Hi All,

Trying to get a Jukebox up for my HDMini2, I've built NFOs and gathered art for all my movies by way of YANFOE, and processed them into a Jukebox using the current YAMJ from ACR, getting an odd issue though.

The Jukebox loads fine, as do the details pages for the movies, but when I hit play I run into problems.

Initially I was getting the "No Video File" error, tracked that down to an issue in the library config, the playerpath was incorrect, fixed that, was still having issues, realised it was because there was a protocol specified (file://) which was leading to relative pathl inks like "; as there is no context as to where it's relative to not even web browsers like that, dropping the portion leads to functioning links being generated (my playerpath is ../ because my Jukebox directory lives under my Movies directory), the Jukebox now works in a browser.

When I attempt to use this Jukebox from the HDMini2, I get to the details page, hit play, the screen goes black like it's going to start playing, then I get an "error bar" (black bar at the top of the screen with a cross in a circle) but there is no message on it and I get dropped back to the main Jukebox screen so I've no idea where to go to from here.

Re-generated the Jukebox using the same configs and YAMJ 2.5.1 (current stable), no change in beahviour.

I've tried accessing the Jukebox over the network (SMB) and from a directly attached USB HDD, in both cases I see the same issue.

My HDMini2 is running the r5440 firmware (I believe this is the current stable version).

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated, this is about the only thing I've had issues with on the HDMini2, and I'd like to get this working.

EDIT: just updated to r7317 (after checking the firmware forum) still seeing the same issue.

Thanks,

-J

EDIT: Issue is now resolved, I wrote a utility to create a "shadow" library in hard links, with filenames which do not include the problematic characters (commas, square brackets and spaces, all replaced with underscores) and generated a jukebox against that, there was a secondary issue around my library configuration; for reference, the HTML pages which are generated are NOT a valid test of the functionality of the ACR box, in fact ic they work, chances are the ACR box will NOT, playerpath in the library XML MUST begin with file:// even though relative paths with a protocol of file:// will not work in a web browser.

Thanks to AndyA for his assistance.

Sounds like the file naming problem.
Make sure you follow these rules:
•Don't use square brackets - use round brackets
•Stick to alphanumerics where possible (as in dont use any punctuation eg ! # , - etc)
•Keep file names short and as per the wiki as far as possible
•Don't use multiple '.' characters

A pain to go through and check everything yes.

Hi
cdh555 is right, and you'll find this and a lot of other YAMJ and AC Ryan Playon HD specific information in the Wiki.
I do advise you upgrade from YAMJ version 2.5.1 to the latest version from Omertron's Media Player Site as there are numerous fixes and enhancements covering: -
- Reboots in the AC Ryan firmware
- Blank menus in the Jukebox interface
- Revised APIs on IMDB and TheTVDB web sites
Andy

@cdh555:

Riiight, it doesn't handle square brackets, if that's the case I will not be using the Jukebox functionality because it will involve renaming several thousand files or renaming about 500 and rescraping about 500 movies... Not worth my time.

Do we have any idea when this bug might potentially get fixed? This is CLEARLY a bug in my mind because if you're going to deal with files from Windows systems you ought to be able to deal with ALL valid characters in Windows filenames, and the rest of the player handles these files just fine.

@AndyA:

Ah, it's moved off Google code now (where I got 2.5.1 from)? or is that a fork?

Hi
The issue with square brackets is an AC Ryan firmware issue - it has been a bug, reported many times, since the first beta release of the SDK4 / GUI2.0 firmware. The ability to handle square brackets in file names is part of the YAMJ file naming standards as described in the Wiki, and the previous SDK3 jukebox (SDK3 firmware not available for V2 products) did conform to the YAMJ standards.
Sorry if this problem is a problem for you, it is for quite a number of users, and although it has been reported, I have no information as to when it will be fixed.
The full release versions of YAMJ are on google code and AC Ryan's download page, but the latest pre release is always on Omertron's media player site, as per my previous post, and this is the one I would advise using.
Andy

I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for the square brackets to be fixed.

In the meantime, I have found Bulk Rename Utility very usefull for getting the naming conventions cleaned up.

http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php

Thanks for the suggestion but but that would break my YANFOE database, in theory I can do a binary search and replace over it but doing that sort of thing to a serialized object out of .Net is liable to have strange effects...

And besides, I'm quite happy with my naming convention, the only issue is square brackets causing the HDMini2 Jukebox to choke, and frankly that's not enough motivation to change it.

Thanks for the link to the utility Gregiboy

@Jrandomperson, if you don't want to change your naming, then there is little option but to live with it. I will raise it again with AC Ryan as an issue,
Andy

I've had some additional thoughts on this matter.

It occurred to me last night that NTFS supports hardlinking which effectively makes the same file appear in multiple locations under potentially different names (essentially creates two MFT entries pointing at the same set of blocks), and I thought to write a utility to generate a "shadow" jukebox with the unsupported characters (square brackets and such) stripped from the file names, which would allow me to maintain my naming convention in archive storage but provide them in a palatable form for the HDMini2, the first cut the heirachy was generated correctly but after running YAMJ across it I was still seeing the same issue, I then proceeded to make some modifications to the utility to also replace space characters in the filenames (with underscores), same result (the files play fine if accessed directly)

After this I decided to do some testing on a small library to determine what the ACR box will actually accept.

My latest foray has been to create a directory containing only 5 movies (copies of the files not hardlinks), an NFO and an Artwork directory containing the NFOs and Images for the movies, even when I strip the names down to the bare minimum e.g. "28_Weeks_Later.mp4", the most basic is "Antitrust.avi" and regenerated the Juke box using YAMJ I *still* have the same issue, I am using the current development release of YAMJ (v2.6 r2948) and my HDMini2 is running the latest firmware r7317.

So it would appear that this is NOT related to file naming (or there is another issue in addition to the file naming issue), I would be most appreciative if somebody could shed some light on what the issue might be.

I am happy to package up the various bits and pieces of my Jukebox (sans video files of course) and provide them to somebody who might be able to analyse them and provide some insight into the issue.

Oh, and just for the ACRyan people who might see this this is one of those times when a USEFUL error message would be really good, silent failures are the height of poor software design, they severely detract from the user experience, and generally annoy people.

Please see the PM I've sent you with a link in it.
Can you see if r2925 has the same problem. I run r2925 and have yet to upgrade. Can you also comfirm you have mjb.PlayonHD=true set in your moviejukebox.properties file and that YAMJ is using the moviejukebox.properties file.


Andy