HTPC Systems - J.River MC

I wish MC allowed 3 locations like XBMC, it was nice to know at a glance what the local conditions are and the temps at the other two. This screen takes a few button pushes to get to. It's not that important though...

This is what Movies look like. While it's not as impressive as a 4 x 8 group of icons, it allows the arrow right/arrow left/play button actions to work the same way as they do in my music screen. The second view is series. This groups movies together and orders them by release date, like all of the Harry Potter movies in chronological order, or Iron Man, the Firefly series & Serenity, the Resident Evil movies, etc.

This was a nice bonus. This view is what you get by right arrowing into CSNY, then into the CSN album, then pressing play. The bonus is the background picture. MC downloads this artist art automatically from a server on the internet live while the album is playing (if your internet connection is always on). The slide show fades through several images as the music plays. Simple eye candy, but I find I really like it.

This is what my album collection looks like in Artist view. Pressing the right arrow gets you into CSNY to select a particular album to play, or hit the play button here to play all albums in order. Nice and easy. You can keep drilling and scrolling all the way to the songs in a particular album to select a specific song. Right arrow goes into the directory/album, play button plays what the cursor has highlighted, left arrow backs up one level. For me, channel up/down is page up/down for scrolling through long lists of artists, albums, or songs.

This is the opening/home screen of MC in Theater View. I put the Favorites selection there. It contains icons to launch several internet radio stations I like, and can also contain play lists for anything.

Here are my movies. The large thumbnail of CSN is displayed in the lower left because it was playing when I grabbed the screen capture. The large pane to the right contains both DVDs which MC plays flawlessly and Blurays, which MC hands to TMT3 for playback.

This is J.River MC in windowed mode. As you can see, it looks much like Windows Media player. Here, the audio files are grouped by Artist. My audio file collection is about a 50% - 50% mix of wave files and 320 kbs MP3s.

This is the other portion of the program I use a lot, local weather conditions.

I was quite happy with MC 15, and really wasn't paying attention to MC 16 development. While the program looks and handles the same, the added Bluray support is a major groovy thing and a total success for me, on my PCs.

I'm not into complex tagging. What I'm looking for is two, maybe three ways to order/organize my media file displays. I use name, series and date imported for my video files, and artist, genre, and date for my albums. I download the highest resolution cover art (one image per album or movie) and I'm fine. I just don't need a lot of trailer, plot, album info and poster art to keep track of. Using MC 16 the simple way I do allows me to quickly rip, import, and tag albums and movies with minimal effort. It's easy to learn and use the program at this level.

I realize a lot of folks do like trailers, plot info, album info and poster art , and MC 16 will do a great job of it. It will require a few days of serious effort to learn the ways MC 16 does these things, but you will love what you have when you're done, and you can always go to their forum for info and answers. They are a happy, responsive bunch of people. Look for JimH (the owner) and Matt a programmer working for J.River.

December 18, 2010

I started building my HTPCs around XBMC. This is a media player application with an excellent 10' user interface. While I still like (and prefer) XBMC's user interface, its audio performance has been compromised by programming changes. The stutter I experienced when using XBMC with a Xonar DX sound card became very bothersome, and other persistent un-fixed problems (no seek back/rewind function on DVD playback for one) finally prompted me to try J.River Media Center with ASIO4ALL.

http://www.jriver.com/index.html

http://www.asio4all.com/

The basics of what I found are posted here. The result was great, an instant sale for me. The program works well, plays well with other programs and does a couple of things so well that I really love it on my HTPCs.

First and foremost, it plays audio better than XBMC. This is a function of its own excellent audio streaming code and its ability to connect to ASIO devices while using ASIO4ALL to emulate an ASIO sound card. The primary advantage of this is a direct data path from the source program's output to the sound card's hardware inputs. The data stream is not processed by Windows XP in any way, and only the output volume control from the device driver has any effect on the data stream. This allows the holy grail of bit-perfect playback in Windows XP. While I wasn't really seeking bit-perfect playback (I use the volume controls), I am always interested in accuracy, and it actually did make a difference.

• 1. This made a BIG difference in sound quality on the XP/Audigy machine in my study. The muddy bass I had always blamed on the Logitech Z560's preamp/head unit/sub design was actually happening somewhere in the Windows/Creative sound card driver software path. The audio is uniformly excellent now.

  2. The J.River/ASIO4ALL combination eliminated all audio problems on the bedroom system with the Xonar DX card. No blats, ticks, farts or artifacts of any kind when starting, stopping, or pausing audio files, just correct behavior. Also, while less pronounced, there is an increase in audio quality on this system also.

  3. I believe that the J.River MC/ASIO4ALL combination would be a definite step up in audio quality for any machine not already using a direct connection between its player software and its sound card. While subjective opinions are always to be taken with a grain of salt;

     1. The bass clean-up was very obvious on the Creative machine

     2. Music is more detailed (I'm noticing new things and finding forgotten things in my old favorites). I always take it as an improvement when I hear a detail that was previously masked.

     3. While the bass was improved, it was not attenuated. The spectral balance was maintained, with a very slight apparent increase in midrange and treble tones. This is not off-putting in any way, it's just how my head hears the increase in detail. It adds to the clarity of the music for me and doesn't sound tinny, sibilant, or strident.

  4. For those interested in ultimate quality, you can install an audiophile/pro grade sound card with native ASIO drivers and listen to your digital data stream with nothing between J.River MC and the output. Interesting, and possibly audible with very high quality headphones/speaker systems and youthful ears. I'm just not interested in spending the dollars to get there when the solid performance offered by the Xonar and a few other sound cards is available for $80 to $300.

Second, J.River MC (MC) can tag wave files. You can actually put real tags in the wave file, or you can tell MC to extract the meta data from an organized directory and filename structure. I have always used similarly organized, descriptively named directories and descriptive filenames for my ripped music. Once I got a grip on how to use MC to read this information, I was able to restore group by genre or group by artist functionality and add release date information to my music collection without resorting to tags in the wave files.

Third, MC works very well with Total Media Theater 3. By this, I mean MC will display my Bluray rips with cover art and allow me to select the Bluray I want to play. When I press the play button, MC launches TMT3 with the selected Bluray rip playing. When the movie is over, I exit TMT3 and there's MC, right where it was when play was pressed. I never could get XBMC to do this. While I'm sure it was my ignorance preventing me to achieve this with XBMC, it only took me 10 minutes to get MC to do this...

Regarding Bluray playback, J.River is taking a path I really agree with. They don't plan to build native Bluray playback support into MC. Power DVD and TMT3 both handle this well, and coping with Digital Rights Management (DRM - i.e., unscrambling the encryption) is an on-going problem that must be dealt with constantly. I use DVDFab to rip my DVD and Bluray discs to my server and remove DRM encryption. I've noticed that DVDFab has been updated almost every time I launch it. This is to include cracks to new DRM encryptions which allow DVDFab to unscramble newer discs more often than to distribute bug fixes and program improvements. I would rather see the DRM experts dealing with this while J.River deals with continuing to provide the highest quality audio and DVD playback possible.

Also, for those using EAC; J.River MC will provide checked/confirmed correct rips to wave, FLAC, or Monkey Audio formats. One more open source/freeware program I don't have to mess with :-)

I now have a PC which puts J.River MC on the TV in Theater View. From MC, I can go to my music collection, my movie collection (DVD and Bluray rips), or a collection of internet radio stations and launch what I want. MC also gives me access to local weather, news feeds, and YouTube.

I still use Snapstream's Beyond TV to handle the 6 PVRs in my server as well as live TV. This is the only software I have to switch to. I've found that I can just leave both applications running and switch between them.

Very convenient, and controllable with only my Harmony Remote and EventGhost.

At this point (for me at least) this is a viable alternative to separate components used with a home theater receiver. Although I only use the stereo (2 channel only) outputs of my sound cards, the other outputs are there for 7.1 audio. For a full 7.1 channel system, you would simply connect appropriate power amps and speakers, MC, TMT3 and BTV will handle the sound, routing the appropriate signals to the appropriate sound card inputs, and the sound card will handle the DA conversion and send the appropriate analog signal to the amps and speakers. All DA conversion is done by the sound card, and I'm using the program's output level control to control the system's playback level.

I no longer use the volume control on the receiver in my bedroom. With the Xonar DX sound card I have found an affordable signal source that provides very high fidelity from a completely silent background, very nice. For me, this will be the path to an HTPC sitting on an amplifier with a flat screen on the wall above it and I'm done. A complete stereo with excellent fidelity, as powerful as necessary, with instant access to my music, movie, and photo collections, with the added bonus of a fully functional computer if I wish to sit closer and use the RF connected keyboard.

Here are a few screen shots from J.River MC.

While I'm not really using it properly, I find it very easy to group movies using a series tag and a disk # tag. (In MC I use fill properties from file name using [Name]\[Series]\[Disc #]. With this simple directory structure MC names my movies, and if the info is there, includes Series Name and disc number (order in the series).)

This is the more typical display of my movies, alphabetically ordered by movie name.

This is the new view for my movies. "Recent" is displaying the movies in the order they were imported into the library, latest first.

This is my album collection listed by artist. The icons that appear to be stacks of records are indicating more than one album by that group. As before, impeccable audio is one of J.Rivers primary claims to fame.

This is the main/opening screen for MC 16. Still clean, uncluttered, quick, and easy to navigate with a remote. The thing to remember when navigating with a remote in the J.River MC product is this; left arrow moves you to the "Back" command, it's like pressing the ESC key to go back, or up one level in the menus. Also, you usually need to stop the playing media, then use the play button to start a new song, or album.

One thing I did change; I pulled Movies out of the Video main menu item and placed it on the main menu level. I'm not using the Video portion of the library yet, so it's convenient to move Movies up where it is easier to access. By the way, this is very easy to do, even a non technical tag guy like me found it easily.