DLNA - What do I need to know?

[JJZolx]

I know nothing about DLNA, video libraries, tagging, etc. Educate me a little. I do have a few hundred movies on my file server and several thousand TV episodes. I watch them through a computer, but who knows, maybe I'll buy a DLNA compatible player some day.

Questions:

Is there an equivalent to 'cover.jpg' that would give me some type of cover image for each video?

Along with the above question, is there some type of directory organization that is required or that works best?

I have the following video file extensions on the server:

.avi
.mkv
.wmv
.divx
.mov
.m4v

The vast majority are .avi. Will LMS scan and serve all of these file types?

How are video files tagged? What software can be used on Windows, what fields can be added? Are all of the above formats equally 'tagable'?

[JJZolx]

Ok, so I got LMS to scan my movies and TV shows. And I got XBMC 10.1 up and running on a Windows XP computer. I added the UPnP library in XBMC and it shows me the server. I've even played a few .avi files.

What I see in XBMC is a flat filename view. Is that what I should expect? I thought it would at least use the directory structure.

I have my TV episodes named using the following:

/Breaking Bad
../Season 1 (2008)
../../S01E01 Pilot.avi
../../S01E02 Cat's in the Bag....avi

So all I see is the file name. That means I have about 20 files named:

S01E01 Pilot.avi


So, do I need to add the TV show name to file names in order to make it work correctly, or can I tag the files somehow?

XBMC also shows me thumbnails for each video. Are they coming from the LMS server, or is XBMC generating these?

[andyg]

You can browse by folder too, obviously video tagging is nowhere near where music file tagging is. We do try to read at least tagged titles from videos if they have them though.

Thumbnails are generated by LMS.

[andyg]

AVI and MP4 files can be tagged the same as WMA/MP4 audio files, since they use the same container. I am not sure about tagging for other formats. There are probably a lot where you can't tag them at all.

[JJZolx]

Ok, I'm starting to get it.

I found in XBMC where I can browse by folder. For this instance of LMS I have only videos, no music or photos. One thing that could maybe improved is that at the top level I see:

Music
Pictures
Video

But Music and Pictures are empty. Seems like these could be suppressed by LMS when empty.

[erland]

You can browse by folder too, obviously video tagging is nowhere near where music file tagging is. We do try to read at least tagged titles from videos if they have them though.

Thumbnails are generated by LMS.

Is there some kind of thumbnail included in some video formats ?
I'd expect that most users would really like to have the advertisement/DVD cover image instead of a random frame from the movie as cover image.

Maybe a png/jpg named the same as the movie file or some kind of cover.jpg in the same directory or something similar would be appropriate ?

[JJZolx]

Yeah, I never really got an answer to that one.

It'd be interesting knowing how a frame from a video is chosen to represent it. A problem with the thumbnails for widescreen movies is that they're all but unreadable with 1/2 the image area consisting of black bars.

[erland]

Yeah, I never really got an answer to that one.

It'd be interesting knowing how a frame from a video is chosen to represent it.

I'm guessing it's random or taken at a specific time a few minutes after the start of the movie, which probably rarely is going to result in a image you are familiar with. The result is that the images might look nice in the user interface but they aren't really improving the usability by making it easier/faster to find things.

Ideally I'd like some kind of IMDb integration, similar to the LastFM album cover retrieval, that would result in images which I'm familiar with and would increase the usability when browsing. However, I guess an IMDb integration gets more complicated since Logitech needs to arrange business agreements and in this case making it possible to at least provide your own cover.jpg or similar would solve the problems.

Also, for my MythTV library, MythTV is already providing images, if I have a video file like:
2314_20090103210000.mpg
There is also a image in the same directory:
2314_20081204215500.mpg.png

I wonder how other video recorders handles this, if they also generate a jpg/png the LMS scanning could probably get quite a lot faster if it would just use the already existing image produced by some external software. It's likely not going to increase the usability since the external software also just take a random frame and put it as an image, but it's going to make the scanning faster I suspect, which would be good.

[Davidg1]

Yeah, I never really got an answer to that one.

It'd be interesting knowing how a frame from a video is chosen to represent it. A problem with the thumbnails for widescreen movies is that they're all but unreadable with 1/2 the image area consisting of black bars.

Generally it is better to "import" into something like XBMC, rather than use "folder view".

Importers for most front-ends go and get metadata and art from various sites such as http://thetvdb.com/ and http://www.themoviedb.org/

These sites include posters, fanart and episode thumbnails, supplied by contributors.

Importing this info relies on an organised method of file/folder naming. For TV shows this can be as simple as Fringe.S04E01.mkv, which provides enough info to pull all the rest eg. http://thetvdb.com/?tab=episode&seri...=4120435&lid=7, http://thetvdb.com/?tab=series&id=82066&lid=7 , http://thetvdb.com/?tab=season&serie...d=468438&lid=7

I think a lot of DLNA servers at this point are a lot more manual than this. LMS certainly sounds primitive compared to even these!