Local Metadata + Movie Grouping (1 Viewer)

[<><]

Hi, using your Moving Pictures plugin and have a few questions, recommendations

Local Metadta
Ability to read local metadata. I have my data stored in xml files called "mymovies.xml", which is a pretty common structure used by a lot of HTPC enthusiasts. Is it possible to just read the contents of this file instead of having to fetch it from your online sources? Similar to how you allow the use of local Posters/Backdrops if available.

Movie Grouping
Reading your posts I know that Filtering/Grouping is scheduled for your 0.8 release, just have a few questions.
Will grouping be based on movie locations or will it have to be set on a per movie basis? For example, i would like the following:
Group Foreign Movies
- \\server\disk1\foreign
- \\server\disk2\foreign
Group English Movies
- \\server\disk1\english
- \\server\disk2\english

So on Moving Pictures i would select either Foreign or English and only be shown movies from the folders specified for those groups.

Disable Auto Fetching
Would it be possible to disable the auto fetching of metadata/posters/backdrops for movies? A lot of my foreign movies get the wrong metadata or even if it gets the correct metadata, the poster/backdrop it retrieves is of very bad quality...basically I would only want it to use my locally stored data.

Thanks

 

[fforde]

You can not currently load metadata from a local file. With the next release though the scraper engine supports reading local files though so it would be possible to write a script to do what you are describing.

As for grouping you could do exactly as you describe. You can basically add any number of criteria for a movie to be in a group. And criteria can be based on pretty much any data stored about a movie. It's location, genre, language, etc. Anything in the DB pretty much.

As for disabling auto retrieval the only way to do this would be to disable all existing scraper scripts. You can do this from a popup launch on the Importer Settings tab in the config.

 

[<><]

Thanks for your quick reply, looking forward to your next release.

Also, is "Sorting" available in the GUI, i see the option in the configuration utitlity but not while using Moving Pictures, the right menu only shows me View Options and Video Settings....

Also a guide on keyboard shortcuts?

Thanks

 

[fforde]

Press F9 for the context menu. You can sort from there. I will see about putting together a keyboard shortcuts guide later this week, but really all the keys are consistent with MediaPortal keys. If anyone else is willing to compile something though, that would be awesome.

 

[<><]

One more thing,

Does the movie need to have metadata associated with it for it to be added to the MovingPictures database? What I mean is (i know currently if it does not find a match through the auto-retrieval it does not add it to the database unless you manually add it in there) if i disable ALL auto fetchers for metdata/images b/c i only want to use locally available data (b/c i want full control) and your scanner comes across a movie with NO metadata, will it add the movie to the database?

Also does it keep checking the local folder to see if data has been added?

Thanks

 

[fforde]

No if you turn off all data providers nothing will be added to the database. You could probably easily write a "scraper script" that just sets the title to the filename and that's it though. Which would effectively load everything in without information.

 

[<><]

I see, i'm just trying to get my head around this, so for local metadata you would have the ability to set that as the primary fetcher (just like you currently can images)....and the "scraper script" as the secondary?

 

[fforde]

Well with the next version you could essentially create a scraper script that fetches local metadata. So it would still be treated as a scraper script. Moving Pictures doesn't really care where the data comes from, all it knows is it passes some information about a file to a data provider and it hands back a list of possible matches.