Comic Plugin... (1 Viewer)

[Mars Warrior]

As a great fan of comics, I told myself how nice it would be watching them on the cautch in front of the tv and decided to start building my first plugin for MP.
I know its has nothing to do with the basic functionality of MP, but its a very nice thing for me to learn the plugin structure and at least ad something to MP while waiting for my HTPC hardware which is due at the end of this year.

My idea is the following:
== Many sites nowadays offer serveral RSS feeds (either directly or by scraping) for comics. Some even supply the OPML files to make it even easier to use these feeds. My idea is to use these OPML files as a basis for the configuration utility of MP. The user can easily see which comics are available and simply select them without the hassle of finding out the name of the actual RSS feed. Furthermore, if the rss feed is changed, all that is required is to get the new OPML file (containg the actual location of the RSS feed), and that's it again. If no OPML file is available, it even not that difficult to create your own

So that would be the configuration. Fairly easy I think from a user point of view. I already found OPML files for Dutch, German and English comics. Tried to find the Swedish Cook, but had no luck ;-(

== The second thing of course is to download them and view them in MP. As downloading is concerned, I see 2 options:
- Add a comics page which displays the selected/configured list and options to download them all or manually select a single comic
- Do the above automatically every day orso (easier for me, no separate page, no skinning (something I have no idea how to...)). I have no idea if this is possible in the current plugin structure however as the plugin would be active all the time and have no own plugin (comics) page (Frodo ???)

As for viewing: my simple idea was, since it involves images, to use the picture plugin through which the comics can be viewed, ie you have to select the comics directory orso to view the downloaded comics, just as the pictures of holidays..

Since I'm only starting this, have limited time, and in a weeks time will enjoy a month Holiday, I wonder if people have additional ideas for this so I can do this the best way possible, giving the limited time I have. So please comment on the idea itself, manual/automatic download, known comic feeds and whatever you might think of...

To give you an idea of some of the comics:
- User Friendly
- Rudy Park
- B.C.
- Wizard of Id
- Ripley's Believe It or Not!
- Pearls Before Swine
- Big Nate
- Drabble
- Over the Hedge
- Liberty Meadows
- Peanuts
- Get Fuzzy
- TrueNuff
- Penny Arcade
- Dilbert
- Iys Bar
- Joy of Tech
- Bob the Angry Flower
- Errant Story
- Nicht Lustig
- Elf Life
- Nemi
- Saturnalia
- MegaTokyo
- Sinfest
- Rubert-Cartoons

are already available using official or scraped feeds all specified using OPML...

PS. Jadz: your plugin manual already gave me more info than I already had found out myself...

 

[elric]

Hei! i'm developing a comic plugin too .
But my plugin will be more centered in read comic zipped formats like cbr,cba,cbz, and folders with captured comic pages in jpg or other image formats.
Like CDisplay, but within MediaPortal.
With slow advance and zoom, and thumb preview.
I will post a link sooner.

 

[MrMario64]

can't you guys work together and make a very feature rich comic plugin?

 

[jadz]

Glad it helped. Be sure to contribute anything you learn back so we can grow the manual into more advanced topics.

-jadz

PS. Jadz: your plugin manual already gave me more info than I already had found out myself...

 

[elric]

Well, in my opinion the two plugins differ enough to difficult the integration under the same window. Maybe we can code a submenu like:

- Book Comics
- Internet Daily Comics

 

[waeberd]

coool!
I have some CDisplay collections that would be cool to use in MP!

Cheers,

Daniel

 

[Mars Warrior]

I couldn't have said it better:

Well, in my opinion the two plugins differ enough to difficult the integration under the same window
- Book Comics
- Internet Daily Comics

Its both about comics, but thats about the only resemblance

Maybe, just maybe I might use the image display function in order to display the comics, instead of having to use the picture plugin.

The thing that suprised me however is that obviously there is much more going on for MP than I expected, or is the fact that two people are creating two different comic plugins just a coincedence??

It would be nice if everybody who is building or thinking about building a plugin would post it in this plugins section. It would even be nicer if a sticky would be added with the current and to come plugins where every developer can enter his/her progress and features, or am I asking to much??

 

[tomtom21000]

anyone still working on this?

tomtom21000

 

[Mars Warrior]

anyone still working on this?

tomtom21000

Yes, still working on the daily plugin. However, I'm currently building my new HTPC which will temporarily also be my development PC, and I just got two Amity2 cards (PVR150MCE) which must be tested.

If that's all done, I will continue with the daily comic plugin :lol:

 

[Anonymous]

Hi Mars


I have developed an app a wile ago that downloads the following daily comics -
"Dilbert","Calvin & Hobbs","GPF","User Friendly","Chopping Block","Pc N Pixel","Spooner","Mega Tokyo","PvP","What is Square","Gaming Gardians" "Least I could do","Grave Yard Greg","Bob n Ed","FlexTime","DevilHunter","sinfest","LOF","Reckless Life","Striptease","Penny-Archade","Die Bitch Die","Errant_Story","Faans"

This works by going to the web site reading in the HTML for the page determining the link for the image ie http://www.gpf-comics.com/comics/gpf20041110sDigo.jpg - for todays GPF comic. It then gets the image and saves it to disk. I has two ways of downloading the file, if you have no proxy it will use 'client.downloadfile', if you have a proxy then the code is also there to download the file byte by byte. The app will then emails out the comics to specified address through exchange server.

If you want the code (it works but is a little rough in places - keep meaning to clean it up) I can email it to you ....... might save you some work.


Murtagh