Moving Pictures Public Beta 0.5.5c (1 Viewer)

[armandp]

Nice discussion going on here hehe

I just wanna add to this that Moving Pictures aims for a fast & easy "out-of-the-box" experience. Minimizing the need for user input during import and/or setup of the plugin. Getting the user to spend more time browsing and playing back their collection rather than maintaining it. This includes supporting the common naming standards as used/encountered by our community.

Currently i'm also working on the initial DiscID implementation. This will boost identification of DVD media, reading the actual "standard fingerprint" of the DVD (or it's 1:1 backup) (as supported by WMP, MCE, VMC, My Movies etc.. ) DiscID might or might not be in the upcoming release depending on how much time Fforde needs to finish up the main feature he's working on.

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

Sounds really nice, looking forward to hearing fromm both of you, as i'm pretty sure most user's are

Just to be sure did anyone thank the both of you, well i am, great work, keep it up

Chow

 

[armandp]

We'll do our best ... in the end it all boils down to free time and motivation

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

Motivation, we can supply

Free time, now that's the awkward bit, now back to the real world, best wishes guy's

 

[zack84a]

Scene rips are often still done to fit onto old fashioned CDs (700MB). Compressing a full 5.1 movie down to this size loses a LOT of quality and usually ends up as stereo. Watching those things on your PC is fine, but watching them on a 42" or above screen in your living room that has a 5.1 system is just terrible.

Some rippers don't want to lose so much quality so they make them multi-part, but often still impose a 700MB limit so that people can still fit them onto CDs.

However...

Realistically, the cost of blank DVDs is so low that there's really no need to do this. It's done so that kids (yes, children and young teens) who can't afford DVDs can rip them onto CDs (which are only marginally cheaper). The people doing the ripping are usually also teens as well. It's just a habit from 3 to 5 years ago when blank DVDs were expensive, everyone swapped home movies on CDs, and people watched them on 17" computer monitors.

Stay away from rips that are 700MB in size if you plan to watch them on a modern home theatre. Do your ripping to at least preserve the 5.1 sound and keep the video high quality. That means a normal movie would shrink down to about 1.3 to 1.5GB. Use a video joiner to re-join movies that have been split to 700MB so that you don't get a pause in the middle of watching while your player has to switch from 'CD1' to 'CD2'. If you can't join them, keep them in the same directory.

And if you think that's too much trouble and you can't be bothered, or that the quality looks and sounds fine as it is, why are you using Media Portal at all? In fact, I struggle to work out why people insist on keeping their TV episodes and movies in rar files and with names like 'heroes.s03e09.Bill.takes.the.blue.pill[VTR].avi', if they're using a home theatre system. So they can continue to 'give back to the scene' while at the same time have their collection available in their living room? I dunno. Boggles my mind and I don't think time should be spent making importer work for these situations. Either stick to your CD swapping, laptop-watching underground teen rebel lifestyle, or have a home theatre environment with a neatly organised system of audio and video. Don't ask coders to make their importers handle these infinitely-complex filenames, obscure codecs, and bizarre requests

("I keep my multipart movies, complete with 6 subtitles, in a multi-part RAR file along with PAR files, named using roman numerals and swedish characters, compressed using a beta version of MPEG7, and want to watch it on my iPod connected to a 60" plasma, and it's not working. Can you spend 3 weeks writing code to make your program work for my environment?"

/rant

All in good fun I am replying. The great thing about Media Portal/HTPC's is that everyone can have their own setup.

I posted earlier because I noticed a way that users could speed up their import. It was my impression that one of the main goals was to make managing your movie database easier. If I want have to manually tweak everything, then I would just use My Videos. Also I am pretty sure I am not the only person trying to relive their 'teenage' years and download scene rips... One day I will grow up.

First...
It appears you have alot more free time than I do.. Time to rip movies, find subs, and add it to your collection. However since you appear to only want the best quality, you spend even more time ripping and encoding your blue rays. I encourage you to stay away from tv seasons.... you might be waiting awhile. Next everyone can rejoin a file. If thats the case, lets just say everyone rejoin, and lets not worry about two cd situations.

Second..
This isn't napster. If you have a great scene source.. not tpb, you normally get great rips, with 5.1 audio. Maybe not 110% perfect audio for your sound proof room (I know you love quality), however good enough for me to hear the explosions come from behind me... very scary i know. If you remember my original posts... movies that deserve to be 1.2 gbs (the low end of your sweet spot) are.... Others aren't that big because they don't have to be... Why waste hard drive space when its completely unnecessary. Now there are cases when I have found action movies to be over compressed... Or a movie falls along the one 1 cd/ 2cd border, and it is infact over compressed. If that is the case.. then I might actually rip it myself.. Continue to live in wav format.. ill move to mp3 and on to flac. Scene rips have to use certain codecs, naming standards, and quality guidlines... Period (or its nuked).. It doesn't guarantee they absolute 100% best quality, not even close, but I do know it wont be over cropped it won't be out of sync, and it will be complete.

Third..
Why would I rename files if I didn't have to?
Yes there are some crazy names for tv shows, they all make sense, and if you know the rules then they are easy to parse (see tvseries). See at least my files follow some sort of rules.. They could write the program following scene naming rules and we would be just about done.


Like I said all in fun.. because in the end I don't care... Quality is great on my end..

We both can agree that this plugin fits both of our needs, and we are both happy because of it.

Finally I would say I use Mediaportal because I love tinkering and love technology, and I am always excited to see my HTPC can do next...

 

[globaldonkey]

This has been quite an amusing debate.....

Personally I'm a "neat freak" and even go to the trouble of joining split avi's and merging avi's with external subs into an mkv, if for no other reason than having an asthetically pleasing directory listing (plus mkv's are just so much easier to use). I use TV Show and Movie renamer to standardise the filenames as well.

But I wouldn't go as far as declaring somebody who doesn't do this as having a "CD swapping, laptop-watching underground teen rebel lifestyle". That perhaps is the part of the opinion that need not be expressed.

 

[Bussiebaer]

Had a short glimps at the plugin. Worked amazing, found the most of my movies right from the start. And it was nice not to search for cover/fanart manually. Wait for the ofdb-support, then I will take another look.

Many thanks for your hard work!

 

[ThaClown]

For me the effort that goes in renaming a mivie to the IMDB name and a TV serie to <series> - <season>.<episode>.<ext> is very little, .. Maybe add a folder.jpg and subs and all is perfect in less then 3 mins per movie/season.

Use BulkRename or SeriesRenamer and you're done.
If you are really THAT buisy when do you have time to watch all the movies and series????

 

[Darre]

Dir's post made me laugh CD-swappin Underground teen rebel

I kind of agree with everyone here, the plugin should pickup most scene named files.. TV-series and movies. I have a relativly large DVD collection, but I think I've only ripped like 1% of it to my computer myself. The rest I downloaded. I won't spend weeks ripping 400 DVD's when I can just click a link, extract it and move it to my movie dir.

Ive renamed a lot of the movies/TV-series as well.. Why? Because I found actually renaming some files that I know won't get picked up without me interacting inside the program(s), because of rescans etc, will eventually cost me more time/effort then just renaming them ONCE. Its not hard to do at all =) I'd guess it takes around 5 secs a file if you do it when you download. If you have lots of files to rename just use some program to do it. I had all the extra stuff in all my movie names removed with a filerenamer, I only had to go over and tidy up some of them afterwards.

As of my last scan moving pictures picked up just about every movie I have, and most of them without even asking.

 

[Raytestrak]

Where does moving pictures store it's cover information?

I have my movies on a network share and sometimes my database becomes corrupted. Maybe it happens when my server is inaccessable, I don't know, but my entire movie collection becomes f*cked up. Which always sucks, but I have quite a lot of anime movies and it recognizes them all but always enters the japanese names in moving pictures. So I have to manually type all the names in the moving picturers plugin which REALLY sucks.

I've had to do this about 5 or 6 times, so now I make a backup of the database and copy it in the database folder. This works okay, because I don't have to do a lot of typing, but the cover info isn't stored in the database because allthough I see all my movies in the correct order and with the correct names, but a lot of covers are missing so I still have to add them manually.