YAMM, Media Browser and Media Center

After much trial and error I have finally become annoyed with the habit of Media Browser of updating my movie folders, literally one day I can have a folder showing one name and the next the content is presented differently. For instance, The Adventures of a Teenage Dragonslayer used to have a cover image saying just than then one day it changed to a French language version.

As I have Media Browser running via Media Centre on my main PC and the HTPC I don't even end up with a consistent view.

The final straw has come in that I also have XBMC installed in both locations and that updates too and has added a healthy does of random.

I'm trying to get used to XBMC because MediaCentre is on the way out - I believe it is a pay for option on Windows 8 and that will kill it off, the downside is that the other products are just too complicated - yes they can do a lot of things but I just want my media presented in a simple interface with not too much messing about but having spent an extended period with MediaPortal and a couple of other products XBMC strikes me as the only viable alternative out there (and I'll try it again on my Rasperry Pi eventually, I love the Party Mode in the music library).

Anyway, I'm a long term user of Yamm, Yet Another Media Manager, which works pretty well but it too can have a randomisation effect - clearly they all pick up standard files from common sources and it is those sources that are changing. I've now stopped Yamm monitoring my entire collection and today I have been through and removed all automated updating from Media Browser and Yamm on both machines and manually visited every movie and corrected the content; it seems the best way to do this is to individually add the movies folder to the Yamm config and then wait for it to update (I've frequently resorted to adding

[imdb=ttxxxxxxx]

to the end of the foldername (where ttxxxxxx is the id from the imdb.com site) to force Yamm to use the correct film information.

Now all of my Movies have the correct information and look great in Media Browser and XBMC.

New HTPC Build : The Software

I've tried a number of software packages to run my media center kicking off with MediaPortal in the days of Windows XP when no suitable software was bundled but a huge amount of time and effort later Windows 7 with bundled Media Center came along and saved me.

Windows Media Center is not a perfect solution, too many forced adverts, too few rows of content with lots of empty space but it works out of the box. Luckily Media Center Studio helps and is tweaked nicely with Mikinho's Media Center Strips.

What I have found that since Windows 7 there are built in codecs for MP4 files from a Sanyo Xacti camera, quicktime for the Lumix TZ5 and laterlly support for AVHCD files from a Lumiz FZ100, all with no changes by me.

I have also been using MediaBrowser for Movie support and YAMM to pick up move details. Unfortunately, the music plugin crashes my machine which is a shame as WMC's Music library sometimes corrupts of its own accord so having a backup capability would be handy so Music Browser is on hand just in case. In fact I've just had another crack at the Music support on MediaBrowser but it just doesn't display my files reliably, I've checked all of the files to ensure I have tags in place on everything (and weeded out a few corrupt MP3s as a result too) but no luck still.

I also have in place MKV capability which makes life a lot easier for an movies, divx provides the basic codec capability and configuring MKV file extensions via MediaBrowser's External Players works nicely and combined with the integration of Cyberlink PowerDVD that game with the Samsung blu-ray drive for blu-ray disks everything works neatly now.

I did make a short foray into XBMC which looks great, miles better than WMC but configuration changes don't always seem to result in a working solution so blu-rays would play - WMC works so it lives on and the Neo theme in MediaBrowser looks fabulous so why tinker any further?

the three musketeers

This is what it is all about, Adrian, one for you!

I have been to see The Three Musketeers and without a doubt there will be disagreement with my opinion.

It was great - there I said it, inspite of only 6 stars on imdb and the local rag giving it only a couple it was great, goodbye herd hello some "facts"

Yes, it is the same 3 musketeers story you've seen before - notably that with Michael York, Oliver Reed, Raquel Welch and a host of other greats.

Yes, it is historically accurate, france existed, there were blokes running around with guns and swords, history tick.

Yes, it was in 3d. I've seen my fill of 3d films over the last couple of years and I can safely say I am unimpressed, I didn't want to see this is 3d but our local cinema doesn't show it during peak hours any other way. What's wrong with 3d, well it does work nowadays but being a glasses wearer two pairs is not a fashion statement to be made. I saw Clash of the Titans in 3d and can safely say a terrible film is not rescued (there's another one for you Adrian). I saw Thor in 3d, not a bad film (on the fence there chap, it has Natalie Portman so I can't fault it really) but I go sick of the glasses and discovered that only some parts of the film had been recorded in 3d. So 3d for this film, well, it worked, it seems to have been used gently pretty much throughout the film and been used effectively without excessive flying into your face effects.

The film itself was good entertainment with the expected humour and action and James Corden makes a remarkably good effort at Planchet. English accents abound for the musketeers but not being French myself (yes this side of the channel) I don't see the problem there. Air ships, no problem there either, why not. Orlando Bloom as Buckingham, blooming brilliant.

All I can say now is that I assume Adrian will hate it with a passion.