Serviio style interface

[Encrypted]

Anyone checked out Serviio Media Sever? It has a very nice way of displaying menus inside PS3. It downloads album covers and media info, displays all your movies with the correct name instead of file name and sorts it by artist, genre, or whatever. Unfortunately Serviio sufferes from poor transcoding and no remux support which takes away from its great initial presentation.

Is there any way to get that great presentation with PS3 media server? An addin or plugin would be great.

[taconaut]

You can check the link in my sig.

[Encrypted]

This is a good start, but definately not the level of change that I had in mind. Serviio arranges all of your media in a very nice way. It also connects to IMDB automatically and downloads cover art, proper names and artist and album info for music and movies. Then you can search or browse based on Genre, Actors, all sorts of stuff. It makes the end user experience much nicer on the PS3.

[taconaut]

Did you try it? It imports if from tmdb (like serviio) and you can freely arrange your folders e.g. By genre

[Encrypted]

I did try it a few months ago. I dont remeber it doing an imdb import. Maybe it was an earlier version. I will give it another try and let you know.

[Encrypted]

Ah, I remeber now. It wasnt grabbing the TMDB info before so it really didnt do what I was hoping. I got it working now though. You have to rename all of your movie filenames to the movie title only. Then it works pretty good. Serviio was a bit more automated as it would work without renaming any filenames, and it would look at the nfo and compare with IMDB.

This is looking good. Let me play with ait a bit more and get back to you. So far I am liking what I am seeing. Thanks.

[Encrypted]

Okay, got it working pretty good now. I had to rename all of the movie files to the movie title from IMDB but it downloads cover art now which is cool. Very nice, Thanks a lot. You should try and add this as a main component of PMS. I think almost everyone would want this feature.

[calebc2099]

It was an uphill battle converting from PS3 Media Server to Serviio but I've finally made the switch. PS3 Media Server is/was nice but eventually, what drove me away was incompatibility and lack of support for other, non-PS3 renderers.

I had serious issues trying to use PS3 Media Server with both XBMC (v11.0 Eden) and the WD TV Live HD where video files would be displayed multiple times in a directory.

I had a number of other, minor but annoying issues like, for example, a number of renderers would display thumbnail images as separate files rather than using the image as a thumbnail for the video.

Serviio isn't perfect but it's a better fit for me and my various non-PS3 renderers. From my own experience, here is a list to help guide others:

uPnP client ................... Best Server .................... Why?
1) Sony PS3 ................... Either ........................... PS3 Media Server provides better transcoding support than Serviio - If transcoding is not necessary then Serviio is better because it's noticeably faster when there are hundreds of video files in your collection.

2) XBMC (v11.0 Eden) ........ Serviio .......................... With PS3 Media Server duplicate video files are displayed when there are more than 15 files in a directory, also, thumbnails are displayed as separate files.

3) WD TV Live (HD) ........... Serviio .......................... With PS3 Media Server duplicate video files are displayed - similar to the issue with XBMC

4) VLC .......................... PS3 Media Server .............. The root folders are duplicated every time Serviio refreshes its library

5) Persona MediaConnect ... Serviio .......................... With PS3 Media Server thumbnails are displayed as separate files and also, the number of items in each folder is incorrect. With Serviio, thumbnails are used as thumbnails and don't appear as separate files & the number of items in each folder is correct.

6) RanySoft AcePlayer ....... PS3 Media Server .............. Serviio doesn't use the file name in the resource URL and AcePlayer depends on the resource URL for the file name for some strange reason therefore, currently, only PS3 Media Server will work with AcePlayer.

Here is an example of the difference in resource URLs between PS3 Media Server and Serviio:

PS3 Media Server - http://192.168.100.10:5001/get/0$1$2$2$ ... ro_Boy.m4v

Serviio - http://192.168.100.10:8895/resource/315 ... AC_MULT5*0

[Raptor399]

2) XBMC (v11.0 Eden) ........ Serviio .......................... With PS3 Media Server duplicate video files are displayed when there are more than 15 files in a directory, also, thumbnails are displayed as separate files.

3) WD TV Live (HD) ........... Serviio .......................... With PS3 Media Server duplicate video files are displayed - similar to the issue with XBMC
[...]
5) Persona MediaConnect ... Serviio .......................... With PS3 Media Server thumbnails are displayed as separate files and also, the number of items in each folder is incorrect. With Serviio, thumbnails are used as thumbnails and don't appear as separate files & the number of items in each folder is correct.

These sound like bugs in PMS, to be honest.
Thank for reporting!

[Encrypted]

For me, PMS works pretty good overall. The Transcoding system, is the best around. But the user experience with Serviio is way better. Anyone who has used serviio will know what I am talking about. If we could have the back end transcoding engine of PMS combined with the rich user experience on PS3 from Serviio, that would be awesome.