New user with a couple of questions

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
1

Howdy,

I’ve spent a fair amount of time learning my way around my new WD TV Live SMP as well as makemkv, but I’m coming up dry on a couple of items.  I’m hoping you guys can help out the newbie…

1) Movies starting with “The” in the title (The Fugitive, The Dark Knight, etc.)

I’d really like these to show up in my movie list sorted as if the “The” wasn’t there at the beginning.  The Dark Knight should be in the D’s and The Fugitive should be in the F’s.  I tried changing the file names from “The Dark Knight (2008).mkv” to “Dark Knight, The (2008).mkv”, but it doesn’t help.

SMP is still able to lookup the metadata with file renamed like that, but once it does, it gets sorted back into the T’s instead of the D’s.

Any suggestions on how to fix this one or just something I have to live with?

2) What file names to make “Firefly: The Complete Series” work correctly?

Seems like a couple of twists to make my rookie-self crazy on this one.  The Bluray discs include the episodes in the order they were produced and meant to be broadcast in.  Of course, they weren’t actually broadcast in that order and not all of the episodes on the set even aired.

What’s the right way to name these so that I get the correct metadata AND so they’ll stay in the intended order?

2b) How to handle the two-part pilot?

For other (simpler) series, I’ve done this with filenames and directories:

  TV Series</font>

    seriesname</font>

      seriesname.s01e01.mkv

      seriesname.s01e02.mkv

      …

 

What’s the right way to handle the 2-part Serenity pilot episode?

3) Wrong cover art on screen for several movies

On several of the first few BDs I ripped with MakeMKV, the cover art on screen doesn’t match the image from the metathumb file downloaded when I hit “Get Content Info”.

I think this is only happening on movies where I included the cover.jpg attachment inside of the track when I was checking what to include in MakeMKV.  Not knowing any better, that seemed like the right thing to do at the time.  I stopped including that when I’m doing the rip and the SMP seems to use the metathumb as I’d expect it to.

Presumably, SMP sees the image in the MKV and is using that rather than the metathumb image.  I’ve tried rescanning the library and downloading the metadata again, but the SMP keeps displaying the crappy image embedded in the MKV rather than the metathumb.

Any way to force SMP to use the metathumb other than re-ripping (ugh!) the mkv?

Thanks!

Jay

2

  1. You’ll need to edit the TITLE tag in the XML file and then rebuild the media library.

  2. Look them up at www.thetvdb.com and check the episode numbering there.

2b) Same answer.

  1. The WDTV ignores embedded JPG’s in MKVs, so they’re coming from somewhere else…  
3

Thanks, Tony.

Changing the tag does the trick for fixing the sorting.  Seems like ignoring the initial “The” in titles for sorting would be a common feature request so WDTV would do it automatically without requiring XML editing, but maybe I’m in the minority on that.

Apparently I won the lotto for worst TV Series I could possibly select to use as my first attempt at getting everything working the way I think it should.  Given all the notes I was having to keep, probably would have been easier to use a spreadsheet!  Pro-tip to other newbies:  don’t use Firefly as your learning exercise :slight_smile:

I’m still not sure what the scoop is on (3) with the funky cover art.  Once I stopped including the cover.jpg attachments in the mkv, I haven’t seen that issue on any more movies.  One other possible variable is that I found out about using the WDTV Profile in MakeMKV to fix forced subs on Bluray rips at about the same time.  That seems less likely to be it, but something I’ll have to experiment with.

It’s more important to get all of my library ripped than to chase this one down, so it may be a few days before I debug this.  I’ll either re-rip or, more likely, look into tools to delete the cover.jpg from the mkv and see if that fixes it.

Appreciate the help!

Jay

4

Confirmed that re-ripping the mkv without the cover.jpg attachment fixes the cover art issue I was having.  For some reason, the WDTV ignores the metathumb file if there is a cover.jpg attachment included in the mkv.

5

 

3) Wrong cover art on screen for several movies

On several of the first few BDs I ripped with MakeMKV, the cover art on screen doesn’t match the image from the metathumb file downloaded when I hit “Get Content Info”.

 

I think this is only happening on movies where I included the cover.jpg attachment inside of the track when I was checking what to include in MakeMKV.  Not knowing any better, that seemed like the right thing to do at the time.  I stopped including that when I’m doing the rip and the SMP seems to use the metathumb as I’d expect it to.

 

Presumably, SMP sees the image in the MKV and is using that rather than the metathumb image.  I’ve tried rescanning the library and downloading the metadata again, but the SMP keeps displaying the crappy image embedded in the MKV rather than the metathumb.

 

Any way to force SMP to use the metathumb other than re-ripping (ugh!) the mkv?

 

I noticed half a dozen movies whose icons had been looking very weird since the latest firmware update.  I had briefly looked at them, but could find nothing common to them.  Your post made me recall that for a very brief bit I had included cover art in the mkv files.  Sure enough, I just checked (with mkvmerge), and the files whose icons are not showing properly have cover art attachments!  This just happened with the latest firmware.  So my suggestion is to remove them.  Looks like mkvpropedit can do this–that is what I am going to try first.