My Anime 2 (2 Viewers)

[craige1]

Hey, I have a weird thing happen to me after I installed the latest build (2.1.1.7). The chibi girl character for the main menu for Anime 2 was replaced by a dull, ugly tv shaped icon with "anime" written inside. Is this normal or it's an error? How would I fix it?

We recently added a, what MediaPortal calls, "hover picture". It's the image that shows on the mediaportal window when you hover over a plugin link. There hasn't been a hover picture in My Anime 2 before but there was one in My Anime. You might have still had the old hover picture from My Anime coming up if you used it before. The new hover picture does not have any writting in it. It is named "hover_My Anime.png" and should be in every skin's media folder. I'm not exactly sure why it would remove the old one but not show the new one. What skin are you using? If you have a program that allows you to edit your skin then you could try updating the link to the new picture. Other thing to try is to delete the skin cache but that should of been done automatically if you used the installer.



A good test of popularity, try and find this plugin by google'ing "My Anime 2"...

Atm it doesn't seem that this plugin gets mentioned/recommended much out there on the big wide interweb. This isn't actually too surprising, up until this release, the only way to find this plugin was to actively search the words anime in the MediaPortal forum or to browse the plugins subforum until you stumbled across it. Now we have added the plugin to the MediaPortal plugin repository and our number of users has doubled in this one release. Not bad really, but this is still a "young" plugin. Nearly every release there are brand new features, the face of the plugin is still changing, and up until very recently there wasn't a single ounce of help on how to setup and use this pluging for any new users.

The other problem with the popularity of the plugin is the "target" ordinance. Currently you have to be a fan of anime who actively collects it AND have a HTPC. That narrows down the crowd a bit. It would be great to get this plugin out there into the general anime crowd and say "Here is a client that allows you to watch your anime, move them into groups, sort it by release date or a number of other details, see detailed info about them, and manage the files for you" Features. There arn't many(if any) programs out there that allow you to do that. The only one i can think of is AOM, which we plan to replace most of its functionality anyway. The biggest "draw back" about just giving it out to the general anime community is that you have to install MediaPortal first. Half of them don't know what it is, and the other half don't want to install a full blown media centre program just to watch their anime. Now i would, but it is unrealistic to expect them to. There are ideas for far down the line, that may never happen, to turn My Anime 2 into an independent program, that has the MP interface as a plugin to the My Anime 2 core. That would solve that problem, along with a couple others.

Adding files manually is a painful task atm but there are plans to make it easier. It wont be as easy as the automatic way and it never will, but we would like to make adding files as easy as it possibly could. Its a little unfair the expect people to only use files that have been entered into the AniDB database, which the automatic way requires.

 

[FdL]

Hey, I have a weird thing happen to me after I installed the latest build (2.1.1.7). The chibi girl character for the main menu for Anime 2 was replaced by a dull, ugly tv shaped icon with "anime" written inside. Is this normal or it's an error? How would I fix it?

We recently added a, what MediaPortal calls, "hover picture". It's the image that shows on the mediaportal window when you hover over a plugin link. There hasn't been a hover picture in My Anime 2 before but there was one in My Anime. You might have still had the old hover picture from My Anime coming up if you used it before. The new hover picture does not have any writting in it. It is named "hover_My Anime.png" and should be in every skin's media folder. I'm not exactly sure why it would remove the old one but not show the new one. What skin are you using? If you have a program that allows you to edit your skin then you could try updating the link to the new picture. Other thing to try is to delete the skin cache but that should of been done automatically if you used the installer.

I found the "hover" pic file with the chibi girl ^^ Now I need to know where to paste it to replace the default one for Anime 2. And yeah, I did use the original anime plugin so it must have carried over.

The thing is I'm having some weird problems with my HTPC's hard disk I think, as I don't seem to be able to browse too deep into the MP folders... :s So far it all works for watching and everythign MP, but I noticed when trying to fix the pic issue. It just crashes and reboots the computer, every time I tried to browse looking for the pic. Sounds awful, yeah. So I hope I don't have to reinstall everything into a new HD.

But if I eventually have to, this is a good time to ask exactly what would I need to backup to keep everything Anime 2 as it is now. Just the database file and it would work from there, rebuilding the images and stuff, or would I have to backup those too?

 

[lwerndly]

Hi there,

Seems like the audio and subtitle settings in the plugin configuration are not retained. - At least they are set back to default settings when you revisit the configuration.

Works for me but I am using the latest SVN version.
I will revert back to 2.1.1.7 tomorrow and see if I can reproduce the problem

I found the "hover" pic file with the chibi girl ^^ Now I need to know where to paste it to replace the default one for Anime 2. And yeah, I did use the original anime plugin so it must have carried over.

The thing is I'm having some weird problems with my HTPC's hard disk I think, as I don't seem to be able to browse too deep into the MP folders... :s So far it all works for watching and everythign MP, but I noticed when trying to fix the pic issue. It just crashes and reboots the computer, every time I tried to browse looking for the pic. Sounds awful, yeah. So I hope I don't have to reinstall everything into a new HD.

But if I eventually have to, this is a good time to ask exactly what would I need to backup to keep everything Anime 2 as it is now. Just the database file and it would work from there, rebuilding the images and stuff, or would I have to backup those too?

I'll have to check the hover images again.
The image you are speaking of was designed for monochrome only.
craige1 has done another images which should only work for other skins I thought?

Backup the database file. But unless you are putting your anime folders into the same absolute path it won't work straight away. But bert_r (I think) wrote a sql script you can use to fix this.

I always back up the images folders as well. It is not necessary but saves you time/bandwidth on downloading all the images again. If you don't, a "Run Import" will download any missing images anyway.

 

[yhoogi]

Dear faithful My Anime 2 peeps,

Due to the size of this topic, this daunting 412 post topic that scares the little ones away, we have created a dedicated forum for the plugin. Hopfully it will make it much easier for new users to seek help, and to make it easier to find answers to questions that have already been answered. Dont be shy and take a look.

We also have started a wiki. Currently there is no documentation for My Anime 2. No manual, no guides, no nothing. This wiki is to change this fact. We will be building upon it over time, but also invite you to add to anything to it that you think will help other users.

Forum
Wiki

As always the IRC channel is open for users aswell.

Server: technohub.homedns.org
channel: #MyAnime2

Hi there,

Please do not understand me wrong: I appreciate the time and effort you all invest in developing this plugin.
But, wouldn't it be better to try to create a subforum within the MediaPortal Forum setup?
This second forum may create some confusion for the devoted plugin users and also causes risks of double entries, missing information if you check only one forum, etc.

Just my two cents...

Cheers,

 

[craige1]

FdL
Heres a guide, Change the default hover image.

About the new forums
The forum was originally made in response to our google code forum being utterly spammed out of commission. We developers need a place to talk technobabble without using the public support forum. There is a hidden developer only section on the new forum that allows us to talk ideas without them becoming promises in a public area. Since the developers use the forums regularly to talk, it makes it easier and faster for us to respond to help if users use that same forum. We also currently don't meet half of the requirements needed to have our own sub-forum in the mediaportal forums.

This current 400 and something post topic is way to long for new users. I know personally that i wouldn't sit there and go through that just to find that one post with the info I need, so I don't expect others to ether. We have been having problems with new users trying out the plugin and leaving, so we try to make it as easy as possible for new users. I do agree that double forums could lead to missing information when searching, which was the idea behind adding the user support parts to the new forum. The double forums problem, along with later My Anime 2 possibly becoming a stand alone program, makes me vouch for a complete migration to the new forums, but that is defiantly something that would need alot of discussion about first.

 

[yhoogi]

Understandable that the devs needs a dedicated forum.

But for the public users and the now rather large thread: why not opt for a dedicated plugin section in MP? There, everybody could issue a new thread, as all the other plugins like moving_picture, TV-Series, etc are doing.




Also, hearing for the first time of the standalone issue:
Seems interesting, but I personnally would favour the plugin, as I am using MP for the integration of all different functions (Movies, TV, Radio, Music) in a single user environment. For me it was a major driver to get rid of all the specific solutions.

Cheers,

 

[FdL]

@FDL
Heres a guide, Change the default hover image.

Thanks a lot!!! I'm going to try this today.

I found the "hover" pic file with the chibi girl ^^ Now I need to know where to paste it to replace the default one for Anime 2. And yeah, I did use the original anime plugin so it must have carried over.

The thing is I'm having some weird problems with my HTPC's hard disk I think, as I don't seem to be able to browse too deep into the MP folders... :s So far it all works for watching and everythign MP, but I noticed when trying to fix the pic issue. It just crashes and reboots the computer, every time I tried to browse looking for the pic. Sounds awful, yeah. So I hope I don't have to reinstall everything into a new HD.

But if I eventually have to, this is a good time to ask exactly what would I need to backup to keep everything Anime 2 as it is now. Just the database file and it would work from there, rebuilding the images and stuff, or would I have to backup those too?

I'll have to check the hover images again.
The image you are speaking of was designed for monochrome only.
craige1 has done another images which should only work for other skins I thought?

Backup the database file. But unless you are putting your anime folders into the same absolute path it won't work straight away. But bert_r (I think) wrote a sql script you can use to fix this.

I always back up the images folders as well. It is not necessary but saves you time/bandwidth on downloading all the images again. If you don't, a "Run Import" will download any missing images anyway.

Thanks a lot, this is important info. Thankfully I wouldn't have problems with the paths to the episode files since they are all either in network folders or in DVD-Rs.

Hm, I could replace the image, but I can't clean the cache since the path listed in the wiki article doesn't seem to be right. I can't just browse to it either because of my pc problems.

craige1, could you please check and tell me the correct path? Could it be in Documents and settings instead? Thanks in advance.

 

[lwerndly]

Understandable that the devs needs a dedicated forum.

But for the public users and the now rather large thread: why not opt for a dedicated plugin section in MP? There, everybody could issue a new thread, as all the other plugins like moving_picture, TV-Series, etc are doing.

Yeah we hope or that one day, but you need a minimum of 5000 downloads from the repository to qualify for this.
Unfortunately before the last release we doing all our downloads from google code. We started changing this for the last release, and the next one will have the main link from there.

Also, hearing for the first time of the standalone issue:
Seems interesting, but I personnally would favour the plugin, as I am using MP for the integration of all different functions (Movies, TV, Radio, Music) in a single user environment. For me it was a major driver to get rid of all the specific solutions.

craige1 wasn't talking about replacing the MP plugin, but just adding other applications outside of MP. Just so you could do things like
- Use a web browser to view and manage your database/collection
- Use a different PC to hash your files
- etc

 

[FdL]

craige1 wasn't talking about replacing the MP plugin, but just adding other applications outside of MP. Just so you could do things like
- Use a web browser to view and manage your database/collection
- Use a different PC to hash your files
- etc

This would be very interesting. I have my MP on a different PC on the network and it's usually uncomfortable to edit and manage stuff from that same machine I use to watch it. It would be cool to be able to manage it remotely via web browser. Also to be able to hash files from a faster system.

 

[craige1]

Thats the idea .

Sorry about not being clear about how how it would effect MP. What you see inside MP wouldnt change at all, it would still look the same way from inside MP. I have invested so much time and alot of money into getting MediaPortal to work, and i love using MP to watch my anime, I wouldnt want that to change. Its just that My Anime 2 is very tied into MP right now, but i think if we seperated the MP GUI from the core code alittle bit more, we could make the plugin much more accessable to the rest of the anime community. The more peeps we can make happy with this plugin, the happier i will be.