GREAT plugin that needs work (shared DB and other features) (1 Viewer)

[Ronner]

This is by far the best movie plugin for mediaportal but it does have it's issues atm. I'll point out the issues I'm having atm.

shared database
One of the most important ones is that it's pretty much impossible to have several clients use the same DB/thumbs/covertart/fanart etc without screwing up the databases. I have everything set up on a centralised database for the 3 clients that I have in my house and everything works fine with that, except moving-pictures

UNC connection names
Another thing is that the locations where it looks for movies always seem to translate back to a driveletter. I'd like to keep that as UNC connection names. Example \\mediaportal\ddrive\media\movies . With shared databases in mind this is quite important.

adding movies while mediaportal is running
Another one is that for me it never added new movies to the database while mediaportal is running. I have to shut down mediaportal, go to the configuration and then moving-pictures scans the locations and finds the newly added movie. I don't know if something is wrong in my setup or if this feature is not implemented yet, but it would be much nicer that it just picks up new movies while mediaportal is running. And in case of multiple matches or unsure matches it would just prompt the user within mediaportal itself to choose from the list of possible matches.

easier manual matching
Sometimes it simply doesn't find the correct match. As an example, I have the tv-series "guns" ( "Guns" (2008) ) and it matches all kinds of results, but not the correct one, so I can't select it from the list. When I choose to manually give a search string and type in "guns" (including the quotes as shown on imdb) then it still doesn't find it. Perhaps it would be a good feature to be able to manually give the IMDB url to the correct match.

Manually editing fanart
There is the ability to edit coverart manually (add by file/url and delete covert art), but not for fanart. The only way you can edit your fanart manually is to enter the path to the fanart in the movie details screen. Not so much a major issue, but would be more userfriendly if you could edit it the same way as you would normal coverart.

Set watch flag from list of movies
When you are in mediaportal, you have to select a movie first to get it's details screen and there you use F9 (menu) to set or delete the watch flag. It would be nice to be able to do the same from the other views (list, icons etc) as well so that it's easier to quickly go through your list of movies to set wether you watched them or not.

MediaInfo in list of movie-details
When you are in mediaportal you see info such as Director, Writer, Genre, Runtime and Cast. It would be nice to add some basic media info such as Resolution and FPS. This makes it easier to see if the movie is HD or not and wether you need to set the refresh rate of your TV to 24p or 25p or 30p. You could also possibly add "HD" and "Full HD" logo's somewhere when you have a movie highlighted that is either 720p or 1080p and a DVD logo for dvd movies. Makes it easier to identify the quality you are about to get.

Light fanart and titles of movie
When the fanart is quite bright it's hard to read the titles of the other movies in the list. This is most likely a skin-related issue but it would be nice if skinners would take this into account.

Genre's in listmode
The option "Show only unwatched movies" is nice. Something similar should be done with movie-genre's so that you can only list movies of a certain genre.

Ok I'll stop my rant on probs and feature requests now cuz it's getting too long!!

GREAT plugin of which I hope will keep evolving fast!

 

[marvenius]

short answer: most of that is planned already (still beta stage at this moment)

 

[Ronner]

is there a way to participate in the beta?

Oh and a quick solution to not screw up the database could be to make an option wether this client will be used to update the database or not.

 

[marvenius]

It's a public beta anyway.
Download from here: https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...ad-moving-pictures-public-beta-0-6-5-a-48802/ or here: moving-pictures - Google Code
You want extra? You can compile your own since it's open source as well.
Or you can participate when your a (C#) programmer.
Just head over to the project page on Google (moving-pictures - Google Code) Also on the project pages there is the issue list where you can check progress and planning for upcoming features and bugfixes. (planning is not written in stone, so may change based on time of the programmers, severtiy of the bug and so on ...)

 

[fforde]

Hi Ronner, thanks for all the feedback (and thanks for giving it in a constructive way ). Marvenius is right most of this is either a known bug or on the schedule. I will go through and point you to the scheduled issues for each suggestion though. Before I begin though, please remember that Moving Pictures has only been available for 4 months, so it is a pretty young plug-in. We are making steady progress but there are only two really active developers on the project so it all takes time.

This is by far the best movie plugin for mediaportal but it does have it's issues atm. I'll point out the issues I'm having atm.

shared database
One of the most important ones is that it's pretty much impossible to have several clients use the same DB/thumbs/covertart/fanart etc without screwing up the databases. I have everything set up on a centralised database for the 3 clients that I have in my house and everything works fine with that, except moving-pictures

Well everything else works fine most likely because none of them do realtime updates linked to file system changes. Moving Pictures is very active in maintaining your collection based on things being added and deleted from your watch folders, so when you have two copies of Moving Pictures attached to the same database, you get some conflicts.

Multi-seat support is asked for a lot though so we will definately implement it. Currently our plan is to do things in two phases. Phase one simply involves an option to turn off the movie importer for client systems. Meaning that the main system is the only one that would be automatically importing movies and artwork. There are still some problems with this, for example the client systems wont know when movies have been added or updated, so at best they would just have to periodically reload everything from the database. Obviously not ideal. The idea though is this enhancement would create a workable situation for the time being while the larger phase two enhancement is shceduled/worked on.

Phase two is a proper multi-seat setup with the main instance working as a proper server and the satellite installs, proper clients. So there would be no centralized database, the different versions of Moving Pictures would just talk to each other across the network. This is a more complicated solution but solves a lot of the problems I mentioned above.

UNC connection names
Another thing is that the locations where it looks for movies always seem to translate back to a driveletter. I'd like to keep that as UNC connection names. Example \\mediaportal\ddrive\media\movies . With shared databases in mind this is quite important.

This is scheduled for a future version, although it is a fairly easy fix so we may pull this forward a bit. We are doing a lot of changes to the config screen right now so it may be a good idea to go ahead and knock it out...

adding movies while mediaportal is running
Another one is that for me it never added new movies to the database while mediaportal is running. I have to shut down mediaportal, go to the configuration and then moving-pictures scans the locations and finds the newly added movie. I don't know if something is wrong in my setup or if this feature is not implemented yet, but it would be much nicer that it just picks up new movies while mediaportal is running. And in case of multiple matches or unsure matches it would just prompt the user within mediaportal itself to choose from the list of possible matches.

Based on your suggestion above I am assuming all of your import paths are on network drives? If this is true you are probably experiencing this bug. The text in that issue is not so descriptive, but basically, in 0.6 sometimes the Windows service that watches the file system for changes crashes when connected to a network drive. This has already been resolved for 0.7.

As for prompting the user for matches that are not auto-approved, this too is scheduled.

easier manual matching
Sometimes it simply doesn't find the correct match. As an example, I have the tv-series "guns" ( "Guns" (2008) ) and it matches all kinds of results, but not the correct one, so I can't select it from the list. When I choose to manually give a search string and type in "guns" (including the quotes as shown on imdb) then it still doesn't find it. Perhaps it would be a good feature to be able to manually give the IMDB url to the correct match.

I feel like our matching process is excellent so I am kind of surprised to hear you say this. You gave a bad example though, as you mentioned "Guns is a TV Show, and as you know Moving Pictures is intended for movies. The IMDb script actually uses regex to filter out TV Shows from the search result to achieve better auto-approval rates. This is a design decision, we have intentionally chosen to have a narrow focus on Movie content to create a more specialized experience. See here for more details.

A tip though, in the manual search dialog, if you are using the IMDb script, if you type in the IMDb ID instead of the title, it will match to the TV Series anyway.

Manually editing fanart
There is the ability to edit coverart manually (add by file/url and delete covert art), but not for fanart. The only way you can edit your fanart manually is to enter the path to the fanart in the movie details screen. Not so much a major issue, but would be more userfriendly if you could edit it the same way as you would normal coverart.

This of course is planned.

Set watch flag from list of movies
When you are in mediaportal, you have to select a movie first to get it's details screen and there you use F9 (menu) to set or delete the watch flag. It would be nice to be able to do the same from the other views (list, icons etc) as well so that it's easier to quickly go through your list of movies to set wether you watched them or not.

Well the idea is to keep things uncluttered. If we put every menu item on the context menu of every location of the GUI, there wouldn't be much point in calling it a "context menu" would there? And more importantly, it would not be very usable with a dozen different unrelated options packed into one menu.

Besides if you want to change the watched status of a large number of movies at once, which is what I get t he impression you are trying to do, you are much better off doing it from the GUI, as you can select multiple movies at once and make a bulk change.

MediaInfo in list of movie-details
When you are in mediaportal you see info such as Director, Writer, Genre, Runtime and Cast. It would be nice to add some basic media info such as Resolution and FPS. This makes it easier to see if the movie is HD or not and wether you need to set the refresh rate of your TV to 24p or 25p or 30p. You could also possibly add "HD" and "Full HD" logo's somewhere when you have a movie highlighted that is either 720p or 1080p and a DVD logo for dvd movies. Makes it easier to identify the quality you are about to get.

Again, planned. Most of the information you are describing is not readily available without integration of third party libraries though, so it is not as simple a task as it seems.

Light fanart and titles of movie
When the fanart is quite bright it's hard to read the titles of the other movies in the list. This is most likely a skin-related issue but it would be nice if skinners would take this into account.

Yeah this is a skin issue. Most skins have a semi-transparent background that overlays the fan-art for this specific purpose though...

Genre's in listmode
The option "Show only unwatched movies" is nice. Something similar should be done with movie-genre's so that you can only list movies of a certain genre.

Of course this is planned too.

Ok I'll stop my rant on probs and feature requests now cuz it's getting too long!!

GREAT plugin of which I hope will keep evolving fast!

So thanks for the feedback, hopefully that gives you an idea of where we are at. I would suggest skimming the Issue List though because it is actively updated and should give you a pretty good idea of our roadmap. If you have any ideas to contribute to anything I have linked above (or other issues for that matter) feel free to post in the appropriate issue.

 

[Ronner]

Thanks for the great and informative reply!

For such a young plugin you already made something that is really great in my opinion and the upcoming changes sound really nice.

The guns series was indeed a bad example because I know the main focus is solely on movies, and I agree it does a pretty great job on matching those! From the list of movies (about 130) that I have on my mediaportal I think it wrongly matched maybe 2 or 3 films but it did have it in the list. Mainly it was due to not having a complete title for instance "ice age 2" would match something else first. When doing a manual search for "Ice age 2 the Meltdown" however, then it found it right away, so it's also a matter of naming your folders/files correctly.

If it would be easy to implement to switch off the updating of the movie database on client machines and simply have a temporary contextmenu option of "reload database", it would already be a good enough workaround for most people I guess. Right now I simply can't use moving-pictures on my client machines for the sole reason of it "Destroying" the database that was made on my main mediaportal machine.

Another thing that sprung to mind is being able to wrap to the bottom or top of the list on it's boundaries. For instance I'm on the first movie in the list, but I need to go all the way to the bottom to find a movie called "Wall-E" or something similar in the lower end of the alphabet. Would be nice if I could just press up and it would end up in the bottom of the list.

Thx also for the great tip on using the imdb id in the manual search! very useful!

Can't wait on future updates because it's really a very great plugin.

Thx again for updating me!

 

[marvenius]

Another thing that sprung to mind is being able to wrap to the bottom or top of the list on it's boundaries. For instance I'm on the first movie in the list, but I need to go all the way to the bottom to find a movie called "Wall-E" or something similar in the lower end of the alphabet. Would be nice if I could just press up and it would end up in the bottom of the list.

I'm not to good with those long answers ;-) so here's a short one again.
It already does this (checked with generic skinfile on Blue3) but this may be a skin issue.
I've seen another post about this also.

Just go to the top of your list and press UP again. Should "warp" you to the end of your list.
(also works in small and large thumbs, but not on filmstrip view)

 

[poppabk]

Another thing that sprung to mind is being able to wrap to the bottom or top of the list on it's boundaries. For instance I'm on the first movie in the list, but I need to go all the way to the bottom to find a movie called "Wall-E" or something similar in the lower end of the alphabet. Would be nice if I could just press up and it would end up in the bottom of the list.

This works for me in list view using the default 16x9 skin, in fact I rely on it as I have my TV series sorted with "zz" in front of the title so as to separate TV series from movies in my list.

 

[vl002001]

Another thing that sprung to mind is being able to wrap to the bottom or top of the list on it's boundaries. For instance I'm on the first movie in the list, but I need to go all the way to the bottom to find a movie called "Wall-E" or something similar in the lower end of the alphabet. Would be nice if I could just press up and it would end up in the bottom of the list.

I'm not to good with those long answers ;-) so here's a short one again.
It already does this (checked with generic skinfile on Blue3) but this may be a skin issue.
I've seen another post about this also.

Just go to the top of your list and press UP again. Should "warp" you to the end of your list.
(also works in small and large thumbs, but not on filmstrip view)

this is definitely a skin issue. i was having this problem with Indigo, but it works fine after I switched to StreamedMP

 

[Ronner]

I'm not to good with those long answers ;-) so here's a short one again.
It already does this (checked with generic skinfile on Blue3) but this may be a skin issue.
I've seen another post about this also.

Just go to the top of your list and press UP again. Should "warp" you to the end of your list.
(also works in small and large thumbs, but not on filmstrip view)

I'm using indigo with the moving-pictures skinfiles of monochrome. Perhaps the prob is there

This works for me in list view using the default 16x9 skin, in fact I rely on it as I have my TV series sorted with "zz" in front of the title so as to separate TV series from movies in my list.

Why don't you use MP TvSeries? That is way cooler for tv-series imo.