Lost Season 6

Now that I've finished being distracted by thost annoying Star Wars DVD's, I'm back to my normal agenda. So today's effort will be the converting of Disk 3 of Lost Season 6 on BluRay.

The process is pretty straightforward using RipBot264 (with AnyDVD HD in the background of course). I'll post up a set of instructions about this shortly. The only part that makes different than a normal BluRay is that you need to get all the episodes.

The more interesting aspect of getting Lost (or any other episodic show) converted, is how to put them in your Media Center in a usable and 'good' manner.

I use a Windows Media Center and a plugin called MyMovies. I cannot say enough good things about MyMovies, its interface is nice and it makes it MUCH easier to get movies, or sets of movies, to play through your Media Center and extender. It will even do some transcoding for you. PLUS its base functionality is FREE and you an unlock additional (or needed) functionality with a little time and effort (or pay if you want) I'll have to devote a future blog post just to extolling its virtues.

But for now, I will pick on ONE thing I don't think MyMovies does so well.. Episodic TV shows. To be fair, MyMovies was probably not designed with this scenario in mind. Collection management seems to have been its original primary focus.

MyMovies will let you do a couple of cool things to help. You can choose to create a "Box Set" of movies and have a menu to dive in to show the individual movies inside it. For example, you could have one top level "Star Wars" menu item, and all 6 movies underneath it.

And under an individual movie, you can have multiple 'disks', each of which plays something different. The original intention of this, I believe, was to allow for some individual movies with multiple disks of content, to be represented.

I kind of abused this system to make it work the way I wanted it to work.

I don't really play 'disks'. I play my backup files of the movies(WMV or M2TS files), and I use the multiple 'disks' to enable me to watch the individual pieces of content off the disk that I have made backups of. For example, for Pixar movies, I might have one "disk" be the main movie and another "disk" be any of the shorts that came with it. You can label these "disks" however you want, so its good for being able to find and watch what you want.

But back to Lost..

Originally, I had one top level "Box Set" menu entry point for each season, which expanded to each of the individual "disks" as the "movies" in the box set. And then each "Movie" would have disks for each of the episodes on that disk. This sounds fine, but the problem is I wind up cluttering my top level menu. In this case, I have 6 top level menu items for Lost, one for each season.

I don't like that.

I want -one- top level entry point for Lost. All of it.
Unfortunatly, MyMovies doesn't allow me to nest an additional layer in their structure. So, I've settled on one top level "Box Set" for all the seasons of lost. One "Movie" for each season. And each episode in the season as a "disk". The good part of this is it works great through my extender which cannot just play a backed-up DVD directly from the server. The bad part is, the long 13+ item menu for selecting the episode I want to watch which I need to scroll through.

Anyway, if someone has a better way of managing this, I'd love to hear about it.