w4mezzmo
04-06-2013, 08:37 AM
BACKGROUND
This will be a long post describing my initial and ongoing experiences with Mezzmo.
I have a large movie collection; my DVDs are all ripped to disk in VIDEO_TS format. I’ve been looking for DLNA streaming software for a while and ended up on Mezzmo’s doorstep due to research on the ‘net. I’ve downloaded several DLNA packages and none of them worked correctly, if at all. My tests have been with a none-too-smart BluRay player: the BDP-S570/BX57. This suffices since it’s perhaps a more difficult test and it is allowing me to investigate best practices (software and televisions and directory structures) before making purchase decisions.
I’ll describe my initial experiences with Mezzmo in a blow-by-blow fashion. I’ll then try to point out any underlying problems. Finally, I’ll try to sum things up.
Please note that the following is written as succinctly but kindly as possible. Below you’ll find critique that is genuine and perhaps not overly flowery but that has been written with a desire to connect with the developer(s) in a positive manner in order to improve the product.
INITIAL EXPERIENCE
Here is a running tally of my initial impressions of the product. Look at the Real-*.jpg attachments for pictures.
Upon first running the software, Mezzmo asked me for libraries to scan. It defaulted to a set of My* folders (“My Music,” “My Videos,” etc.) that I had to delete. I then proceeded to enter my movie folders, agonizingly, since Mezzmo uses a tiny, outdated files dialogue and one that kept defaulting to the wrong drive or wrong folder deep inside a drive tree, and I kept forgetting to select [Video] from the drop-down. Mezzmo should have initialized the folders from my Windows Libraries.
I clicked [OK] and Mezzmo went to town and tore through my libraries, looking for videos and subtitles and thumbnails and what-not. Wow! Mezzmo is a Grand Master of multi-threading. Congratulations, as thread handling and async operations are among the most difficult challenges facing a programmer.
Mezzmo was finished, for the most part, in 1-2 minutes. However, it spent another 5-10 minutes “getting video thumbnails.” At the time, I think I understood that, as a MediaBrowser user, I had relied upon its cache rather than manually creating files for every DVD rip (folder.jpg, backdrop*.jpg, MyMovies.xml or movie.xml) and that Mezzmo, lacking JPEGs in each DVD directory, was forced to read the video file for a thumbnail. This is a great feature but it produces lousy thumbnails—thumbnails that are neither elegant nor representative of the movie. I decided to consider the issue, later.
I went upstairs and fired up the Sony BDP-S570. I went to the first menu item—All-Video-Files—assuming quite naturally that, being first on the list, it was the primary method for perusing your movies. I hit enter 2-3 times to get to some video—any video—and to my surprise, something streamed! That was a first. Clearly this software “works,” which is more than I can say for the other package I tried.
What a mess! Under All-Video-Files were thousands of files: *.mp4, *.m2ts, etc. It was impossible to find anything and scrolling the entire list would have taken twenty minutes. Clearly, something was very wrong. I played around with the other menu items and found that I could navigate by Folders and find the movie I wanted to play, but that it was still a very long list and that in the end the best way to find a movie was to remember what year it came out and navigate through the Year folder. I was disappointed, but at least I could recline upstairs and watch a movie from my desktop in the office.
My next order of business was to reformat my directories. Mezzmo provided a list of DVD “Titles” but interspersed in the long (and I mean LONG) list of video files were thousands of *.m2ts files; those were mostly BluRay files, I learned. I quickly discovered that Mezzmo knew nothing about BluRay directories; the only thing it could do was list each m2ts file. So I split out my movies into e.g. D:\Movies.DVD, D:\Movies.BluRay, etc. Now off to Mezzmo to change the scan directories. To my displeasure, I could not for the life of me find the menu item to manage them. I was looking for a dialogue like “Manage Libraries” where I could delete my old directory paths and enter the new paths and, upon hitting [Enter], have the software re-read all of my files. The only thing close was the Tools→Setup and it did not show my previous directories. So I did my best to clear everything out by right-clicking in Video and All-Video-Files, etc., and hitting the delete key and they I re-ran Setup. When I went upstairs, everything was doubled or tripled, at least!
In an attempt to clean up my scan folders, I uninstalled Mezzmo completely. I re-installed it and put in my *.DVD folders and voila!—a semi-clean list of DVDs from my Sony BDP. I did this 2-3 times to get everything right and, unfortunately, I now had 2-3 Mezzmo icons on my Sony BluRay player. It seems that Mezzmo picks a new DLNA “token” of some sort on every install and that every install ends up with a new “live” DLNA source but leaves behind multiple “defunct” sources. At this point, I think I have 5-6 defunct Mezzmo’s on the Sony’s menu. A picture of the problem is attached, naturally.
The information on my television was incomplete and incorrect; I understood immediately that Mezzmo was bereft of *.xml movie data. The next day I bit the bullet and used Media Center Master to create files for every single movie on my hard drives (folder.jpg, backdrop*.jpg, and now only movie.xml as I found that MyMovies.xml had been deprecated). I felt that if I was to run more than one software package to watch movies, it was now time to have complete, stand-alone trees of movies and metadata. After doing so, I deleted my MediaBrowser cache and let it rebuild and I went to Mezzmo to do the same. Again, I was forced to uninstall and re-install because it was not clear to me how to force Mezzmo to “re-scan” my libraries. After having done so, I was disappointed to find that Mezzmo ignored all of my movie posters (folder.jpg) and that the shiny XML data did not positively affect the Artist and Creator information: they contain thousands of permutations of concatenated artists…almost one menu item per movie.
In an effort to divide my movies into manageable, navigable groups, I played with File→Create-Playlist. I saw Playlist, Smart, Active, Linked…? Who knows what’s what. There is no easily accessible information on these—no bubbles, etc. I did a quick Google search and with that and some playing around I discovered that a Smart List would do what I wanted: to break out my movies by first letter (‘A’ for “A.I” and ‘B’ for “Braveheart,” etc.) Tediously, I entered twenty-six SmartLists called ‘A’ through ‘Z’. Upstairs, I found that “All Videos” (which, itself, start with an ‘A’) and the other menus were interspersed with my letter menus—not what I wanted. Back to Mezzmo where I renamed each SmartList with a prepended period (.A, .B, etc.) The period is lexographically smaller than any letters and I had what I wanted…I thought.
Back upstairs, I found, upon deeper examination, that my titles were somewhat intermixed. The Smart Lists contained titles that did not begin with the designated letter. Many movies were in the ‘.T’ category because their title began with the word “The.” MediaBrowser is smart enough to sort without the leading “The;” the Smart Lists are not.
On a more upbeat note, I ran a difficult test using a movie that had to be transcoded. Mezzmo performed brilliantly. It engaged all six cores of my I7-3930K and stayed well ahead of the stream. See attached pictures of CPU activity during and after transcoding. Like I said, Mezzmo is a master of multi-threaded performance. I was tempted to throw it five balls to juggle and to ask it to pat its head and rub its tummy as well, but I’m sure it would have done so elegantly.
All of this happened over the course of a week, on and off. In an effort to write this feedback, I created a small directory tree as a test case. It is attached as well as the Test-*.jpg pictures that demonstrate some of these problems in the test case. I’ve deleted the test folders, uninstalled and re-installed Mezzmo, and have my original folders available again, sans .A—.Z Smart Lists which I have yet to recreate (as it’s a pain and they don’t automatically update, anyway). And I now have my ninth or tenth “defunct” Mezzmo icon on the Sony BDP.
PROBLEMS / ENHANCEMENTS
Here is a list of the problems I found (bugs, etc.) and enhancements that I believe are necessary. There are some duplicates, and these observations parallel some of the above recollection—I jotted down the following, stream-of-consciousness style.
All-Video-Files should automatically be partitioned by first letter (A...Z), or done so when the #-of-files exceeds a certain threshold. Better yet, provide a drop-down to select a partitioning strategy. When setting up the subfolders under Music and Video and Photos, the user should choose from a strategy to create them and organize them. Internally, this can map to the Strategy Pattern. Although I didn’t test with music, I imagine the same is true of Music→All-Music-Files or Album-Artist: a large collection of MP3s would require breaking down by [A…Z].
Neither Artist nor Genre are usable as they generate long, concatenated keys—permutations of artists and/or genres—almost one per movie I imagine, unless two movies have the exact, same actors or it’s a multiple-disk set or television series with the same actors. Instead, list only one artist so that a search for “Gene Kelly” yields the movies in which he played. A good structure would be Artist→{Starring, Costarring}→[A...Z] / <decade-i.e.-50s-60s-70s-etc> / ???.
It would be smart to ask for which software (if any) the directories have been formatted. If, for instance, one’s choice was “Media Browser” then Mezzmo could (very-ambitious-code-alert!) peek into the C: MediaBrowser cache for video posters. At the very least it should look for folder.jpg and/or backdrop.jpg files, which leads to the next observation. When it cannot find the files, there should be a choice to go to the internet for the information or a scrollable warning log so that the user can say “Ah! I forgot to run Media Center Master on this, that, and the other movie.”
Mezzmo appears to create a poster from the video information; rather, it should take the folder.jpg or backdrop.jpg. To do this requires knowing that it’s dealing with ripped DVDs, which leads to the next observation.
In order to tame the presentation of my movies I was forced to create 26 Smart Lists from ‘A’ to ‘Z’ for movies whose name start with that letter. This is a somewhat arduous task. If you do so then “All Video Files” and “Artist,” etc. are interspersed with the first-letter lists on the TV’s menu; I was forced to name all of my Smart Lists .A, .B, .C, etc. (i.e. prefixed with a period). There should be a way to enforce a certain ordering to the content lists.
When adding folders, ask not only what type of file (video, music, etc.) but what type of predominant folder structure: { ripped DVDs, freestanding files… } so that a good, default view can be set up; e.g. Video → [A...Z] for DVDs. A drop-down with the choices (under Library Management) should automatically reformat the presentation of the Library and its menu sub-items.
Eliminate the ‘The’ on titles when sorting alphabetically. Better yet, provide a check box for user preference.
Regarding my .[A-Z]/ smart lists: Mezzmo is confused when sorting by title, alphabetically. Titles that begin with ‘A’ are found in my .V folder, etc. The smart lists are only 80% correct; it seems that I would have to manually move things around to fix this, and what happens when I rip new movies? I have no intention of manually entering the data into Mezzmo; it should automatically pick up new data. The smart lists are not automatically maintained. But neither are the folders—they are not scanned for new material and they’re not accessible anywhere in the product except for the initial Setup dialogue!
The code does not update smart lists when new material is added; selecting Smart-List→Refresh does not search for new material. It seems to do nothing. There appears to be no way to automatically update Mezzmo other than to uninstalled, re-installed, read the folders, recreate the smart lists, etc. Update: I can find no “rescan library folders” option in any menu or any right-click context menu; I’m convinced that Mezzmo is incapable of syncing with my Libraries / directory paths.
The product does not really understand DVDs; some DVDs are completely unwatchable as different cuts are interspersed throughout the VOB files and playing VOBs sequentially yields the same scene from different angles. I imagine that there are post-IFO instructions to skip over batches of VOBs based upon internal DVD “registers.” That’s how you can choose angles, editions, follow-the-white-rabbits, etc. No matter how you slice it or dice it, Mezzmo must learn (no matter how painfully) to be a DVD player; perhaps the author of pgcedit (or et al.) could be enlisted to help with the code.
The product in a perfect world would also understand BluRay—but that’s a pipe dream. I have three BluRay software packages and not a single package can play all of my disks. They all have problems in different areas, some able to play certain disks and not others, some hanging on certain disks, etc. Alternative, real-world to-do item: make Mezzmo understand that any directory with subdirectories of BDMV or CERTIFICATE are BluRay directories; the BDMV/STREAM/*.m2ts files should be ignored when searching for video files, otherwise you end up with 1000s of useless files listed. Better yet, (1) have a drop-down or checkbox with the choice, or (2) have a whitelist / blacklist of BluRays that can be played (since the entire movie is in one, huge file), or (3) contact some service like TMDb or IMBDB or et al. to discover which m2ts files are movie files and the correct ordering therein.
The product plays non-English audio (e.g. “Yes Man” et al.); this happens presumably when English is not track #1 on the disk. Solutions: (1) a whitelist / blacklist section to force audio for certain titles; (2) an entry in movie.xml or a stand-alone XML that decorates the directory; (3) a call to TMDb or IMDBb or et al. to find DVD information by disk signature (DVD-ROM or rip), returning audio and title and etc. data (if there is such a web site).
There is no Library-Maintenance item that makes sense to me. When first installed, Mezzmo asks for folders to scan. Good: I enter 4-5 folders that contain home movies, my DVDs, my BluRays, etc. I expect them to be scanned on every start, looking for new or changed content. There is no place to find the “scan folders” afterward so that I can add new folders, delete old ones, etc. In Tools→Setup I find the original give-me-initial-folders-to-scan dialogue, but it no longer lists the original folders I inputted and if you give it a new folder it merges it into the old folders. There appears to be no way to remove old “scan folders” except to uninstall and re-install.
Mezzmo uses a very tiny and clunky choose-your-file(s) dialogue. With four hard drives and thousands of directories it is very onerous to find a directory or file. Furthermore, certain operations insist on opening to “%USERPROFILE%\...\My Documents” every time which means you have to scroll up, up, up and collapse the C: drive and then expand your D: drive, etc. Mezzmo needs a larger and smarter file dialogue or at least a memory of where the user was last, e.g. perusing the D: drive, or maybe at the very least open with everything collapsed. But in this day and age, using such a passé file dialogue is hardly excusable.
Include an option to shutdown at a certain hour. Until such time as I’ve installed a 24x7 server in the basement (a TO-DO item for me), I’ve been leaving my desktop running on the 1st floor. Before going to sleep, I use Remote Desktop from my laptop to launch shutdown.exe; an automatic shutdown at <hour> or after-X-minutes-of-inactivity would be great. Look at uTorrent and its Quit / Shutdown / etc. options after Done-Downloading, etc.
Mezzmo does not seem to read the Windows Libraries. When it starts, it assumes that media is in %USERPROFILE%\My* folders. I have none. All of my media is across D: and E: and I can access them from Explorer using Libraries→Music (D:\Music), Libraries→Movies.DVDs, Libraries→Movies.BluRay, etc. Mezzmo should be honoring the Windows Libraries entries since many users will have them configured and, after all, that’s what the entries are for. Make sure that custom libraries are honored, e.g. I have a Movies library created by Explorer→Libraries→New→Library and it contains six directories across two drives.
Mezzmo needs to know more about other software packages. If you look at Media Center Master, its configuration page has many, many tabs and hundreds of options. It understands other software packages and what they require. It can create backdrops, various *.xml files, and on and on. Mezzmo needs to do the same. At the very least it should read folder.jpg files. Ditch most of the scattered and confusing menu items and make one Edit→Configuration item which brings up a huge, tabbed interface like Media Center Master.
CONCLUSION
Mezzo is almost a great product. It’s a grand master of threading; it’s fast and takes advantage (but does not overburden) multiple cores; it actually streams DLNA (what does that tell you about the competition?). I think very highly of this product and congratulate the developer(s). But it falls very short of being an outstanding product. The menu system is confusing. The UI is confusing. It has no wizards for common tasks. It is configurable, but only through the blood, sweat and tears of the user. The television’s on-screen menus are an unending, twisted disaster (at least on my Sony BDP). Mezzmo needs to understand DVDs better, and at least recognize and possibly ignore BluRays. It needs the concept of autoscanning folders and a method to easily manage them. It needs to read folder.jpg files et al. and it needs understand and interoperate with other software in this space (MediaBrower, Media Center Master, etc.).
It’s possible that trawling through the Mezzmo forums might provide enough information to mitigate much of the above critiques, but it’s not practical. Nobody should have to plow through forums to make software work—software should Just Work™ and it should have good documentation. Due to so many sharp edges and missing features, Mezzmo feels like a single-developer project—one person coding away to the best of his/her ability. If that’s the case, I heartily reiterate my congratulations to him/her: what a feat! But Cowboy Coding can only get you so far. Maybe Mezzmo should be open-sourced so that other developers can collaborate and make it truly great. A Mezzmo Professional Edition with some features held back (tag editors, internet skimmers, skins, etc.) could generate the revenue.
I may continue looking around or continue to evaluate Mezzmo. If it proves to be the current best of breed then I’ll pay for it and hope for its constant improvement.
With kind regards,
Mike
This will be a long post describing my initial and ongoing experiences with Mezzmo.
I have a large movie collection; my DVDs are all ripped to disk in VIDEO_TS format. I’ve been looking for DLNA streaming software for a while and ended up on Mezzmo’s doorstep due to research on the ‘net. I’ve downloaded several DLNA packages and none of them worked correctly, if at all. My tests have been with a none-too-smart BluRay player: the BDP-S570/BX57. This suffices since it’s perhaps a more difficult test and it is allowing me to investigate best practices (software and televisions and directory structures) before making purchase decisions.
I’ll describe my initial experiences with Mezzmo in a blow-by-blow fashion. I’ll then try to point out any underlying problems. Finally, I’ll try to sum things up.
Please note that the following is written as succinctly but kindly as possible. Below you’ll find critique that is genuine and perhaps not overly flowery but that has been written with a desire to connect with the developer(s) in a positive manner in order to improve the product.
INITIAL EXPERIENCE
Here is a running tally of my initial impressions of the product. Look at the Real-*.jpg attachments for pictures.
Upon first running the software, Mezzmo asked me for libraries to scan. It defaulted to a set of My* folders (“My Music,” “My Videos,” etc.) that I had to delete. I then proceeded to enter my movie folders, agonizingly, since Mezzmo uses a tiny, outdated files dialogue and one that kept defaulting to the wrong drive or wrong folder deep inside a drive tree, and I kept forgetting to select [Video] from the drop-down. Mezzmo should have initialized the folders from my Windows Libraries.
I clicked [OK] and Mezzmo went to town and tore through my libraries, looking for videos and subtitles and thumbnails and what-not. Wow! Mezzmo is a Grand Master of multi-threading. Congratulations, as thread handling and async operations are among the most difficult challenges facing a programmer.
Mezzmo was finished, for the most part, in 1-2 minutes. However, it spent another 5-10 minutes “getting video thumbnails.” At the time, I think I understood that, as a MediaBrowser user, I had relied upon its cache rather than manually creating files for every DVD rip (folder.jpg, backdrop*.jpg, MyMovies.xml or movie.xml) and that Mezzmo, lacking JPEGs in each DVD directory, was forced to read the video file for a thumbnail. This is a great feature but it produces lousy thumbnails—thumbnails that are neither elegant nor representative of the movie. I decided to consider the issue, later.
I went upstairs and fired up the Sony BDP-S570. I went to the first menu item—All-Video-Files—assuming quite naturally that, being first on the list, it was the primary method for perusing your movies. I hit enter 2-3 times to get to some video—any video—and to my surprise, something streamed! That was a first. Clearly this software “works,” which is more than I can say for the other package I tried.
What a mess! Under All-Video-Files were thousands of files: *.mp4, *.m2ts, etc. It was impossible to find anything and scrolling the entire list would have taken twenty minutes. Clearly, something was very wrong. I played around with the other menu items and found that I could navigate by Folders and find the movie I wanted to play, but that it was still a very long list and that in the end the best way to find a movie was to remember what year it came out and navigate through the Year folder. I was disappointed, but at least I could recline upstairs and watch a movie from my desktop in the office.
My next order of business was to reformat my directories. Mezzmo provided a list of DVD “Titles” but interspersed in the long (and I mean LONG) list of video files were thousands of *.m2ts files; those were mostly BluRay files, I learned. I quickly discovered that Mezzmo knew nothing about BluRay directories; the only thing it could do was list each m2ts file. So I split out my movies into e.g. D:\Movies.DVD, D:\Movies.BluRay, etc. Now off to Mezzmo to change the scan directories. To my displeasure, I could not for the life of me find the menu item to manage them. I was looking for a dialogue like “Manage Libraries” where I could delete my old directory paths and enter the new paths and, upon hitting [Enter], have the software re-read all of my files. The only thing close was the Tools→Setup and it did not show my previous directories. So I did my best to clear everything out by right-clicking in Video and All-Video-Files, etc., and hitting the delete key and they I re-ran Setup. When I went upstairs, everything was doubled or tripled, at least!
In an attempt to clean up my scan folders, I uninstalled Mezzmo completely. I re-installed it and put in my *.DVD folders and voila!—a semi-clean list of DVDs from my Sony BDP. I did this 2-3 times to get everything right and, unfortunately, I now had 2-3 Mezzmo icons on my Sony BluRay player. It seems that Mezzmo picks a new DLNA “token” of some sort on every install and that every install ends up with a new “live” DLNA source but leaves behind multiple “defunct” sources. At this point, I think I have 5-6 defunct Mezzmo’s on the Sony’s menu. A picture of the problem is attached, naturally.
The information on my television was incomplete and incorrect; I understood immediately that Mezzmo was bereft of *.xml movie data. The next day I bit the bullet and used Media Center Master to create files for every single movie on my hard drives (folder.jpg, backdrop*.jpg, and now only movie.xml as I found that MyMovies.xml had been deprecated). I felt that if I was to run more than one software package to watch movies, it was now time to have complete, stand-alone trees of movies and metadata. After doing so, I deleted my MediaBrowser cache and let it rebuild and I went to Mezzmo to do the same. Again, I was forced to uninstall and re-install because it was not clear to me how to force Mezzmo to “re-scan” my libraries. After having done so, I was disappointed to find that Mezzmo ignored all of my movie posters (folder.jpg) and that the shiny XML data did not positively affect the Artist and Creator information: they contain thousands of permutations of concatenated artists…almost one menu item per movie.
In an effort to divide my movies into manageable, navigable groups, I played with File→Create-Playlist. I saw Playlist, Smart, Active, Linked…? Who knows what’s what. There is no easily accessible information on these—no bubbles, etc. I did a quick Google search and with that and some playing around I discovered that a Smart List would do what I wanted: to break out my movies by first letter (‘A’ for “A.I” and ‘B’ for “Braveheart,” etc.) Tediously, I entered twenty-six SmartLists called ‘A’ through ‘Z’. Upstairs, I found that “All Videos” (which, itself, start with an ‘A’) and the other menus were interspersed with my letter menus—not what I wanted. Back to Mezzmo where I renamed each SmartList with a prepended period (.A, .B, etc.) The period is lexographically smaller than any letters and I had what I wanted…I thought.
Back upstairs, I found, upon deeper examination, that my titles were somewhat intermixed. The Smart Lists contained titles that did not begin with the designated letter. Many movies were in the ‘.T’ category because their title began with the word “The.” MediaBrowser is smart enough to sort without the leading “The;” the Smart Lists are not.
On a more upbeat note, I ran a difficult test using a movie that had to be transcoded. Mezzmo performed brilliantly. It engaged all six cores of my I7-3930K and stayed well ahead of the stream. See attached pictures of CPU activity during and after transcoding. Like I said, Mezzmo is a master of multi-threaded performance. I was tempted to throw it five balls to juggle and to ask it to pat its head and rub its tummy as well, but I’m sure it would have done so elegantly.
All of this happened over the course of a week, on and off. In an effort to write this feedback, I created a small directory tree as a test case. It is attached as well as the Test-*.jpg pictures that demonstrate some of these problems in the test case. I’ve deleted the test folders, uninstalled and re-installed Mezzmo, and have my original folders available again, sans .A—.Z Smart Lists which I have yet to recreate (as it’s a pain and they don’t automatically update, anyway). And I now have my ninth or tenth “defunct” Mezzmo icon on the Sony BDP.
PROBLEMS / ENHANCEMENTS
Here is a list of the problems I found (bugs, etc.) and enhancements that I believe are necessary. There are some duplicates, and these observations parallel some of the above recollection—I jotted down the following, stream-of-consciousness style.
All-Video-Files should automatically be partitioned by first letter (A...Z), or done so when the #-of-files exceeds a certain threshold. Better yet, provide a drop-down to select a partitioning strategy. When setting up the subfolders under Music and Video and Photos, the user should choose from a strategy to create them and organize them. Internally, this can map to the Strategy Pattern. Although I didn’t test with music, I imagine the same is true of Music→All-Music-Files or Album-Artist: a large collection of MP3s would require breaking down by [A…Z].
Neither Artist nor Genre are usable as they generate long, concatenated keys—permutations of artists and/or genres—almost one per movie I imagine, unless two movies have the exact, same actors or it’s a multiple-disk set or television series with the same actors. Instead, list only one artist so that a search for “Gene Kelly” yields the movies in which he played. A good structure would be Artist→{Starring, Costarring}→[A...Z] / <decade-i.e.-50s-60s-70s-etc> / ???.
It would be smart to ask for which software (if any) the directories have been formatted. If, for instance, one’s choice was “Media Browser” then Mezzmo could (very-ambitious-code-alert!) peek into the C: MediaBrowser cache for video posters. At the very least it should look for folder.jpg and/or backdrop.jpg files, which leads to the next observation. When it cannot find the files, there should be a choice to go to the internet for the information or a scrollable warning log so that the user can say “Ah! I forgot to run Media Center Master on this, that, and the other movie.”
Mezzmo appears to create a poster from the video information; rather, it should take the folder.jpg or backdrop.jpg. To do this requires knowing that it’s dealing with ripped DVDs, which leads to the next observation.
In order to tame the presentation of my movies I was forced to create 26 Smart Lists from ‘A’ to ‘Z’ for movies whose name start with that letter. This is a somewhat arduous task. If you do so then “All Video Files” and “Artist,” etc. are interspersed with the first-letter lists on the TV’s menu; I was forced to name all of my Smart Lists .A, .B, .C, etc. (i.e. prefixed with a period). There should be a way to enforce a certain ordering to the content lists.
When adding folders, ask not only what type of file (video, music, etc.) but what type of predominant folder structure: { ripped DVDs, freestanding files… } so that a good, default view can be set up; e.g. Video → [A...Z] for DVDs. A drop-down with the choices (under Library Management) should automatically reformat the presentation of the Library and its menu sub-items.
Eliminate the ‘The’ on titles when sorting alphabetically. Better yet, provide a check box for user preference.
Regarding my .[A-Z]/ smart lists: Mezzmo is confused when sorting by title, alphabetically. Titles that begin with ‘A’ are found in my .V folder, etc. The smart lists are only 80% correct; it seems that I would have to manually move things around to fix this, and what happens when I rip new movies? I have no intention of manually entering the data into Mezzmo; it should automatically pick up new data. The smart lists are not automatically maintained. But neither are the folders—they are not scanned for new material and they’re not accessible anywhere in the product except for the initial Setup dialogue!
The code does not update smart lists when new material is added; selecting Smart-List→Refresh does not search for new material. It seems to do nothing. There appears to be no way to automatically update Mezzmo other than to uninstalled, re-installed, read the folders, recreate the smart lists, etc. Update: I can find no “rescan library folders” option in any menu or any right-click context menu; I’m convinced that Mezzmo is incapable of syncing with my Libraries / directory paths.
The product does not really understand DVDs; some DVDs are completely unwatchable as different cuts are interspersed throughout the VOB files and playing VOBs sequentially yields the same scene from different angles. I imagine that there are post-IFO instructions to skip over batches of VOBs based upon internal DVD “registers.” That’s how you can choose angles, editions, follow-the-white-rabbits, etc. No matter how you slice it or dice it, Mezzmo must learn (no matter how painfully) to be a DVD player; perhaps the author of pgcedit (or et al.) could be enlisted to help with the code.
The product in a perfect world would also understand BluRay—but that’s a pipe dream. I have three BluRay software packages and not a single package can play all of my disks. They all have problems in different areas, some able to play certain disks and not others, some hanging on certain disks, etc. Alternative, real-world to-do item: make Mezzmo understand that any directory with subdirectories of BDMV or CERTIFICATE are BluRay directories; the BDMV/STREAM/*.m2ts files should be ignored when searching for video files, otherwise you end up with 1000s of useless files listed. Better yet, (1) have a drop-down or checkbox with the choice, or (2) have a whitelist / blacklist of BluRays that can be played (since the entire movie is in one, huge file), or (3) contact some service like TMDb or IMBDB or et al. to discover which m2ts files are movie files and the correct ordering therein.
The product plays non-English audio (e.g. “Yes Man” et al.); this happens presumably when English is not track #1 on the disk. Solutions: (1) a whitelist / blacklist section to force audio for certain titles; (2) an entry in movie.xml or a stand-alone XML that decorates the directory; (3) a call to TMDb or IMDBb or et al. to find DVD information by disk signature (DVD-ROM or rip), returning audio and title and etc. data (if there is such a web site).
There is no Library-Maintenance item that makes sense to me. When first installed, Mezzmo asks for folders to scan. Good: I enter 4-5 folders that contain home movies, my DVDs, my BluRays, etc. I expect them to be scanned on every start, looking for new or changed content. There is no place to find the “scan folders” afterward so that I can add new folders, delete old ones, etc. In Tools→Setup I find the original give-me-initial-folders-to-scan dialogue, but it no longer lists the original folders I inputted and if you give it a new folder it merges it into the old folders. There appears to be no way to remove old “scan folders” except to uninstall and re-install.
Mezzmo uses a very tiny and clunky choose-your-file(s) dialogue. With four hard drives and thousands of directories it is very onerous to find a directory or file. Furthermore, certain operations insist on opening to “%USERPROFILE%\...\My Documents” every time which means you have to scroll up, up, up and collapse the C: drive and then expand your D: drive, etc. Mezzmo needs a larger and smarter file dialogue or at least a memory of where the user was last, e.g. perusing the D: drive, or maybe at the very least open with everything collapsed. But in this day and age, using such a passé file dialogue is hardly excusable.
Include an option to shutdown at a certain hour. Until such time as I’ve installed a 24x7 server in the basement (a TO-DO item for me), I’ve been leaving my desktop running on the 1st floor. Before going to sleep, I use Remote Desktop from my laptop to launch shutdown.exe; an automatic shutdown at <hour> or after-X-minutes-of-inactivity would be great. Look at uTorrent and its Quit / Shutdown / etc. options after Done-Downloading, etc.
Mezzmo does not seem to read the Windows Libraries. When it starts, it assumes that media is in %USERPROFILE%\My* folders. I have none. All of my media is across D: and E: and I can access them from Explorer using Libraries→Music (D:\Music), Libraries→Movies.DVDs, Libraries→Movies.BluRay, etc. Mezzmo should be honoring the Windows Libraries entries since many users will have them configured and, after all, that’s what the entries are for. Make sure that custom libraries are honored, e.g. I have a Movies library created by Explorer→Libraries→New→Library and it contains six directories across two drives.
Mezzmo needs to know more about other software packages. If you look at Media Center Master, its configuration page has many, many tabs and hundreds of options. It understands other software packages and what they require. It can create backdrops, various *.xml files, and on and on. Mezzmo needs to do the same. At the very least it should read folder.jpg files. Ditch most of the scattered and confusing menu items and make one Edit→Configuration item which brings up a huge, tabbed interface like Media Center Master.
CONCLUSION
Mezzo is almost a great product. It’s a grand master of threading; it’s fast and takes advantage (but does not overburden) multiple cores; it actually streams DLNA (what does that tell you about the competition?). I think very highly of this product and congratulate the developer(s). But it falls very short of being an outstanding product. The menu system is confusing. The UI is confusing. It has no wizards for common tasks. It is configurable, but only through the blood, sweat and tears of the user. The television’s on-screen menus are an unending, twisted disaster (at least on my Sony BDP). Mezzmo needs to understand DVDs better, and at least recognize and possibly ignore BluRays. It needs the concept of autoscanning folders and a method to easily manage them. It needs to read folder.jpg files et al. and it needs understand and interoperate with other software in this space (MediaBrower, Media Center Master, etc.).
It’s possible that trawling through the Mezzmo forums might provide enough information to mitigate much of the above critiques, but it’s not practical. Nobody should have to plow through forums to make software work—software should Just Work™ and it should have good documentation. Due to so many sharp edges and missing features, Mezzmo feels like a single-developer project—one person coding away to the best of his/her ability. If that’s the case, I heartily reiterate my congratulations to him/her: what a feat! But Cowboy Coding can only get you so far. Maybe Mezzmo should be open-sourced so that other developers can collaborate and make it truly great. A Mezzmo Professional Edition with some features held back (tag editors, internet skimmers, skins, etc.) could generate the revenue.
I may continue looking around or continue to evaluate Mezzmo. If it proves to be the current best of breed then I’ll pay for it and hope for its constant improvement.
With kind regards,
Mike