stuff.

Don't worry about explaining it all here if it's documented already. A link would be fine. Just want to ask the kind of questions a native XBMC user would ask if thinking of migrating. (Hope you don't mind)

Cheers

Yeah you can run this along side xbmc without it affecting your XBMC setup, they will work independently, there is also an xbmc addon which you can use also which proves MB and XBMC WORK together. http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=178180 Xnappo has created this for the XBMC community and us.

I've numbered your questions above

1. No it wont overwrite anything in your folders, it may add artwork to your folders
2. Yes, nfo are supported
3. Yes, it recognises those extra fanart folders also.

Ok, ready for your next question