Hi
Apologies for the newbie question but I am wondering if there is a way to play individual TV episodes within a single ISO.
Based on the very helpful online manual, I have backed up (in the form of a single ISO image) disk 1 of season 2 of Mad Men. This disk contains the first three episodes of this series. To do this, I used the following naming convention:
MadMen.s01e01-02-03.
XBMC then correctly identifies this disk and, if I select mad men as a TV show I am presented with these three episodes (correctly scrapped). However, if I try and launch any of these three episodes, I am taken to the start of the disk, run through the open warnings etc and presented with the main menu (from which I then need to select the episode again).
Is this a function of buring a whole disk as one single ISO? Or can I still have a single ISO for these three episodes but with the ability to launch specific episodes within that ISO.
Or is there a better way to back up my disks to achieve this?
Many thanks
Couj
That's a function of you ripping the whole disc as one iso. What i do is rip each individual episode separately to an iso. I find it to be much more practical. Just like people don't usually rip an audio cd as one single file.
Thanks for the quick response - much appreciated.
I thought that might be the case - unfortunate but understandable.
I'm currently using AnyDvd to do my iso burns. I'm not sure if it will let me select individual episodes to burn as ISO's but I'll look into it.
Cheers
Couj
There's no need to rip a seperate iso for each episode, while you're watching an episode, go into the bookmark dialog. you'll be able to set an "episode bookmark". If you do that at the begining of an episode, then when you select that one from the libarary, it will play the correct one.
The one downside to multiple episodes in one file is that they will all have the same thumbnail image, but the eposide problem is easy enough to fix.
Thanks for the tip. I'll try each approach and see which I like better.
Sure, you can do it without ripping individual episodes, but if you ever have to rescan your library, all the bookmarks will be gone and you'll have to bookmark them all over again. It's all a matter of personal preference, but, IMHO, if you're going to have to take an extra step either way (ripping individual episodes or bookmarking each episode), you might as well just rip them separately and be done with it forever.
Another point. If I'm not mistaken, bookmarks only tell XBMC where to start playing, but not where to stop. A small side effect of that would be that if you are doing stuff around the house and set it to play random episodes, if XBMC plays one of the earlier episodes on a disk, it will play all of the following episodes on that disk before randomly picking another episode. Not a big deal I know (and probably doesn't even matter to most), but yet another small reason why i prefer individual episodes as it makes things just a little more polished IMHO.
Correct - there's no "stop here" support for videos as yet.
Thanks to everyone for their input - really appreciate it. Given that I've only just started ripping my TV shows, it sounds like ripping each episode separately is the way to go.
I had a similar problem. What I do now is rip each episode as a vob using dvdshrink in reauthor mode without any compression. In options I have it set so vobs aren't split at 1 gig, so one episode = 1 vob. Takes just a few minutes and there's no loss in quality.
Using clonedvd2, mount the ISO, I use Slysoft's free Virtual Clonedrive, then rip each chapter of the dvd to a DVD file with Clonedvd2.
I use Gordian knot to then convert them to Xvid files, very small, great quality, perfect for tv shows. Name them as episodes
tv show.s01e01
and you are good to go. Next time you rip a tv show dvd just skip the ISO step, rip each episode to its own dvd file, then convert to xvid.
MR
Lakestang Wrote:Using clonedvd2, mount the ISO, I use Slysoft's free Virtual Clonedrive, then rip each chapter of the dvd to a DVD file with Clonedvd2.
I use Gordian knot to then convert them to Xvid files, very small, great quality, perfect for tv shows. Name them as episodes
tv show.s01e01
and you are good to go. Next time you rip a tv show dvd just skip the ISO step, rip each episode to its own dvd file, then convert to xvid.
MR
With the size and prices of hard drives today, why sacrafice quality for the sake of space. Not to mention the time it takes to convert rather than just rip. Why bother with all that? To each their own, but there's a point of diminishing returns and today with Blu-Ray, who wants worse quality than DVD?
Honestly, they look good to me, they are what I download when I get something newer from the internet. Most of the shows I want are old, not HD by any means.
I have blueray, dvd, 5+TB of storage, (mostly full) and thought the same thing at first, but, after using the xvid format, I must say I really like it, watching Burn Notice now, 46" LCD, decent sound, no real loss of quality to my tired old eyes. 349 MB xvid file
Time is a factor, but with a quad core desktop, it really takes almost no time to rip then convert a TV show episode. I guess I could leave them all in DVD folder format, or a bunch of little ISO files, but, to me, the xvid files are a good trade off.
I keep all my movies in ISO, so I have the menus, but, do not see any merit in that for tv shows. I have 13 dvd files to convert now, 13.8 gb, they will be done in the AM, and take up 4.29 gb or so when done.
Also makes them easy to share, move, that sort of thing.
yadster Wrote:What I do now is rip each episode as a vob using dvdshrink in reauthor mode without any compression. In options I have it set so vobs aren't split at 1 gig, so one episode = 1 vob. Takes just a few minutes and there's no loss in quality.
I'm also using DVD Shrink to rip my TV discs to individual episodes, but am reauthoring each episode, stripped of all but one audio channel and English subtitles, as its own DVD ISO -- using
MultiShrink to manage batch processing of as many parallel instances of DVD Shrink as necessary to rip each episode on a given disc.
Lakestang Wrote:I keep all my movies in ISO, so I have the menus, but, do not see any merit in that for tv shows.
The main benefit I've found for ripping TV episodes as individual DVD ISOs, absent any menus or extras, is retention of chapter marks, for friendlier show navigation.
Also, I've learned that DVD ISOs are better than DVD folders because XBMC's built-in scraping rules and its "Auto resume from last position" feature don't work with TV episode DVD folders.
My one current complaint of using the DVD-Video format for TV episodes is that I haven't found a way to get XBMC to exit the episode DVD at the end of a video; the screen just goes black, until I hit 'Stop.'
plooger Wrote:My one current complaint of using the DVD-Video format for TV episodes is that I haven't found a way to get XBMC to exit the episode DVD at the end of a video; the screen just goes black, until I hit 'Stop.'
It would seem this "unable to exit from DVD ISO" was a glitch in the particular version of XBMC I was running. The latest T3CH build (6-27-2009) works great; the player releases back to XBMC at the end of the video (since there's no DVD menu), and XBMC proceeds to the next item in the playlist, if queued.
Thanks... to somebody(s) out there.