Expand TVSeries to a sister plugin? My Films? (1 Viewer)

[fforde]

If you would like a hand on the coding of your new plugin drop me a line, i could look at adding in support for the various movie data sites and cover sites as I am overly familiar with them all, should be a doddle! have you thought about supporting csharpscripts, like Movies does? That way those searches are plain text readable like you want so anyone can maintain them + they are flexible as you like supporting XMLnodes, HTML scrapping, regex, etc..... Plus the implementation code is already there in the core for you to borrow

I would love the help. On the Google Code page there is an Issue Tracker for the project and if you're interested in helping out, anything on the list not assigned to someone is fair game. And if you have an idea not listed, feel free to make a new issue for discussion. Apply for membership to the Developers Discussion Group (you need a Google account) and I'll add you as a developer to the project from there, at which point you'll be able to commit directly to SVN.

If you worked on mediainfo.dll integration maybe we could get that squeezed into an initial release. If you are interested in working on importers that would be great, but I am not sure about the csharpscript approach. I would be willing to talk about adding it in temporarily while another system is worked out, but I don't feel like C# is a good scripting language for this purpose. I realize it's more flexible than a scraping engine based on XML config files and RegEx, but C# is also scary. It's not something that a non developer is gonna feel comfortable working with. If you want to discuss more though post in the discussion thread for the issue in the Issue Tracker so we don't lose or forget about any ideas.

I also like your ideas about selectively pulling fields from different data providers, and maybe even setting default data providers for specific fields. So the summary would automatically be pulled from movie-xml.com and the rating info from IMDB, just by default. This could probably be integrated pretty seamlessly into the Movie Manager pane. This is of course gonna have to wait a bit though, need multiple providers first before we work on something like this.

Drop me a pm if you need help with the skinning also, (would also like to start working on a GUI for the titanium skin I'm currently working on also), Looking great keen to beta test it!

I will PM you in a week or two when I get the GUI code nailed down a little better, thanks I will definately take you up on that.

Just a quick suggestion\question to do with the GUI function, Is it going to be similar to myfilms where you have the all the main views ie filmstrip list etc but choosing a film takes you to the imdb page\detail page and you launch the movie from there. Or is it going to be similar to myvideos where you need to bring up the dialogue box if you want to go to the detail screen? It would be good if selecting the movie went to the detail page unlike myvideos I reckon.

I prefer going strait to the details section as well, but this will be configurable, so people can set it up like they want.

 

[mattsk88]

Just a quick suggestion\question to do with the GUI function, Is it going to be similar to myfilms where you have the all the main views ie filmstrip list etc but choosing a film takes you to the imdb page\detail page and you launch the movie from there. Or is it going to be similar to myvideos where you need to bring up the dialogue box if you want to go to the detail screen? It would be good if selecting the movie went to the detail page unlike myvideos I reckon.

I prefer going strait to the details section as well, but this will be configurable, so people can set it up like they want.

Good idea! what kind of time frame are you looking at for the first release?

 

[fforde]

Currently trying for the end of the month. Really it's just a matter of how much time I can devote on the weekends. The GUI is the last major piece of work to do though, which is now in progress, a little less than half way done. Then there is half a dozen or so minor things I want to do on the config screen. Some more important than others.

 

[mattsk88]

Currently trying for the end of the month. Really it's just a matter of how much time I can devote on the weekends. The GUI is the last major piece of work to do though, which is now in progress, a little less than half way done. Then there is half a dozen or so minor things I want to do on the config screen. Some more important than others.

Keep up the good work, can't wait to see how it all works, looks like just what a lot of people have been asking for.

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

Hmmm, doh, start thinking MP2 plugin, what a future.

sorry, just went off on a tangent here, night of snooker, beer and laughter

Hope i got away with it

 

[fforde]

Hmmm, doh, start thinking MP2 plugin, what a future.

sorry, just went off on a tangent here, night of snooker, beer and laughter

Hope i got away with it

To be honest I have been working off and on on this plug-in for almost a year, so when I originally started work on it, MP2 hadn't even been announced yet. And of course the first thing I worked on was the database abstraction layer. When MP2 was announced I actually got depressed and stopped working for a while, I thought my plug-in would be obsolete before I finished it. Eventually though I figured that separation from the Media Portal code base is not necessarily a bad thing, it means that if I or someone else wanted to port the plug-in to another media center app, it wouldn't be too hard to do so. Between MP, MeediOS, XBMC, Boxee, SageTV and of course Windows MCE, there is a lot of competition out there, old and new. In retrospect I am glad that my code is flexible enough to one day be ported elsewhere, be supported on multiple platforms, or maybe even be made a stand alone app. I am not saying any of these things are even long term goals for me with the project, but it makes me feel good to think that my code might have some longevity, even if MP2 leaves it behind.

As far as integration with MP2 though, I really don't think this would be too hard. None of the logic of the application interacts directly with Sqlite, it's all done through a layer of abstraction. So when MP2 comes out I think it will not be too monumental of a task to extract an interface and create a new database layer that goes through MP2. I don't know how the services system will be set up in MP2, but it would also not be too difficult to provide the data-providers and/or movie importer as a service to other parts of MediaPortal or other plug-ins. The opportunity is there. But you are right this is very much a MP1 plug-in right now.

 

[emphatic]

The thing is when a great plugin like this introduced right before MP1 is finished, it will prolong the appeal of MP1 unitil MP2 is actually a useful app. Hopefully this plugin might inspire more "features" missing from the MP1 core being programmed as plugins as MP1 is in feature freeze mode. Thanks for sticking it out for MP1!

Emph

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

I thought my plug-in would be obsolete before I finished it

Can really see this being long term, so the reference to MP2 is well justified (as well as MP1), just like the MP-TVSeries, can easily see these being part of the mainstay plugins for MP, or any other htpc application that deems to implement them into their code, for a long time to come

Regards

 

[gamejester]

Cool, Have been signedup as a viewer on your main go8gle news site since you announced it months ago, just made a request to join dev.

We should have a bit of a chat offline about how best to approach info scrapping; whilst c#script may look a little scary at first to those not familiar with coding, I would say it is no more so than regEX to those same people; so ultimatly all scrappers will be created and maintained by people with a least basic coding knowledge + there are not really that many sites that have any useful info so the number of scrappers that needs to be maintained will only be a handful. If we can get to a point where we can auto match a movie 100% of the time then use just 2 or 3 great scrappers there will be nothing for anyone else to do ;-)

A way to achieve this is by having 'good' file names. I have just introduced a year extration from the file name to the core movies plugin, so if you have a movie stored as \star wars (1983).avi it can match it no problem to the Empire Strikes Back as although your naming was poor it has the more refined search using the year...........................a lot of the usual sources out there name movies like this now so it is becoming more common.

Perhaps a basic and advanced method for scrappers could be employed, that way everyone is cattered for

mattsk88

myvideos where you need to bring up the dialogue box if you want to go to the detail screen

You can actually achieve this with the movies core pluigin now using the MCE Replacement plugin, simply change the action of Select on the Movies page to Information in the custom mappings (I have been using it like this for ages)

 

[mattsk88]

Are you planning on having movie fanart supported at all in a later release?