Some Questions About Mezzmo before I buy

Hello,

I recently purchased as Sony Bravia (first networkable tv I've had!), and of course the first thing I ran into was that my MKV files were completely incompatible with the TV. Doing more research I found out that more TVs are defective like this, and the solution was to find a DLNA media server. Hence I've been looking for a good media server program to run. So, naturally, I found Mezzmo :).

My first impression was good - everything works pretty smoothly, TV got set up no probs, and movies played easily.

However, I smacked up against two fairly large issues, and I'm hoping that someone can maybe help explain to me how to get around them.

1) Subtitles. For whatever reason it looks like the 46EX520 model doesn't want to display any subtitles. I extracted the subtitle track from the MKV and renamed to exactly the same as the movie file, did the 'Maintain DB' thing etc, no dice. No subtitles. Is there a plugin or a profile that I'm possibly missing that I could try? I hear it's coming in the next version - any chance there's a beta I could try? :)

2) Seeking / Chaptering - is there any way to make some kind of chaptering available? I was testing this with Avatar, and the first subtitle showing up is like 20 minutes into the movie, so it was a pain in the butt to fast forward to the same location over and over.

The two issues above sent me back into the web looking for solutions, so I ran across the Wild Media Server program. Fortunately it handles these two issues. Unfortunately the program has a terrible interface, a bad rap in reviews, and a crummy licensing system. I mean, c'mon why would you make all the lists you send to the TV show up in random order??? The only plus I could find is that it's available for free if you know russian :confused:

The one thing I did think was very cool about WMS was that it allowed you to control the TV from your pc, which helped since you could sort the lists on your PC. :P


Anyways, what I'm trying to get at is, are there solutions to my two issues? Because if I can solve them I'm going to be a happy Mezzmo customer shortly...

Thanks for your questions & feedback. Some answers:

1) Unlike many other TV models, Sony Bravia TVs do not support streaming external subtitles (.SRT, .SMI, .SUB). So subtitles must be burnt into the video before steaming them. Mezzmo will have this burning subtitle feature later this year - we're midway in development now.

2) You can FF/REW though your movie using your remote control when streaming a video from Mezzmo media server. However, if the file is being transcoded on-the-fly by Mezzmo, then FF/REW may not be possible since the transcoded file is still being created. To get around this, you can pre-transcode your file before streaming it and you will able to FF/REW as you wish.

One thing to try is to change the device profile of your TV in Mezzmo & see if you find one that better matches your TV and your files. This can result in less transcoding which will mean you will be able to FF/REW much more. Go to the Media Devices dialog in Mezzmo and try each of the "Sony Bravia KDL" device profiles. We also have a few recent patches for these Sony Bravia device profiles, so contact us at support [at] conceiva [dot] com and we'll provide them to you.

Thanks for the reply.

So is there no way to add chaptering to a pre-transcoded file? I understand it won't let you skip around if you're in the middle of transcoding, but it would be nice to pick a particular time to start playback (on any video) once transcoding is complete.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Pawz

So is there no way to add chaptering to a pre-transcoded file?

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Support for chapter points stored in video files is device dependent (i.e. whether a device reads them and lets you seek to them). I have not seen many devices support a video file's chapter points. Samsung devices use separate MTA files for its chaptering (and Mezzmo supports this). We will investigate chapter points & test what devices will support them.

Sorry, one further question - is it possible to import movie information from something like Movie Label 2012?

I've got an entire database of up to date movie information, would be nice if I can move it across somehow :)

Not sure how Movie Label 2012 stores its information, but Mezzmo reads metadata for video files from several popular external sources, such as:

• Metadata and artwork from Thumbgen files (.tgmd)
• Metadata and artwork from mymovies.xml (or <filename>.xml) files
• Metadata and artwork from series.xml (and episode) files
• Metadata and artwork from XMBC .nfo and .tbn files
• Artwork from folder.jpg/.png, <filename>.jpg/.png

Mezzmo will automatically find these files and extract the metadata/artwork when you add your video files into Mezzmo or when you maintain your library.

Is the format of these xml files available?

Also I'm not seeing a way to import an xml file in the menus for Mezzmo, so how does Mezzmo know where to look to load this xml file? Does it have to be in the same folder as the movie file?

I can't seem to find any documentation about this feature.

Mezzmo will automatically find these files and extract the metadata/artwork when you add your video files into Mezzmo or when you maintain your library. The external metadata files must be in the same folder as the media file (except for series.xml, which is in the parent folder of the video file). This is the normal way for these popular external metadata files to be located and most media software applications deal with them as Mezzmo does.

An example:

c:\videos\inception.mkv
c:\videos\inception.xml
c:\videos\inception.tgmd
c:\videos\inception.nfo
c:\videos\inception.tbn
c:\videos\inception.jpg
c:\videos\folder.jpg

(Usually you will not have this many external metadata files for one media file, but I have shown them all for explanatory purposes)

With regards the internal structure of each external metadata file, you really need to ask the guys at the My Movies, ThumbGen and XBMC web sites/forums since they are the authors of these files. A quick search on the internet will give you sample files to look at.