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+---- Thread: WMC and MB3: Very cool (/showthread.php?tid=184225)
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WMC and MB3: Very cool - awp0 - 2014-01-23
I haven't noticed much discussion about it here in the XBMC forum, but big props go to Krusty and team for the WMC and MediaBrowser3 integration. It works great! I see some areas where it compliments XBMC quite nicely. For example, it provides a very nice web interface for EPG viewing and recording scheduling. It provides transcoded LiveTV via web browser, and it should help solve problems with remote and underpowered Android clients due to its transcoding ability. This should replace my Aereo service pretty soon!
Very well done and thanks again for this great application.
RE: WMC and MB3: Very cool - spaceboy - 2014-01-23
true, i think most people took this as a challenge to xbmc but as you point out its pretty complimentary. still i'm an mb3 user through and through and only came to xbmc until mb3 developed their own clients
RE: WMC and MB3: Very cool - mayoman - 2014-01-23
It's certainly not my fault we are not talking about it
For me Mediaportal still wins as backend over WMC (full transponder per tuner rather than single channel, DJBlu's Sky-UK EPG Grabber). However, this is really tempting me for tablet and phone clients in particular. I almost feel it's worth splashing out on new tuners & live with the more hit-and-miss EPG in WMC to put together an MB3 centered home network...
RE: WMC and MB3: Very cool - bandook - 2014-01-23
Can you guys that are using mb3 describe your setup? I haven't used mb since it was just an addon to wmc, basically replacing the stock movie library. So what is the deal with mb3 that makes it a good candidate for live TV in place of wmc? This thread has me interested to give it another look, just curious if you could give me some motivation to give it that second look
RE: WMC and MB3: Very cool - krustyreturns - 2014-01-23
@awp0, thanks we appreciate that. There are still kinks to work though with mb3, but when its all there I think it will complement xbmc too.
@mayoman, thanks for the link, I didn't know about that discussion.
RE: WMC and MB3: Very cool - mr3p - 2014-01-23
In the interest of continued serverWMC development, hopefully everyone can have a conversation about XBMC and MB3 in same thread. I'm not an MB3 user but loaded it just to have a look. With regards to integration with serverWMC, setup with the MB3 server was straightforward and liveTV is accessible but is live TV also viewable via client?
RE: WMC and MB3: Very cool - awp0 - 2014-01-23
(2014-01-23, 21:23)bandook Wrote: Can you guys that are using mb3 describe your setup? I haven't used mb since it was just an addon to wmc, basically replacing the stock movie library. So what is the deal with mb3 that makes it a good candidate for live TV in place of wmc? This thread has me interested to give it another look, just curious if you could give me some motivation to give it that second look
MediaBrowser is now offered as both a plugin for WMC as well as a fairly powerful standalone client-server HTPC system. It has similarities to XBMC but it's still quite different and I believe it compliments XBMC nicely. In fact, it would be incredible if these two teams came together to build a "super HTPC" (as unlikely as that may be).
I gave up on core WMC years ago. Live TV was about the only thing it was really good at. For almost everything else XBMC is superior IMO. And now that much of WMC's TV functionality is available in XBMC (via Krusty's marvelous add-in), it's really the best of both worlds.
So where does MB3 fit in? Well like I said at the top it provides transcoding and a nice web interface, both of which are unavailable in XBMC. So for me, I use XBMC when I'm sitting in front of my TV. However I use MB3 when I'm on the road or want to watch in a web browser. As mentioned above, MB3 also has superior library management tools but I don't really use them much because my primary DB is still XBMC.
I use XBMC more than MB3 by a long shot, but it's nice to have MB3 running in the background for when I need it. I keep my movies and TV show metadata consistent with the Trakt plugin and MediaCenterMaster. It all fits together pretty well IMO.
Btw, it does look like MB3 will overlap more heavily with XBMC with their new MB Theater client. I, for one, look forward to it. I think their team does a lot of great work with UI design and my very humble opinion is that XBMC could use some work in that area. So a little competition in this area might help us all.
RE: WMC and MB3: Very cool - Rickt1962 - 2014-01-24
awp0 I haven't tried the plugin for XBMC still not sure what it will do for... I use MB3 because I have a Linksys DMA2100 that it supports it
Then Learned about XBMC recently and already owned a HTCP but never utilized it till I found XBMC and love it ! Then after setting that up found out my Samsung player has PLEX LOLwell you can see how this is turning out ! I have a huge over lapping mess ! and just finished buying and setting up my first Raspberry pi with openelec ! might as well be in Chinese ! Got most of it working ! My eyes are bleeding read read read ! So any insight for this plugin ?
RE: WMC and MB3: Very cool - awp0 - 2014-01-24
I don't currently use the MB3 plugin for XBMC, but I do think it's pretty cool. It allows you to scrap XBMC's database and instead use MB3's database, but to continue using XBMC as a "front end". The MB3 database has some advantages, primarily that it's centralized and that it has better tools for editing the metadata. It may also have a few more metadata fields, but I'm not sure. On the downside, I've found that MB3 has some surprising limitations. For example, it supports multiple profiles but you can't do something like "show only certain types of content when my son is logged in". In XBMC this is possible (though not exactly easy).
Anyway, now that your aware of Plex, MB3, WMC and XBMC, I'm not sure if I can recommend any "best" solution. Start by defining your requirements. Do you need to watch your content remotely in hotel rooms, mobile phones, etc? If so then you'll probably need either Plex or MB3 for their transcoding ability. If not, then you might be better off moving to XBMC entirely. You can use MySQL to centralize the XBMC database so multiple XBMC instances (HTPC, Raspi, Android, etc) can be synched on the same library.
PS, I used to have a DMA2100 and I remember it being pretty slow and clunky. I'd take a $50 Raspi any day!
RE: WMC and MB3: Very cool - Rickt1962 - 2014-01-24
(2014-01-24, 02:38)awp0 Wrote: I don't currently use the MB3 plugin for XBMC, but I do think it's pretty cool. It allows you to scrap XBMC's database and instead use MB3's database, but to continue using XBMC as a "front end". The MB3 database has some advantages, primarily that it's centralized and that it has better tools for editing the metadata. It may also have a few more metadata fields, but I'm not sure. On the downside, I've found that MB3 has some surprising limitations. For example, it supports multiple profiles but you can't do something like "show only certain types of content when my son is logged in". In XBMC this is possible (though not exactly easy).
Anyway, now that your aware of Plex, MB3, WMC and XBMC, I'm not sure if I can recommend any "best" solution. Start by defining your requirements. Do you need to watch your content remotely in hotel rooms, mobile phones, etc? If so then you'll probably need either Plex or MB3 for their transcoding ability. If not, then you might be better off moving to XBMC entirely. You can use MySQL to centralize the XBMC database so multiple XBMC instances (HTPC, Raspi, Android, etc) can be synched on the same library.
PS, I used to have a DMA2100 and I remember it being pretty slow and clunky. I'd take a $50 Raspi any day!
The DMA2100 has a nice crash free user screen allowing me to Watch live TV and brows my movies and music everything is Fast...... Except when loading a movie it takes a minute or two to buffer it up
Yea I don't plan at this moment in time to stream to hand held devices.... But the Samsung player has a PLEX app and Allows channels to be added like XBMC so it allows the Movies to play and show its cover art and Info BUT that is slow also with buffering like the 2100 ! Beside the PLEX looks a lot nicer then the Samsung PC Share DLNA.
Just trying to figure out how to get everyone on board in using the metadata in each of my Movie folders instead of going to the web and scrapping all the time since I already store it and use Media Center Master that way I can control it ! I have seen to many mistakes in XBMC and PLEX when they scrap and show wrong title names and Folder cover art. I seem to always have to go in manually and correct there library when I know the info is already correct in my movie folders.
RE: WMC and MB3: Very cool - awp0 - 2014-01-24
If you already have MediaCenterMaster in the mix, then one thing you could do is just run all three of XBMC, MB3 and Plex at the same time. They're pretty much separate systems and there's no reason why they can't all be run concurrently. They don't use a lot of resources when a movie is not actually being played and for the most part MB3 and Plex can just sit there in the background, available when needed. You can use Trakt to keep the watched status of the libraries synched up.
So you (and anyone else) can choose whichever client you want to use at any time, whether it's the 2100, the built-on plex client, or the HTPC running XBMC. Over time you can figure out which one works best for you.
I process all my content through MCM before it's moved to the "watch" folder. After MCM has added the correct metadata files to the content folder then it's 100% certain MB3 and XBMC will each identify the movie correctly when they notice it.
RE: WMC and MB3: Very cool - Rickt1962 - 2014-01-24
(2014-01-24, 17:52)awp0 Wrote: If you already have MediaCenterMaster in the mix, then one thing you could do is just run all three of XBMC, MB3 and Plex at the same time. They're pretty much separate systems and there's no reason why they can't all be run concurrently. They don't use a lot of resources when a movie is not actually being played and for the most part MB3 and Plex can just sit there in the background, available when needed. You can use Trakt to keep the watched status of the libraries synched up.
So you (and anyone else) can choose whichever client you want to use at any time, whether it's the 2100, the built-on plex client, or the HTPC running XBMC. Over time you can figure out which one works best for you.
I process all my content through MCM before it's moved to the "watch" folder. After MCM has added the correct metadata files to the content folder then it's 100% certain MB3 and XBMC will each identify the movie correctly when they notice it.
All my Movies go to file : Videos\Movies\Genre Using Genre folders allows me faster viewing of each folder then I use MCM to scan each Genre folder and it creates single folders of each movie with the metadata in it. XBMC and PLEX have no problem extracting all the movies from the folders and reorganizes them. But for some reason the Movie metadata on some movies not many but some gets screwed up. Its frustrating because I can go in check that single movie in its folder and everything is there as it should be. But XBMC and PLEX still mess it up on the display
now I have over 500 movies so if I scan in 5 new movies maybe 1 will be wrong
RE: WMC and MB3: Very cool - awp0 - 2014-01-24
Is it possible that XBMC is finding and scraping a newly-added movie before it's processed by MCM? The workflow that you described sounds like this would be possible. So, I would imagine that a movie could be auto-scanned by XBMC and incorrectly scraped, and then scanned by MCM and correctly scraped and then moved by MCM to its new folder (with all the correct metadata). Then XBMC would find the movie again in it's new location but it wouldn't know that it's the same movie as before, because it incorrectly scraped it the first time and assumes this new movie is totally different.
RE: WMC and MB3: Very cool - Rickt1962 - 2014-01-25
Nope
I always use MCM first before updating XBMC Library. One of the weird things I just finished a Raspberry ! using Openelec and linking it to my Home network and when I view the movies 10% of them have the wrong folder cover when viewing them. And I know the cover art is in the folder called (folder.jpg) So that tells me XBMC does not acknowledge any info in the movie folders. It ignores it and uses the web scrapping
RE: WMC and MB3: Very cool - awp0 - 2014-01-26
Hmmm, don't know how to help you with this one. I suppose it would also be worth checking your MCM settings to ensure it's configured to produce the XBMC formatted metadata. It's possible that XBMC isn't recognizing the metadata and it's scraping the movie anyway. But I have no idea.