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I did a search in the forum but could not find anything related to it. I cannot run the lastest SVN build so therefore if this is already in there, please disregard.

Recently some anime fansubbers have been releasing their subs in what it's called Ordered Chapters in Matroska. Basically they split the Opening and Endings in two different files from the episode.

Opening.mkv , EpisodeXX.mkv , Ending.mkv

They have their justifications (work effort, better compression for the episode, size etc etc). I don't really care or anything but from time to time I like to watch the OP/ED and XBMC is not able to handle them. Are there any efforts on this front?

To be honest I didn't even find enough documenation in google that I could certainly say this is a Matroska feature and not just Haali's splitter support.

Thoughts?

Sorry for the bump, but 180+ views and still no answers.

Does anyone have any news if devs are even interested? To be honest, this is the only reason I still use external players - well, to be honest the chapters themselves sometimes fail but I can live with that.

I think it's fair to say that the devs aren't interested, certainly not without knowing for sure whether it's a matroska "feature" or whether it's something someone else has hacked on.

Seems to be a specification of Matroska itself: http://www.matroska.org/technical/specs/notes.html (Segment linking)

I realize that are bigger implications than just making the code. But it seems to be that it'd be an interesting addition to the codebase nevertheless. This is definitely a niche request and I'd gladly help in any way possible.

Thanks for the heads up anyway. Even if it ends up not being implemented it's nice to know that the devs look into our concerns.

It's too bad that all the Haali stuff hasn't been implemented in open source land (e.g. XBMC, VLC; I haven't tested mplayer or Xine, but I doubt it's in either one).

Mind you, it's probably entirely an issue where the devs don't come across the need for it. Not their fault in the slightest. (It's a RIDICULOUSLY niche feature, mind you) In fact, I'd assume that 99% of people don't care about it, even as the anime-watching userbase froths at the mouth over its capabilities. You can run an entire series off a single, near-blank MKV that essentially "links" to the rest of the files, and have access, in the right-click menu for Haali, to:

- Any chapter or episode
- Any "audio/sub" combination (English Dolby Digital Audio + "Signs Only" subs, Japanese DTS track + Full Subs, etc.)

You can cut the opening video out, and give it the largest bitrate during compression, to the point where even if it takes up 2-3 times as much space as it normally would (intros tend to have high quality animation and more stuff happening on-screen in general), it's still a substantial shrink in space usage given that it's the only copy on the drive. Doesn't work with all shows (some change elements of the intro often), but it's a nice option to have.

So this is another anime fiend adding his "+1, please add, we love you!" to the request for devs. Thank you for your time.

Like nitio pointed out, it's part of the MKV specs.

Also, mplayer git seems to have support for this: http://repo.or.cz/w/mplayer.git

Initial support commit: http://repo.or.cz/w/mplayer.git/commit/5...6095c0485c

I'm not sure what files are involved but I hope this can help the XBMC devs if they want to add it.

Bump.

Again, almost 700 hundred views must mean something - at least ppl are trying to figure it out if XBMC supports it or not.

Ordered chapters are possible with DSPlayer if you set the splitter to Haali.
The subtitles won't work as well as DVDPlayer's though, but I'm sure they will eventually.

These days it seems that many video files seem to be broken up into several parts (especially fan-subbed anime).

These files string together quite easily using CCCP and Media Player Classic, but there doesn't seem to be any way to string these episodes together using XBMC. Are there any plans to implement 'ordered chapters' in XBMC playback? Is there any sort of hack I can do myself that might be able to help me out?

XBMC is nearly a perfect media solution for me. This is one of the only things keeping me from crossing over completely.

I have no problem for my multipart episodes at all. Have you tried looking over here for information. This is the convention that I use when naming multipart shows.

All the fan-subbed anime I've gotten (a rather large amount) has been in single files. Might I suggest getting a different source?

Ordered chapters chapter are a real PITA.
As much as I understand the reasons for using them I utterly loath them.
Just checked out Darmah and it STILL cant play the damn things

yeah, it's weird. thanx for the lead firefoxtamer, but your suggestion seems to only apply to an episode which is broken in half or something.

what's going on in my particular case is that they've removed the opening and ending sequences from the episodes in order to save space. these are linked in the episode video files to play automatically as if they were included in the episode file, but there's only one copy which plays every time.

pretty clever, but xbmc doesn't seem to know what to do with it. perhaps this will be implemented better down the line.

YodaEXE Wrote:All the fan-subbed anime I've gotten (a rather large amount) has been in single files. Might I suggest getting a different source?

This is a relatively new development in the anime scene atleast as far as widespread usage goes.
You won't see it in tvrips of these shows but you will see it about half the time in dvd and bluray rips.
The benefits are arguable but it's out there and things aren't showing any signs of going back to the way they were.

DSPlayer's all fine and dandy, but how about Linux? Lack of Ordered Chapters support's been my only disappointment about XBMC since I first installed it. And it's been growing more and more obnoxious as of late, since more and more encoders are using this MKV feature. Sometimes it makes my media center PC entirely unusable for its main purpose - watching videos (for example, using an external subtitle track for a opening-and-ending-split series is entirely impossible now).