Netflix Manager (Updated 02/10/07) (2 Viewers)

[hobbes487]

The newest version is now in the downloads section (link in first post). It just took a little longer than normal to get accepted.

 

[Wormfishin]

It's working for me, I've only tried it on a few movies, I'll play around with it a little more later. Good job!

 

[hobbes487]

I'm glad it's working for you. Has anyone else tested it?

 

[RaDiKal]

I recall that Meedio had a theme that used a flash based utility to scroll the news feeds. I wonder if there is a similar plugin for MP that is also flash based. If so, then we can look at the source to figure out how they make that happen.

Have you looked at the non-flash previews to see if you can deal with them?

The YouTube plugin for MP has a way of playing flash embedded videos. I have contacted the author about how to do it.

I will try to implement the non flash trailers once i get home (about an hour). Hopefully that won't be too hard.

P.S. Are you a new convert from Meedio? I noticed you only have 2 (very inciteful) posts so far. If so, welcome. I was once one myself.

Yes, I'm a Meedio refugee. I didn't get that far in setting it up before it was sold so that's a plus (but far enough to have forked over some cash just prior to abandonment). I never did get things to work as wanted - the database structure isn't intuitive to start (and neither is MP but I'm gettin there).

While I'm a new poster, I've been leeching for quite some time (your post didn't get a response and I actually had something to add - so I registered and here I am). I never was able to get the Meedio Netflix plugin to work nor the Winamp visualizations - always lost control when they came up. So now I'm giving MP a try and being patient as it works its way toward covering all my wants. I envision watching selected trailers based on my past movie viewing habits (and ratings) and then having a button defined on the remote to add it to my queue (i.e. verywife friendly). I know that's a ways down the road, but as long as we keep walking, one step at a time, one step at a time.

 

[hobbes487]

Hopefully MP will be able to do everything you want. How is the Netflix Manager working for you now? What else would you suggest?

 

[Wormfishin]

I noticed today that if you click on add in the GUIConfiguration with no data in the rss fields it will add a blank entry. And the remove button does not work to delete it.

 

[RaDiKal]

Hopefully MP will be able to do everything you want. How is the Netflix Manager working for you now? What else would you suggest?

It works 'as advertised.'

I would like to see:

My ratings on movies I've rated as well as the Netflix rating for those I haven't (yellow stars for mine and red stars for theirs). From a space perspective, this could be a string of stars or a star with a number in the center.

Th ability to filter (hide) movies I've seen (rated) from selective RSS feeds (such as Top 100, HD DVD and Blu-ray).

Gray out the Play Trailer if you can't

For movies that are already in my queue, the Add to Queue button should be grayed out and show "Already in Queue"

An option to play a series of trailers from any of the feeds. In other words, play the trailers for the entries in my recommendations list. Then, optionally allow me to select Add to Queue or Ignore. Options for this would include a pause prompt at the end of each trailer and an overlay like a logo bug mapped to a single remote button that I could press while in the trailer.

An icon and rating for friends entries

The ability to combine my queue view with my wife's queue (she shows as a friend but is on the same account). Perhaps flagging each entry with the owner or two seperate views (combined with friend flagging).

 

[hobbes487]

Those are some great ideas. The easiest and most likely one will be to shows the rating for each movie. I will start work on that tomorrow and then begin to think about how I may be able to implement the rest of your ideas.

P.S. I will fix the problem with the remove button in the setup.

 

[hobbes487]

Ok, so i have spent a bit of time contenplating your ideas.

My ratings on movies I've rated as well as the Netflix rating for those I haven't (yellow stars for mine and red stars for theirs). From a space perspective, this could be a string of stars or a star with a number in the center.

This is possible to implement and I am almost done with it. The problem with this though is that it is slower than before because it has to parse http://www.netflix.com/Queue instead of the RSS feed of the queue. (the feed doesn't contain the rating info). Another problem is that the description for each movie is not in the parsed page. It is only in the RSS feed, so i would have to parse each MovieInfo page to get the description and that would be extra slow.

Th ability to filter (hide) movies I've seen (rated) from selective RSS feeds (such as Top 100, HD DVD and Blu-ray).

This has the same issues as above. All of the RSS feeds are very fast and simple to display. In order to know which ones have been rated, it will have to parse the actual page (i.e. http://www.netflix.com/Top25?sgid=2442&lnkctr=LhcSubCategory2442) and not the feed.

Gray out the Play Trailer if you can't

This would be extra slow because it would have to parse each individual MovieInfo page for each movie in the list to determine if there is a playable trailer or not.

For movies that are already in my queue, the Add to Queue button should be grayed out and show "Already in Queue"

This would suffer the same speed decrease as getting all the ratings.

An option to play a series of trailers from any of the feeds. In other words, play the trailers for the entries in my recommendations list. Then, optionally allow me to select Add to Queue or Ignore. Options for this would include a pause prompt at the end of each trailer and an overlay like a logo bug mapped to a single remote button that I could press while in the trailer.

An icon and rating for friends entries

The ability to combine my queue view with my wife's queue (she shows as a friend but is on the same account). Perhaps flagging each entry with the owner or two seperate views (combined with friend flagging).

These are great ideas, but i'm not even going to think about how to implement them until the rest are taken care of.

 

[RaDiKal]

Sounds like you might want to consider caching the queue and rating info and running a periodic update of that info (say nightly at 2am or on MP startup). Although this won't provide perfect info, it will serve the purpose of greatly reducing the clutter of items we're not likely to view/manipulate/enqueue. You can still parse the RSS feeds for current info and then selectively update the missing pieces as it makes sense to do in real time or to defer til the next scheduled sync.