YAMMM best practice in multiple HTPC scenario

[mr-site]

My usage case has been to do my DVD/BluRAY ripping on a separate machine, use YAMMM on that separate machine to rename the movie to a proper sort title and download artwork, and then manually fix-up anything I don’t like about the YAMMM choices before then pushing the movies over the network to multiple HTPCs with WMC (Windows 7 SP1 x64).

I hadn’t felt compelled to use YAMMM at the actual HTPCs, because I wanted the “manually fix-up” opportunity which would then “stick” without the background YAMMM service in danger of second-guessing me again.  But I think the situations where I’ve wanted to “manually fix-up” are probably going to be addressed by http://missingremote.com/forums/yammm-how-hide-secondarynon-english-titles.

However, all of this means I’ve been living without metadata for the movies, since YAMMM can only update a local WMC database, and WMC apparently doesn’t have any options for picking up .XML/.NFO-type metadata from the movie folder itself.

So I’m going to try putting the new YAMMM on one of my HTPCs as a test, but unlike on the RIP machine I’m going to leave all the “rename folder”, “rename movie”, “download artwork”, etc., options disabled.  On the theory that maybe the /only/ thing YAMMM will really achieve on the HTPCs is the insertion of metadata into the WMC instance running on that HTPC, without overriding any artwork or folder name choices I made on the rip machine.

Anyone see an obvious or non-obvious problem I could run into there, or something that would need to change in YAMMM before such a usage scenario would work?

-Alan

[mikinho]

That should work out with the exception that I would leave download artwork turned on. It shouldn’t overwrite the artwork (test please) but will create a local cache of the artwork which makes WMC Library much faster to display artwork

[mikinho]

It isn’t very obvious to anyone really 🙂

Some background. Windows Media Center stored metadata on a per user basis. That means every profile, including Media Center Extenders, would normally have to have different metadata files written.  Previously in Yammm I had a list of user accounts on the local system to write metadata to.

In this version of Yammm I found how to make metadata per system instead of per user…which I think is great.  But that doesn’t on other remote PCs.  So with the additional folders you can share each user’s %AppData%MicrosofteHomeDvdInfoCache folder, setup permissions, etc.  Very cumbersome.

It is much easier to just install Yammm on the 2nd PC.  What I’d like to do is offer a “client” Yammm that will sync the local cache and thats it.

[mikinho]

Thanks for the clarification Alan. I’m going to add settings to let users choose their preference.

[Author]

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