coming attractions page (3 Viewers)

[waeberd]

Hey Knubile,

It seems that there was a problem uploading the sources.

Can you mail me the stuff? I will upload it on my server and publish the link here....

Hope you will find some time and find your way back to MP!!

My e-Mail: daniel.waeber@bluewin.ch

Keep hackin'!

Daniel

 

[ojo]

Did anyone get a copy of the source for this? Can we get it uploaded somewhere?

I recieved a copy. Knubile (like everyone else) has bandwidth problems.

I'll host it on my server for about one week. Feel free to grab it.

http://www.laerke.net/laerke.net/showtimes.rar

Ojo

 

[waeberd]

Thanks ojo,

I had a look... and it's a shame if this plugin is abandoned!

One problem is that the available YAHOO ZIP / TOWNs are very different in every country. Yahoo-Germany only seems to have big towns, Switzerland is missing completely....

So MAYBE (and I don't have the faintest idea if this is hard to do) it would be a good idea to be able to choose movies by cinema (=> by town / zip) or as an ALTERNATIVE simply call the yahoo movie reviews for one country ("new movies this week" in MediaPortal sounds like a cool feature....)

For Swiss people like me, it would be a great thing to see current movie reviews, even if I'd have to find out on which cinema a movie is running...

I'm still thinking about that....

Cheers,

Daniel

 

[MrMario64]

a trailer viewer is always cool

 

[Anonymous]

It will however take someone to develop the actual plugin for MP.

[disclaimer]I am not a programmer, so I don't know what I am actually talking about :wink: [/disclaimer]

I was just wondering, before everyone rushes off and tries to get this jacked up for their own areas. Is it worth trying to create some sort of "modular" scheme for each country to add in its own support for different yahoo formats or even support the scrapping of other local sites. A plugin architecture for this plugin! This is only because it sounds as if each country's requirements are very different. (I suppose the same sort of thinking could be used for XMLTV grabbers if we were going to unify a grabber system which included non-standard grabbers - sorry I am digressing)

A lot of the work could be common (especially for English speaking information), as the trailers, movie info, thumbnails etc could be grabbed by one "engine" (could the IMDB code here help?). We would just need to create the ability for country specific cinema details, and perhaps alternative trailer/info sites for different languages - german, spanish, french, etc.

Maybe want to look at the screenshots here for inspiration of what is possible:
http://www.meedio.com/maid/detail.php?mode=detail&plugin_id={C07E8500-67B7-4DB5-9773-5DB1AD907D87}
(If this interests you read through this thread from the start for other good links)

Sorry if I am talking nonsense, just thought we should maybe consider the implications at this early stage. Anyone interested in creating a more accessible approach? Or is this already in place with great start that Knubile has made?

 

[waeberd]

Hi Forbes,

You're NOT talking nonsense, so just keep it up

I was just wondering, before everyone rushes off and tries to get this jacked up for their own areas. Is it worth trying to create some sort of "modular" scheme for each country to add in its own support for different yahoo formats or even support the scrapping of other local sites.
A plugin architecture for this plugin!

It's not that complicated, I think!

We could decide to have some (two or three) fixed views like:
* MOVIES BY TOWN/ZIP
* NEW MOVIES OF THE WEEK
and maybe some FEW(!) more

In plugin configuration, a user could decide, which views are activated for his MP installation.
Then a toggle button "VIEW BY TOWN" / "VIEW NEWS" / ... that remembers its setting on exiting MP will do the job!
(and for a Swiss guy like me where cinemas all have their own crappy proprietary selfmade homepage :twisted:
:arrow: no scraping at all - the only VIEW that makes sense is the NEWS-view on the german yahoo-movies page).

Another story is the YAHOO scraping:
MAYBE it's necessary to write country-dependent scraping code.
This would lead to some work... but with a reasonable class-architecture, this should be cool to do....

Maybe want to look at the screenshots here for inspiration of what is possible:
http://www.meedio.com/maid/detail.php?mode=detail&plugin_id={C07E8500-67B7-4DB5-9773-5DB1AD907D87}
(If this interests you read through this thread from the start for other good links)

ah... funny! I swear I wrote my stuff BEFORE peeking here!
:arrow: "VIEW BY TOWN" / "VIEW BY MOVIE" / "NEWS OF THE WEEK"
Three views and that's it!

Hope this is understandable and not too much dev-slang!

What do you think?

Daniel

 

[Anonymous]

Hi Forbes,

You're NOT talking nonsense, so just keep it up

Thank goodness for that.

We could decide to have some (two or three) fixed views like:
* MOVIES BY TOWN/ZIP
* NEW MOVIES OF THE WEEK
and maybe some FEW(!) more

...

ah... funny! I swear I wrote my stuff BEFORE peeking here!
:arrow: "VIEW BY TOWN" / "VIEW BY MOVIE" / "NEWS OF THE WEEK"
Three views and that's it!

Yeah, in the plugin config they would choose which country (scapper specific) and enter their city/zip code. Bringing up the plugin they could choose:
* By theatre (button for each) - all shows for today with times. Each show could be selected and this would link you to a picture, desription, review, trailer, etc. A button to flick forward in days.
* By film (button for each) – list all the theatre in your city/zip with that movie showing with times. (Clicking on each might give you theatre specific stuff, phone number, web link, map – obviously would be country specific)
* By time – chronological order of films in your area
* Upcoming releases – country specific.

I don’t think you need the “by town”, most people will only consider going to the cinema in the town they’re in.

I think 3 decisions need to made when going to the cinema – what, where and when. Generally you will always know 1 (sometimes 2) and need to know the rest. What I mean is you will either:
1 - want to go to the cinema at a set time, but not know what to see or where to see it.
2 - want to see a particular movie, but want to know where it is playing and when its on.
3 - are going to be near a particular theatre, and need to know what’s on and when.

Whichever scenario, 3 screens would cover it.

Obviously the 4th option (upcoming releases) is additional to all this.

Hope you understand my 4 screens. Does anyone think it would be useful to have anything else?

It's not that complicated, I think!

...

This would lead to some work... but with a reasonable class-architecture, this should be cool to do....

Anyone interested in a new challenge? This would definitely be a “must-have” plugin, Knubile has already made a great start and there are lots of "similar" projects out there for inspiration.

 

[waeberd]

Anyone interested in a new challenge?

Interested yes!
But too busy and there's stuff to do in myPrograms....

So any volunteers are very welcome! 8)

 

[Anonymous]

Viewing by theatre or by movie has nothing to do with the scraper. The scraper simply populates the MovieData object. The movie object will allow data to be retrieved(movies in a theater or theaters for a movie).
I only implemented the theatre view, but all it would take is more code in the display part, not in the scrapping.

As far as a plugin architecture goes, it's almost there. Each scrapper defines it's supported countries. So when Germany is selected, it could iterate through the scrappers until it finds one that supports Germany. Then the scrapper can do it's job. It doesn't matter where it gets the information from, yahoo or anywhere else. That's abstracted from the rest of the plugin.
So the existing YahooScraper object can be renamed AmericasScraper maybe.

As far as a trailer viewer goes, I think, IMHO, that should be seperated from the scrapers. There could be one other class or set of classes that gets movie data from apple trailers for example, that's not country specific at all. Just like IMDB. The cast, plot etc for all movies scrapped from all countries can all come from IMDB.

If you guys like, I can set up this architecture fairly quickly. But I have one key request. This package will become a seperate project that will just be used by mediaportal. This way it can be reused for other applications.
I find it to be such a waste when somebody puts in a lot of effort in something like this, and they tailor it to one specific application.
I cringe when I think of how many IMDB scrapers there are out there all doing the exact same thing in the same programming languages. All that wasted effort!

Man. This should just turn into XMLMovie. Kind of like XMLTV. I smell a new sourceforge project.

 

[Anonymous]

Wonder why this never took off?

For meedio's equivalent plugin, its the third most popular addon, with over 20,000 downloads :!:

Any new MediaPortalers out there fancy adding support for your country? Most of the code is already written.