Playing Multi-Part Avi Movies Continuously?

[jackryan]

I have many movies that are encoded in multiple .avi parts, usually just two parts, and I want to play them continuously. I use TheaterTek and when I open a movie with TT directly it will play both parts continuously without a problem. But when I try to play the same movie from Xlobby it just doesn't play. So I put both parts in seperate subfolders then each one plays fine when selected, but I have to start the second part manually. What am I doing wrong here?

[jackryan]

I played with this quite a bit now and still to no avail. I read up a little on playlist plt files and tried one in a movie directory that had multiple parts, but still couldn't get it working.

My file structure looks like this:
\\Movies\SevenSamurai\SevenSamurai-part1.avi
\\Movies\SevenSamurai\SevenSamurai-part2.avi
\\Movies\SevenSamurai\SevenSamurai.jpeg

So when I create a .plt it looks like:
D:\Movies\SevenSamurai\SevenSamurai-part1.avi
D:\Movies\SevenSamurai\SevenSamurai-part2.avi

Now I can double click on the plt and TheaterTek will open and play them sequentially just fine, but from Xlobby nothing happens when I click 'play'.

Seperately, I even tried putting the movie files in a subfolder so the plt would have its own space:
So my plt was in:
D:\Movies\SevenSamurai\SevenSamurai.PLT

And the movies were in:
D:\Movies\SevenSamurai\SS\SevenSamurai-part1.avi
D:\Movies\SevenSamurai\SS\SevenSamurai-part2.avi

And the plt now looked like:
D:\Movies\SevenSamurai\SS\SevenSamurai-part1.avi
D:\Movies\SevenSamurai\SS\SevenSamurai-part2.avi

Again, the plt worked fine on its own, but would now work from Xlobby...

In file types, I tried the switches "%playlist%" and "/AP 2 /PATH %playlist%" (no quotes). I suspect that the issue is either here or maybe I need to create an event, but I'm new to all this so a little lost at this point.

Any pointers much appreciated.

[Atlas]

I do something like this with my HD recordings and use TT. The recordings are split files such as

show1.tp
show1_01.tp
show1_02.tp
etc.

All I do is pass the first file name to TT through xlobby and it plays continuously. I'm not familiar with how avi's are handled in TT and it's too late to experiment tonight. What I do is tell Xlobby to just import the first file (through the use of meta masks and ignore masks). You would want it to just import .*part1.avi or ignore .*part[2-9].avi. Search for metamasks in the forum

Another point is the %playlist% is for Xlobby's internal playlist of files it builds which is not the same thing as a TT playlist. If you don't have playlist events being used in Xlobby, for trailers etc, the %playlist% is just the db item (ie C:\pathto\show1.tp). HINT: You can look at the commandline.txt file in the Xlobby root to see what it is passing to TT.

Hopefully this gets you going in the right direction.

[jackryan]

Atlas,
Could you please post your meta tag import and excluding filters. I still haven't figured out the syntax and don't see any documentation...

Also, what version of TT are you running?
I think sequential file playback is broken in 2.41, at least it is for me. I just spent the last two days rebuilding XP from scratch over and over again with different video drivers, with and without FFDShow, etc and cannot get this functionality working again. It just opens say track1-1.avi and ignores track1-2.avi.

Also along the same lines as this thread (XLobby functionality wise) I have another issue looming on the horizon, that I have a few hundred track videos all in avi format all in one directory. Do I really have to put these all in their own folders for Xlobby to handle them? I'd like Xlobby to have one icon on the movies page for one root directory for these, then once opened show a list of all the files. I would *really* rather not have to create all those folders to make it happen...

[Atlas]

There are plenty of posts on metamasks. They are regular expressions. You can search both this forum and google to get more info. Here is one to get you started.

http://www.xlobby.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=902&highlight=regular+expressions


Here are my tags. The ignore is the same as meta but tells it to ignore files that end with 2 digits.

MetaMask \\[?<name>.*]\\[?<episode>.*]\.tp
Ignore Mask \\[?<name>.*]\\[?<episode>.*]_\d{2}\.tp


I'm using TT 2.4.1 so I don't think it's sequential file playback that is broken. There is a thread on TT forums where Andrew says sequential playback is only for transport streams. Maybe that is your thread.

You can have xlobby display your info however you want. Xlobby will only be as organized as you are. If you want one folder and a list of files there are many ways to do that. You will need to familiarize yourself with 'categories' in xlobby and their display options. Colby's skinning guide can help with that.