Moving Picture Public Beta: 0.5.4 (1 Viewer)

[marvenius]

If you (or anyone else) is curious what our traffic is by region:

17.31%	United States
15.53%	Germany
11.36%	United Kingdom
[B]10.13%	Netherlands[/B]
9.61%	Sweden
6.49%	Australia
4.63%	Norway
2.85%	Denmark
2.85%	Canada
2.44%	Italy

at least my nationality is in there
1 person (that I know of) is checking from Belgium.

haven't done much last week with the 4x3 skin. Tried some stuff with the filmstrip view and did some tweaking of the thumbnail views.
Hopefully this week will bring forth a bit more spare time (to spend on these things)

Looking forward to install the latest version!!
I expect no changes with regards to the skin? (So current skin files will be unchanged?)

 

[ScoopD]

17.31% United States
15.53% Germany
11.36% United Kingdom
10.13% Netherlands
9.61% Sweden
6.49% Australia
4.63% Norway
2.85% Denmark
2.85% Canada
2.44% Italy

If everyone else is getting in on it, then c'mon Aussie c'mon.
6.5% from 20 mil is pretty good compared to the 17.3% from 300 mil Americans.

Little man syndrome?

 

[armandp]

For a small country, we "The Dutch" like Moving Pictures a lot!

i'm affraid i'm responsable for most of that traffic
Ow and just so you know i will create an initial moviemeter.nl script that will probably make it into next release.

 

[Yabba]

There's no Spanish on that list, but you can't only count Spain... maybe if all spanish-speaking countries were added we'd count as much as Italy for instance

And more or less the same happens with Portuguese...

 

[z3us]

Isnt it possible to use the existing scripts of ANT Movie catalog???

 

[morfeu78]

There's no Spanish on that list, but you can't only count Spain... maybe if all spanish-speaking countries were added we'd count as much as Italy for instance

And more or less the same happens with Portuguese...

The difference between the distribution of spanish and portuguese is that you guys have 50% more people speaking the language and those are more equally distributed between several nations, Portuguese is heavily weighted toward Brasil, with Portugal, Angola and a few other nations having far smaller populations. 200 mil in Brasil, It's pityfull that we probably have a dozen MP users, and only myself using Moving Pictures at that )

 

[fforde]

I expect no changes with regards to the skin? (So current skin files will be unchanged?)

There should be no skin changes.

Isnt it possible to use the existing scripts of ANT Movie catalog???

Unfortunately no. I might add support for ANT Movie Catalog scripts in the future but I think the odds of this are not incredibly high. I chose against reusing their scripting engine because:

1) The ANT Movie Catalog uses Object Pascal as the scripting language. To understand and work with it you really need to be a programmer, which limits the number of people that can write a scraper.

2) No Regular Expression support. This combined with #1 mean the scripts are much longer and much more complicated then they need to be. Look at their IMDb script verses ours that uses a custom XML/regex script. Ours is about a hundred lines of code, theirs is almost a thousand. I know their script is more stable and mature, and that this is not a fair comparison, but my point is their design creates the need for additional complexity.

3) ANT is written in C++ meaning I would have to rewrite their scrapper engine. This means that you would probably find inconsistencies between how Moving Pictures parses the results of a scrapper and how the ANT Movie Catalog parses the results.

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I also by the way spent a lot of time considering the reuse of the XBMC scraper engine and chose to not go with it because:

1) XBMC is written in C++ while MediaPortal (and in turn Moving Pictures) is written in C#. This means I would have to rewrite their parser (which unfortunately has virtually no documentation in the code).

2) Their regex parser is not fully featured. It does not support lazy matching or interestingly the "\w" element. I am not sure I could duplicate this exactly without writing my own regex parser, so this means that you would get inconsistent script behavior between XBMC and Moving Pictures. These limitations also make it more difficult to construct regex statements to scrape websites. It of course does not make it impossible, it just complicates things.

3) The method of outputting results with the XBMC scripting engine is fairly cryptic. The script writer has to basically construct an XML document for the output. And what makes this even worse is this construction is embedded in an existing XML document, which means all special characters must be escaped. This dramatically complicates things, reducing the maintainability of existing scripts and making new scripts much more difficult to write.

4) And the output of the search scripts is not consistent, making it very difficult to auto-approve effectively for all situations. I think the other issues would have prevented me from using this, but this really was a deal breaker for me.

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Please trust me, I spent a lot of time and did a lot of research trying to decide on which option to go with here. It was not an easy decision. I promise you though if I had found a scripting engine I felt like would work for our purposes I would have used it. I am not so arrogant to think that I can do it better than all these other people, their solutions just didn't work for Moving Pictures. For what it's worth I am writing the script engine as generic as possible so other people could hopefully reuse our scripts at some point in the future.

 

[Bingle]

1) The ANT Movie Catalog uses Object Pascal as the scripting language. To understand and work with it you really need to be a programmer, which limits the number of people that can write a scraper.

Really? That's bizarre. That means not even most programmers could work with it easily. What a strange choice for a scripting language.

But good call on your part to not use it!

 

[piranha]

The ANT Movie Catalog uses Object Pascal as the scripting language. To understand and work with it you really need to be a programmer, which limits the number of people that can write a scraper.

Will the XML scripts always embedded in the dll? That kinda makes it hard to update the script if the layout of site changes. As it is now, it requires recompile of the plugin to udate the script.

 

[fforde]

The ANT Movie Catalog uses Object Pascal as the scripting language. To understand and work with it you really need to be a programmer, which limits the number of people that can write a scraper.

Will the XML scripts always embedded in the dll? That kinda makes it hard to update the script if the layout of site changes. As it is now, it requires recompile of the plugin to udate the script.

Absolutely not. Default ones will be embedded in the DLL, but even those will be updatable by loading a new version of the script manually. Plus of course you could drop other scripts in.