[fforde]

Current Release: 0.5.4
Public Beta
This release is targeted at clearing up bugs, annoyances and usability problems. If you are among those who downloaded the original Alpha and reported bugs, I'd like to say thank you. I think we have ironed out every defect that has been reported, plus a few that were not. This is a pretty stable release so to all of you that have been waiting for a solid version, this is a good time to check out Moving Pictures. This release also includes a default skin that you can just drop into your skin folder. It will not overwrite any files and is totally safe to use with any skin.

UPDATE: The website movie-xml.com, the primary data source for Moving Pictures, has gone down and will stay down at least for the next few days. This means that until the site goes back up or new data sources are added, the plug-in will not import your movies. If you are about to try Moving Pictures for the first time, I would highly recommend you wait until the next release, 0.5.5 which should be available within a week. This release will include support for IMDb and OFDb, as well as movie-xml.com if it comes back up.

Website
Download
Updated Skin Designers Guide

Contributors
First and foremost I want to say thanks to armandp. Without him this release would have taken twice as long. He has really helped out a lot fine tuning the Movie Importer so if you see him posting around here, consider clicking that "Thanks!" button.

I'd also like to thank mattsk88. He has helped a lot with testing, and the Default Skin is based on his design.

Major Changes
Below are details on a few of the most significant changes. If you are interested in a complete change log either take a look at the readme.txt file included in the release, or take a peek at the Issue Tracker for items marked fixed for 0.5.3.

Importer Enhancements
There have been some pretty significant improvements to the movie importer. You should get fewer false groupings, sample files should no longer be added, and general title and year parsing is improved. This means that the importer should be more accurate. That being said we have also raised the default Auto-Approve Threshold from 3 to 1. This means that the plug-in must now be more confident in a match to auto-approve it. This is configurable in the Advanced Settings. And if you all see a lot of matches that are correct, but not auto-approved, let me know. We are still trying to figure out what the best default Auto-Approve Threshold is.

GUI Performance Improvements
To improve performance when moving rapidly through the movie browser, I have added a small delay on loading artwork when traversing the list. The default is 0.25 seconds, so basically this means that when you click, the plug-in waits 0.25 seconds to see if you click again, and if you do it doesn't bother loading the artwork for that movie you very briefly highlighted. This should dramatically improve performance when quickly moving through the movie list, thumbnail view, etc. Depending on your input device you may want to adjust this delay to fit your needs, this is configurable under the Advanced Settings panel. Feedback is of course welcome here.

Skin Designer's Note: To take advantage of delayed loading a skin change is required. Please see the updated Skin Designer's Guide.

Context Menus
We have added context menus to the main screen as well as the details view. To switch from list view to thumbnail, large thumbnail, or filmstrip view, just click that menu button (the default key is F9). The context menu on the details screen also exposes the ability to check for additional artwork if you have none, and refresh movie details from online.

The Default Skin
The default skin has been updated for this release. It now supports thumbnail view, large thumbnail view, and filmstrip view in addition to the list view (see screen shots below). It also now plays friendly with other skins, so if your skin does not support Moving Pictures, feel free to just drop the generic skin in, it wont hurt anything.

The base of this skin and much of it's layout was designed by Mattsk88 for his Titanium skin. So a big thanks to Mattsk88 for getting us started on this. The Titanium skin by the way now supports Moving Pictures so if you are looking for a skin supporting Moving Pictures natively, you may want to check it out.

Bug Reports
If you have a bug report, please read this thread on how we track bugs, and then head on over to the Issue Tracker.

[Conflicted]

Nicely done!

The issue I had with the previous version is gone in this one. - Every video file crashed MP upon ending. - Fixed now :]

Got one small issue still though, My rating [stars] isn't showing for some reason. Do I need to enable it somehow or did I miss something?

Thanks for a great plugin man

Viktor

[pannivas]

thanks guys.

will test this one out as well and let you know.

I just finished re-scanning my entire movie collection 270movies after whipping my entire DB and Coverarts.

Scanner is much much faster and much much more accurate.
Only "problems" i had with the scanner where

1) Only files which included "Director's Cut" in it which is not really a problem as you can exclude that from the reg expressions.
2) Movies with non English names however they are saved with English name on my HDD. (i.e. The Seven Samurai which actually the name of the movie is a much better one "Shichinin no samurai").

Anyway i had several movies with version 0.5.2 which were not even matched with a possibility and now not only they are matched by that match is a perfect one and approved.

Excellent job guys.

Will give you feedback on GUI once the import finishes.

[arryo]

It works great except some movies can be played, I don't know why. Most of my movies are in mkv format. Thanks for your effort

[Paranoid Delusion]

It works great except some movies can be played

Please name files and there format, would help if you told us how you installed your relevant codecs, playback should have nothing to do with this plugin if it recognises them as a valid format.
Can they be played in MP Movies!! for instance.

Regards

[vuego]

moviebackdrops.com is down.
Says Account Suspended

[mattsk88]

Originally Posted by vuego

moviebackdrops.com is down.
Says Account Suspended

That isn't good news

[Paranoid Delusion]

moviebackdrops.com - XBMC Community Forum

There's your answer, so not to bad, lets not piss off the guy.

[kanelbulle]

Hi!
First of all, this is a great idea for a plugin, and even for a beta it works pretty well so far!
I have one problem wich a cant find in your issue list: When serching for information about movies it retrieves everything but the "Score" correctly. The score is 0 on all movies. Do you know why this data isnt downloaded?

Thanks for a great plugin

[fforde]

@pannivas

Yeah for the Director's Cut movies you will need to add to the regex in the advanced settings. Currently it automatically removes DirCut and quite a few other things, but I guess nothing matched exactly for you. We might have a few additions there for the next release if we see a problem though.

The issue with movies with non-english names saved with the english title on your HDD will be fixed sooner or later. What is needed is a.k.a names from the online database which movies-xml.com does not currently provide. As soon as it's implemented though I (or armandp) will integrate it into the code to improve matching.

@everyone

I will see if I can find anything else out about moviebackdrops.com. For the time being the plug-in should still fall back to posters.consumeroo.com, so you should still be getting backdrops. Because you only have one source right now though you may get more misses. When moviebackdrops.com comes back up, your plug-in will automatically check for artwork for any movies that are missing it.

@kanelbulle

The score is properly retrieved, but it is not populated for a lot of movies. I will be adding an IMDB data provider in the near future that will supplement movie-xml.com. Once this happens your ratings should suddenly become a lot more accurate.