Media server with thumbnails..

[Movieguy7]

Greetings!
I have been doing alot of looking on the internet for a program to run my media server. My set up is just for home theater, I dont listen to music often.. My current setup is EUBO's (Which you cant get anymore. KDLinks are same thing) in my theater, living room, and bedroom. Which go through my network back to my computer in the basement. It works.. but im looking for something I can do to make the movie selection look more like kaleidescape. I like the look of the thumbnails. I found PLEX and got it installed on my server and up and running. Then found out it will not recognize any of my files. I used dvdfab to take all my dvds and blu rays and put them on my server, and I did it in the highest quality i could. I dont want to recode all these movies into mp4 so PLEX will recognize them.. Anyone have any ideas??
I dont need any streaming to devices, remote access from outside my home, or anything fancy..

 

[Movieguy7]

I guess technically I mean display the movie covers not a thumbnail.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

What's your current movies file format? It's maybe not issue of files format, but lack of consistent file names

 

[Movieguy7]

I have basically disk iso. It shows up as the movie title as a folder. click on the folder and 2 more folders are in that folder. audio_ts and video_ts. then for BR movies you have the movie name folder, click on it and theres BDMV folder and CERTIFICATE folder.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Plex would not play ifo/vob/iso. You could either use makemkv (free, just replace "trial" key, it's been trial last 5 years or so). It will not reencode video, just extract it. Other than that you could use kodi (for central db you could hack to use your own mysql)

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

I found it's much easier to deal with kodi with iso images of bd/dvd rather than a flat file system like you described

 

[Movieguy7]

I will try and see where it gets me

 

[Movieguy7]

kodi does work. It shows the covers like I wanted and recognizes all the movies. It works on the computer but is not compatible with playstation like PLEX is. But this is great! I might just have to put a computer out in the theater. Thanks a bunch BoredSysAdmin

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

kodi does work. It shows the covers like I wanted and recognizes all the movies. It works on the computer but is not compatible with playstation like PLEX is. But this is great! I might just have to put a computer out in the theater. Thanks a bunch BoredSysAdmin

Yw. I personally use and like Plex a lot, but in living room I have a small low powered pc which is running kodi and plex addon - so I get best of both worlds.
Mostly I find myself watching more stuff using Plex since it much more devices friendly and works great in web browser too. If I were you'd I'd just take the pain and extract movies to flat mkv files, unless you care about menus/extras/etc...