Owner manual

MBOX
®
MINI USER MANUAL 27
If the file extension of a DV movie file is changed from .mov to .vid, Mbox will deinterlace the movie as it plays. The
results of deinterlacing on the fly are not as good as when using deinterlaced content, but this means that interlaced
content can be played without it looking as noticeable.
As is the case with all media servers, Mbox playback performance can decrease as the resolution of its media files
increases. Content up to and including 1080p can be played, keeping in mind that higher-resolution files will
sometimes lead to lower performance than smaller files. The amount of compression used when creating a file will
also affect performance. Given equal file resolutions, higher quality (lower compression) files may not play as well as
higher compression (lower quality) files. Depending on the final display device, high-resolution or low-compression
files may not look better than lower-resolution, more highly-compressed files. For best results, try to find a
compromise between quality and performance.
Media Content Management
Mbox Mini allows for a flexible media folder structure. Media can reside locally on the Mac hard-drive or on additional
hard-drives or storage devices connected to the computer. Just be aware that using external devices is not
recommended because playback performance can suffer.
At startup, the Mbox Mini software performs a media scan to search all folders that reside within the
Mbox/Media and
Mbox/Models
folders on the hard-drive of the Mbox server. External media can be attached to these folders using
aliases, provided the following guidelines are observed:
+ Aliases must link to folders on the supplemental media; they cannot be aliased to files.
+ An alias cannot refer to another alias.
+ The
/Mbox/Media , and /Mbox/Models folders cannot be aliases.
Each time the Mbox server completes a media scan, a text file is created with all media files found and their
corresponding combined file numbers. This text file can be found at
/Mbox/Media_Report.txt
Note: The initial media scan allows the locations of files to be resolved at startup, therefore the "distance" of a file
from the main folder has no effect on the time required to find a file. In addition, the content in the
Media folder is
allowed to be nested (folders within folders) to a limit of 64 folders deep.
Folder and File Numbering
Media content files are arranged into individual "Library" folders
within the
/Mbox/Media or /Mbox/Models folders. Each folder name
must begin with a 3-digit index value. In turn, each file within the
Library folder must be named using a 3-digit index value between
000 to 255 as a prefix in the case of the Media folder and must start
with an index of 000 in the case of the Models folder.
Control channels on the console will be used to select a Library
folder and the numbered file within that folder.

001.videos
001.rain.mov

002.drops.jpg
etc.
Mbox/Media