TV Show Support? Music DVDs?

[fforde]

I have seen a few times around here people mentioning issues with loading a TV Series into Moving Pictures, or maybe a Music DVD. I think it's great that people are finding new uses for the plug-in and are able to use it in areas outside our originally intended scope.

I just wanted to make clear the current design goals of Moving Pictures though. From the start I have intended this plug-in to be a very focused application. I feel like one of the main advantages it has over tools like MyVideos is that MyVideos does not have the luxury of dealing exclusively with movie content. MyVideos needs to deal with music videos, and clips and maybe even TV episodes. Moving Pictures is not designed for these things. By design the plug-in is meant for Movies only. I am not saying that you can not or even should not use Moving Pictures for other types of Media, if you can get it to work I would encourage you to keep on. But please understand that, at least for the time being, Moving Pictures is not intended to be a full replacement for MyVideos, and our bug fixes and enhancements will be focused exclusively on movie content. Other types of media are just outside the scope of the plug-in right now.

If you have any questions, or want more clarification, fire away.

[emphatic]

I saw in the TV-Series part of the forum that the serious approach for the development of this plugin has got them to wisen up about bug reports and so on, so thanks to Moving Pictures, MP TV-Series will become even more stable too. Please support that plugin, since it's really awesome for TV Series.

Emph

[jonaskp]

I just wanna repeat what I've said before: This plugin should stay movie-only IMO. Let other plugins deal with trailers, music videos, TV-series and so on. Let the plugins be focused on very specific things, so they can be absolutely perfect at handling the things they are supposed to - instead of do-everythings, master nothing kind of approach.

Basically, keep up the good work, and don't let anybody convince you to change a thing about the purpose of this plugin

[Yabba]

+ 1

[Helios61]

Hello Community!

Please help to define the purpose of this plugin!

3:10 to Yuma -> Movie -> Movig Pictures
Michael Clayton -> Movie -> Moving Pictures

C.S.I. Miami -> Tv Show -> MP TvSeries
Planet Earth -> ?
Pompeii - The Last Day -> ?

Genesis When in Rome -> ?
Queen - Greatest Video Hits 1 -> ?
R.E.M. Live -> ?
Fleetwood Mac - Rumours -> ?
Shaman -> ?

Best Regards
Helios

[Yabba]

Planet Earth is a TV show, 11 chapters. MP-TVSeries can handle it perfectly, and there's information at thetvdb.com, provider for TVSeries.

Pompeii ... well, I understand it's something like a movie, or a TV-Movie. I guess it could be a series of just one chapter... Anyway there's no information yet at thetvdb.com, altought that could easily be fixed, as long as the site is fan mantained. But Moving Pictures with IMDB can also handle it anyway.

For music videos I think there's a specific plugin, isn't it? I haven't tried it yet anyway. And for DVD-Audio... I don't know exactly how MediaPortal deals with DVD-Audio, but I guess it should be something for MyMusic to handle...

[poppabk]

Currently there is no program that deals with iso's of TV series DVD's correctly and simply AFAIK. I couldn't find a good way of dealing with movie iso files until this plug-in came out so I really hope that moving pictures some day supports TV DVD's because I really like having the entire DVD with its menus/extras etc instead of individual files.

[fforde]

I think one day that might be an area we will look into, but that I think is at least a year away. I really want to focus on making the plug-in great for movie content right now, and once we get to a stable feature complete version then we might start looking at other content types.

Have you mentioned your desire for ISO support over on the MPTV-Series forums though? I think it would be a pretty big change to add support, but I am sure it's doable, and I can see a lot of people enjoying the feature.

[poppabk]

I haven't personally brought it up but it has been mentioned a couple of times, but has not been properly resolved. I think that the TV-Series database is set-up with the episode as the primary key so it would require some major work to get iso of an entire DVD with multiple episodes working correctly, plus the whole point of TVSeries is to provide an episode menu that replaces the DVD menus. Moving pictures is already set-up to handle iso's transparently so it would seem to be my best bet. Would it be possible for me to add the discs to the database manually or is this not a good idea?

[fforde]

Sure, you could add the disks manually. Currently you would have to force it to load using a dummy movie, but in the near future (I think the next release?) We will be adding the ability to add a file or ISO as a "blank" movie. Basically manually adding something that can't be found online. This would be ideal for what you are wanting to do.