Xbox 360 & Media Browser Video Tutorials

[Big Arrick Son]

Here is my guide I put together on the community tracker. Hope this helps some of you that have been struggling getting your 360's working with media browser.

Media Browser and Xbox 360 Pre Setup

Basically I'm going to provide some links to some great helpful info. There will be video tutorials attached to help you along with this. I highly recommend you spend alot of time converting or backing up your media correctly, and organizing and renaming the files correctly. Taking the time to do this now will save you alot of headaches later.

Windows 7 & 360 Extender Info

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... -questions

360 Video Codec Support List, dont forget WTV and DVRMS are supported 1080p.

http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/ ... k-faq.aspx

Organizing your media collection for media browser

http://www.mediabrowser.tv/wiki/index.p ... Collection

Collect metadata for all your organized media

http://themetabrowser.com/

Research this brilliant tutorial by DemonSeed

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1882

Find tons more info on the tracker site or the forums

http://www.mediabrowser.tv/forum/

http://community.mediabrowser.tv/

Got windows vista or you have media that is not natively supported. Transcode 360 PDF guide.

http://www.hack7mc.com/upload/Transcode ... Center.pdf

Watched all the tutorial videos, everything working good. Tweak your media center menus with Media Center Studio.

http://www.adventmediacenter.com/

Media Browser Video Tutorials

Make sure you grab demon seeds mediabrowser shortcut pack here.

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/841137/MB%20 ... rtcuts.zip

Thanks to the entire community, thanks to Xzener for helping me get my icon collection complete for the Movie & TV Browser folder project. Ok never done a tutorial before so hopefully they work fine. I have made these into shockwave files, and they allow you click left or right through the info with screencaps. Hope you guys like them.

Part 1: Windows settings and Windows Media Player

http://megaswf.com/view/e2231895c2f14aa ... 92c5e.html

Part 2: Media Center and Extender Setup

http://megaswf.com/view/26ef01530dd2695 ... 089cb.html

Part 3: Media Browser Config Tool & Important Sharing Setting

http://megaswf.com/view/2516ad18c2641e3 ... 1892b.html

Part 4: Setting up Media Browser in Media Center

http://megaswf.com/view/191c6ac40a6ddfd ... 72275.html

At this point take a break and enjoy your media on 360. If your interested in organizing your data a little bit further see below.

Movie Browser & TV Browser Folder Structure Tutorial

Ok let me throw a few warnings out here, as I finally have had my first response. This method is amazing once you have it setup and working correctly though. I'm looking for feedback and errors so I can see what options cause problems. I have noticed that if I followed my naming structure through all the videos, keeping the main menu entry name the same, example: movie browser and entering in and sorting all options like I suggested just makes this easier to accomplish. I can run through my entire sequence 3,4 and this video and get this working perfectly everytime with my exact option choices and naming structure. Let me know if you run into problems I will try to help and if we can see what is causing this I will add support info here for others.

*Known glitches by using this idea* -

Multiple entries?

If your using the EHS and this method you will see a duplicate of each item entry on the recently added section. This is caused by media browser reading the .VF files in each of your subfolders as another collection. I have tried shortcuts all pointing to the same .VF and it still does it. I have no answer to this except maybe we could request a option in the config tool to add a feature like this folder setup?? Not sure if thats possible, so if you use the EHS you may not like this, but I rather have the sorting options without menus to enter so I use my setup.

Also when your in Diamond, and looking at movie details page, you can scroll over to the genre choices, if you click this it reads all the .VF files and you will end up with multiple entries. The amount of duplicates for either of these glitches is based on how many sorting option folders you have with .VF files, I have 6 in my movie browser, so I get 6 duplicates of everything. Once again I have a Genre area though once I enter my Movie Browser, so this is no concern to me.

*** Update 12/4/09 ***Heres a few snapshots of the glitches



As you can see here, I have the same episode for family guy listed 4 times, due to the fact that my TV Browser folder contains 4 .VF files in folders. The Polar Express shot shows 4, but if I scroll right I would have 2 more for a total of 6, once again because I have 6 .VF files in folders. If you are using the EHS screen you may not want to use my movie browser tutorial.

Thanks to feedback from epayne 11, I know you will need to make sure "Auto Enter Single Folder Items" is checked on in media browser. Also he brought up the breadcrumbs and how the leave a trail of your folder structure, how I have missed understanding what this meant up to this point is beyond me. If you take the time to name your VF's nicely inside of each of your sorting folders you should end up with a nice folder tree in the white text across the top of the screen. I have mine set to 4 on breadcrumbs, and as you can see it gives a beautiful description across the top of where I am at now.



Here is an image of how I redid my VF's and the screenshots of how it messes up the EHS if you use this idea.



Are you still interested, well then here is your next project.

Make sure you have "Auto Enter Single Folder Items" checked in media browser.
Want to organize your media so your main menu entry for movies and tv shows leads to another menu with all your sorting options as clickable icons. Watch this video.

http://megaswf.com/view/fba14e0793d2b96 ... 0a075.html

[epayne11]

Big Arrick Son,

Thanks for the guide, I like the way you have it setup.
Although I must be doing something wrong because after going through your last guide "Movie Browser & TV Browser Folder Structure Tutorial" I am getting some extra folders in the menu's.

So here is what I have
All Movies are stored in C:\Movies


I Created the Movie Browser folder and sub category folders in C:\Movie Browser


In each sub category folder I placed the .vf file


Set Media Browser Configuration Tool to the new C:\Movie Browser folder


And here is how it looks inside of MB.
Main Menu = OK


Sub-Categories = OK


HERE IS THE EXTRA FOLDER <> OK


If I go into that folder I do see the real movies = OK
But I expected these to be up one folder.


I must be missing one step or don't have something configured correctly.
Any ideas?

Thanks

[Big Arrick Son]

Glad to see someone else out there attempted this. Ok I have seen this glitch before when I was trying to figure out if I could do this. Ultimately what we need is media browser config to have an option for this idea, but we would need a lot of supporters. It could be alot of things, are your settings exactly like mine inside of mediabrowser config screen option in video 4? Especially slide 5 and 6? If you change anything there make sure you exit out and reload media browser. See if its fixed? If not I have a few more things we can try. Just wondering did you follow each of these videos step by step or just try to do the moviebrowser section?

[epayne11]

For the most part I did the same settings, few things here and there I changed.
But I found it, the "Auto Enter Single Folder Items" was unchecked, so I checked it and it worked!
Now the description of that says "If a folder contains only one item, automatically select and either play or go to the detail view for that item". I took that as meaning if you have one single move file in a folder to not display the folder, but to just play the file right away... probably wrong about that though...
Other changes I made was to up the breadcrumb count to four (I like that you can see where you are at and how deep down you are) and the other settings was inside of MCE Visual to show animations. I can't help it, I like that feature to much. Without it movies just flip quickly to the next one, you don't have that cover flow "effect" of rolling from one to the other.

Anyways, thanks!

[Big Arrick Son]

Ya i thought it might be the folder thing, all add it to the edit options for people that are like you and just want to use this option but maybe not for extenders, and now that you brought up the breadcumbs notion I will add that once I test it, I honestly have never even touched that setting before, need to make sure it works on extenders for me but dont see that being a problem. Thanks for your feedback.

[epayne11]

hmm..
Each time I start a new Media Browser session (say after going from Live-TV in MCE) and I go into one of those new sub-categories I get this

After about 10 seconds they finally show up, it is like it is caching them or something.
After the first time it goes through this it is fine for the whole time I am in Media Browser (going in and out of menu's).
But if I go out of Media Browser and back in, same thing happens....

[Big Arrick Son]

Ya this is a known glitch, several threads on the tracker around this. When you go in and you see its faded out like that just immediately back out and re-enter same folder and bam it should be fine, no waiting. Happens regardless if your using my movie browser idea or just normal while sorting. You may notice if you are sorting by genre, and say you only have less then 10 movies in a genre type like western, it usually doesnt do this. Like I said several threads out there about this I weighed in on all of them hoping for this to get fixed. I need my wife to be able to sit down and not be like what is this thing doing? It just needs to be a smooth interface, and thats why I created this idea of icon sorting instead of menus....

[epayne11]

Actually before I seen your post I never sorted before and I have about 150 movies online. I used the Enhanced Home Screen a lot to just see the recently added ones or just scrolled...

Here's another question, is it possible to go right into a Genre folder, instead of having to go down to multiple levels?
Example, I want to make a top level menu for "Animation" of all the kids cartoon movies (Wall-E, Nemo, Panda, etc).
I was going to just create one animation movie folder and set the configuration tool to point to it, but problem is that all of my movies are spread out across multiple drives right now and I can't physically move them. Point being, no one single location for just the animated movies.

[Big Arrick Son]

Yep you can definately do this, and by not doing my movie browser idea you can not cause havoc on the EHS screen that it causes. My problem is my movie library is large and I have kids and a wife who like things simple, so if they wanted to click to sort by actor they would have to enter menus and get confused. Well then I would have like 12 icons on my main screen, I'm to organized for that, needed another level of menus.

To do what your asking, goto the config tool, make a new entry, name it by your sort option. So animation, then point it to where all your movies exist. Now enter media browser, you will see your entry. Enter it, all your movies will be there now sort this by genre, then select animation, as long as you have remember index by state im pretty sure this will reenter your animation category everytime you enter it the next time. Give it a shot and let me know.

[Nate8727]

I've finally got all of my filetypes to lay properly on the Xbox 360 except for VIDEO_TS folders. Of course I'm not using transcode 360 for anything but the video_ts either

I think I've tried just about everything for Transcode 360 to get them to work but still no results. Just numerous errors that equal failure.

1. I've tried running Transcode 360 as a service and a tray icon (can't run both, one or the other)

2. I've tried mencoder, and VLCtranscoder, but both fail.

For the life of me I can't figure out how I had the video_ts folders playing with vlc months ago.

As far as the Divx7, it works great. Everything plays with that, even mkv dts files.