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Dadeo

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  • November 26, 2006
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    That's a lot to handle all at once!
    That said, Myfilms rocks, it just has a bit of a learning curve attached to it
    Agree to both points. The functionality and level of customization and data management in MyFilms is awesome. I'm not 100% sure if it's possible to also make it easy, but it's something I 'talk to' (read harass LOL) Guzzi about quite often, and for sure we can do some things to help make it easier. What would you say was the hardest part to grasp?
     

    borgster

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    Probably the most difficult thing to grasp is the interface and the fact the interface is broken in to two separate programs with some of the options carrying over from myfilms set up and AMCU and some not carrying over. This is especially confusing when it comes to the handling of Cover images, Fan art, and a few other similar things. Because of the way the interfaces are divided it becomes confusing and easy to miss a setting or to accidentally undo something that you set up previously the way you wanted it.

    The single biggest improvement to make the program use easier would be an interface overhaul.
    For example use MyFilms setup to set the base directories and everything not related to importing and updating.
    Put all the import and updating setup options in AMCU.
    In general to ease the user experience with the GUI's as much information as possible should be kept on the same tab as long as they are related to each other. One of the confusing aspects is that there are options for the art import and update process currently in I think 4 different tabs (I'm working off of memory here while I'm on break from work so that may not be totally accurate).

    It would also help if on each tab all related items to a single process should probably be grouped together as much as possible. Granted some processes are related to multiple processes but in those cases they should usually be grouped together on the same tab at least rather than having to jump between multiple tabs and programs to change one aspect. I think this should be doable due to how the programs interact with each other anyways, it's mostly just a changes to the GUI interface, probably about 90%, and not so much on the programming side.

    I can't comment on the grabber options that open in a third program as I haven't fiddled with that much, but 90% of users probably don't need to do so anyways.

    One feature that would be kind of nice is a default in the update script, and probably on the import script as well, to where a user can set it to read from an NFO file if one exists and if an NFO doesn't exist then to look it up on the internet (or possibly just import the file straight in to the catalog without anything except the Metadata from the file..

    Another feature that would be nice, and this may exist but I haven't found it yet, is the ability to manually edit the catalog entries.

    I'm sure I can think of more, but my break is over and time to return to work.
     

    Dadeo

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    Probably the most difficult thing to grasp is the interface and the fact the interface is broken in to two separate programs with some of the options carrying over from myfilms set up and AMCU and some not carrying over.
    Yep, in fact AMCU was originally a sep app, Guzzi 'integrated' it into MyFilms, but wanted to preserve the option to run it separately, e.g. on a server even if MP is not installed.

    One feature that would be kind of nice is a default in the update script, and probably on the import script as well, to where a user can set it to read from an NFO file if one exists and if an NFO doesn't exist then to look it up on the internet (or possibly just import the file straight in to the catalog without anything except the Metadata from the file..
    Might be worth adding that as a feature request to Tracker?

    Another feature that would be nice, and this may exist but I haven't found it yet, is the ability to manually edit the catalog entries.
    You can use the View Movies tab in AMCU to manually edit data. You just have to press the save icon after to save your changes. I usually do manual edits in Ant Movie Catalog (AMC) and they automatically update MyFilms XML database (since it uses the same XML db - which is the main reason AMC is the 'default' catalog type for MyFilms)
     

    borgster

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    sorry took so long to respond. I've been troubleshooting an issue in MP-TVSeries the last day or two so that's consumed my free time (silly thing won't parse mediainfo on my files for some reason, but that's another long story.).

    I can understand the need for the two programs given those parameters. I'm fairly geeky and usually have few problems getting programs to work (I go WAAAY back to the days of DOS and having to tweek config.sys to get as much loaded in to upper memory as possible, those were fun days). I just think the two GUI's should synch more as one unit as there were several times I thought I had things set up only to realize I needed to change something in tabs B and C to get something that was set up in Tab A to work, especially when the two fields don't seem to be related on the surface.

    From a programmers perspective I understand the layout (I haven't coded in years and years, last time I coded anything it was in PASCAL on an Apple II+ so that probably dates my last coding experience). But from an end user's perspective it's just a little confusing unless you look at it from an architectural point of view, which most people don't...including myself at this point in my life :D

    (gets off soapbox).

    But I'm happy to report that Myfilms is working as desired at this point in time thanks to your tips and suggestions.
    Now if I can solve the mediainfo problem in MP TV I'll be golden....
     

    Dadeo

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    I'm happy to report that Myfilms is working as desired at this point in time
    (y)
    How did you get your posters/covers from Media Companion to work with MyFilms? As I mentioned I am trying to get the MyFilms NFO grabber to work for as many apps that save NFO as possible. But IIUC MC only stores poster as <movie>.tbn ? I can't find any option that will change that, even though I can see in Movie Preferences:
    Capture.JPG

    But I think that must apply only to 'extra' images?

    It's a really nice app with similar features to MyFilms - a lot more than many other apps have. It's just lacking some more scrapers, especially for localized data, though I saw some feature requests about that already ;).
     

    borgster

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    I actually don't use Media Companion currently for movies or for poster art because while it does store the name/location in the NFO the scraper doesn't pick up that data from the NFO file.

    Currently I use media Companion only for home movies and extras and then I just use it to create the NFO file with a description of the media file and the metadata for that file and the randomly generated fan art it creates, though I usually change that from inside MP later.

    I use Tiny Media Companion currently for the Movie NFO's. and it imports everything except for the actor/director/producer/ and a couple other things which I update from within AMCU. TMM easily imports a selected Fan art and cover in to the folder and allows me to quickly and easily select which poster I want to use and which fan art I want to use (it's actually quicker than working inside of MP).

    I would probably skip the TMM step for movies if there as an option in AMCU on import that allowed for reading an NFO if no internet data found or to use NFO if present and do internet scrape if no NFO present. The whole reason for the NFO step in my case was the extensive home movies and extras being imported and they were causing a headache. Plus, to be brutally honest, the TMM scraper is a lot faster than the AMCU import, especially when adding multiple files but that time savings is lost because AMCU doesn't pick up the aforementioned actor/producer/etc from the NFO files. No big deal though from my perspective since I know I'm the oddball on this workflow and the needs.

    Right now my work flow is as follows.
    Home movies and extras I run Media Companion
    If it's a movie then I run TMM and pick my fanart and cover I want to use.

    Then I run AMCU and import off of NFO.
    Then for movies I go in and run an update for each newly added movie to get the actor/director/producer and other information that was missed.

    that last part is a bit of a pain because it's all manual but it's the only solution I've found that works for my needs as things are currently working :)

    I really haven't been working on this workflow much since I'm still trying to figure out a problem with the TV-Series plugin but I suspect now that's one I won't be able to fix as it appears to be a problem with reading metadata on files processed through handbrake in to H.264 4.1 profile.
     

    Dadeo

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    Thanks! I'm familiar with TMM - it is one of the reasons I am trying to improve the NFO grabber for MyFilms. ;)

    I would probably skip the TMM step for movies if there as an option in AMCU on import that allowed for reading an NFO if no internet data found or to use NFO if present and do internet scrape if no NFO present.
    Yep, could you add a feature request for that to the MyFilms Tracker, so it gets 'scheduled'?

    The whole reason for the NFO step in my case was the extensive home movies and extras being imported and they were causing a headache. Plus, to be brutally honest, the TMM scraper is a lot faster than the AMCU import, especially when adding multiple files but that time savings is lost because AMCU doesn't pick up the aforementioned actor/producer/etc from the NFO files
    I agree TMM scraping is impressively fast (faster than any other app I tested!) especially from IMDb. However, it isn't fair to compare it to MF IMDB-Full grabber as it grabs many details from sub pages. Even so I'm not sure how TMM manages to make it so fast.

    But I'm not sure what you mean that "AMCU doesn't pick up the aforementioned actor/producer/etc" . It gets the names (and roles if available) in my tests. Ofc, not the detailed bio/date of birth etc. - but that does not exist in TMM NFO files. And the actor images are urls (unless you save actor images locally with TMM)
     

    borgster

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    Hmm, for some reason the actors and that aren't being picked up when I scan the TMM NFO's in to AMCU, I must still have a setting wrong somewhere or something. I'll have to look in to that this weekend. (actually I may know what the issue is, I may have forgot to save the NFO form back to MP instead of XBMC format because I was switching back and forth while determining which Media Center I was going to use as the front end).

    Sorry wasn't really trying to compare the two on speed of scraping because they are two different critters that do something similar but different at the same time so it wasn't meant to be an actual head to head comparison. And it's going to be an invalid statement if it turns out the reason for it not reading is because some idiot (me) forgot to change back to the correct format ;)
     

    Dadeo

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    I may have forgot to save the NFO form back to MP instead of XBMC format because I was switching back and forth while determining which Media Center
    Other way around - MyFilms NFO supports XBMC format MP format is only for MP Videos.
    If you have any trouble, just post a movie nfo and I can test it and try to sort it out.
    Is it possible you have more than one NFO file? I think currently MyFilms only supports <movie filename>.nfo, <movie filename>.jpg for covers, and <movie filename>-fanart.jpg for fanart.
     

    borgster

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    Hmmm, okay. I'm set for XBMC style NFO so then I guess that was correct after all.
    I just did a test run and this time it imported everything except the actors, but it did pick up the producers and directors this time. Thinking about it the director and producers have shown up occasionally so it's possible that the initial scrape in TMM isn't picking them up but I've never had it import the actors and this latest scrape had the same results of not picking up the actors from the NFO file.
     

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