I was thinking if I should bother buying a hard drive to install in my PCH when I get it, mainly thinking I wasn't really going to do any of the things that require adding a hard drive (I don't need NAS - that's why I have my WHS box, the BitTorrent client is kinda iffy, etc).

Then I saw this. http://www.treasure-cove.net/moviejukebox.htm

wow! what a way to organize my movies! And navigate to the one I want to watch. Sure beats the rather basic (but workable) interface of the PCH.

Guess I'll be getting a drive

This is GREAT discovery. I'll definitely need to check this out. It should add some much needed eye candy to the PCH interface.

Thanks rrinker for the find. I'll try and give some feedback when I have some time.

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Richard

My gadget blog: http://www.gadgetinsane.com

It tis very cool! I too will try it out. Thanks for the tip!

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John E Pombrio
Do not meddle in the affair of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

AFter reading the entire thread dedicated to it, it seems liek it's not quite as simple as 'click and you have pretty pictures' but it does seem worth the effort. Hopefully making one and two at a time additions after the initial build will be simple
Actually, if the whole thing is actually web driven and you can specify what the PCH start page is, I might be tempted to work on something along those lines that's perhaps WHS specific - maybe an add-in, that would be kind of cool. Can't wait to get my PCH so I can play! Based on how many orders made it into the last batch they announced, I might actually be in the very next batch. One can hope.

Did some playing around tonight and it was a bit tricky to get workin gbut I was able to add a movie and generate the web apges. Can't test it as I don;t have my PCH yet. The most tricky part is that it is a wuite literal script to control the other applications you use with it - biggest thing to rememebr: ALWAYS add the trailing backslash to any path! I'll have ot mention this on the PCH board for the author to look at, MOST programs are smart enough to know that the path C:\MY FILES\MOVIES needs a \ appended to locate a file. I know I've always had code to check this in programs I've written. If the person types C:\MOVIES\, it doesn't add an extra \, and if the user types C:\MOVIES it does add a \. Oh well, once I gt past that part, there is also one other slight limitation, in the way it calls one batch file form another, you cannot use path names with spaces in them. So the default directory it sets up under My Documents cannot posisbly work the way the batch file is written. changed it to write to a simple path off the root of C: and finally it ran through the entire process without a hitch, and made some nice web pages. With a little tweaking to the .CSS files I can probably make it work as a movie jukebox for Windows as well. When setting it up you speficy a path to the movie (that Windows sees) as well as a path that the PCH would see (slightly different for local files, NFS shares, and SMB shares - also different depending on the firmware revision you have, the newest one changed the method of specifying certain share types). I bet I could set this to a windows-compatible specification that would make clicking the link open the movie in WMP.

I need to do some further investigation - the program is driven from whatever movies you load into The Movie Collector. I thought I saw somewhere that TMC uses or can use MySQL as a database - if this is so I can probably duplicate much of what My Lil Movie Jukebox does only truly automate it - as written it scripts keyboard input to TMC to enter various keywords like genre and actor names to make it sort, and then exports that view using TMC's export function. It means that while doing this you have to be careful to NOT touch the mouse lest you mess up what window is active and halt the scripts. If this would simply do direct queries on the database, all that would be eliminated. If there is interest I might try doing some of this. Regardless of method, the end results are quite nice - run the sample test drive from the site to check it out.

Ok, so I have been playing around with this program with little success. I tested it out on 3 movies I had on my PCH. Once exported to PCH it looks great as far as the interface, but that is where it stops. 2 out of the 3 movies were straight dvd rips (vob). In both cases neither movie played on the PCH using the jukebox, it would just try to load and then just return back to the summary page of the movie. The 3rd movie is an mkv, and when I try to play the PCH tells me it is an unsupported format (the mkv I can play fine on the PCH otherwise, so this has to be a software issue with Jukebox). Also, a bigger problem I encountered, when I exported the Jukebox to the PCH and then go to the Hard Disk Drive source on my PCH, I can only see the movies on my HDD that were set up with Lil Jukebox, I cannot see any of my other movies on the HDD. I don't know if there is a way around this, but the only way I could go back to the original default screen in PCH to select all my movies I had to delete all the index files created by the Jukebox. One thing that compounds this issue is that Lil Jukebox is only free for the first 50 movies. If you want to get the full version it costs $49. I have easily over 50 movies on my PCH and I refuse to pay $49 until I am convinced this program is worth it. However, while in "test mode" I cannot view the rest of my movies.

So overall I would say my experience has been less then positive. Setting up all the movies can be a little tedious and manual, but I think after doing a few movies you can get through pretty quickly, so no major complaints there. The execution of the jukebox however has been rather dissappointing (I really do like the interface of the Lil Jukebox vs. the standard PCH interface, but it becomes irrelevant if I cannot get any movies to play and lose access to movies that are not set up under the Jukebox).

Has anyone actually tested the Jukebox on their PCH, RRinker I think you mentioned at the time you didn't have you PCH yet?

It really is just a shame the difficulties and hoops you have to go through just to get a decent looking interface. In my mind PCH is sitting on a winning ticket here if they just spent some time on the interface. Until then would you really expect anyone except "gadget geeks" to purchase the PCH? Anyway, I will stop there as my frustration is a little high from trying to work with the Lil Jukebox. After I get home from work tomorrow I will see if I can do a little more troubleshooting and research on the Lil Jukebox, but if I come to the same result as today then I will just scrap this program and wait for something better to come out (to be honest even if this program worked for me exactly as promised I am not sure I am willing to fork over $49 for...)

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Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

I'm in the middle of setting mine up. I have my PCH now, and it works fine playing my movies off shares on the WHS box. Unlike the example for setting up the Jukebox, I am keeping the movies on the WHS share. I have a HDD in my PCH, but I got a 120GB laptop type for the silence and coolness, and I can't likely copy half a terabyte of movies to it. I have most of my movies keyed in and edited to get the links right, so as soon as I have a free moment or two I will run the export (takes a while the first time - I want the actor info too) and copy the HTML to the PCH and see what happens. The paths are tricky, the spec is different from the A-100 and A-100 depending on which firmware you have (seems like they updated the SMB driver to get better performance and in doing so the format of the mount points changes...wierd but, oh well).