why Moving Pictures over MP's (1 Viewer)

[xvffx]

Im not a heavy Moving Piture user.. just tried it for the last month or so.

I still go back to use MP's buitin cuz it's a 1 click from the menu and no background pictures (so its better to see the text)

my question is.. why Moving Pictures is popular? if people say, its's more accurate when downloading/searching the movie infos

I would agree, then why us MP's builtin suffering... would like to hear some comments ?

Vff

 

[fforde]

I will let others speak for themselves, but I started the Moving Pictures project because:

1) The data importers in MyVideos were not very accurate.
2) The data importers in MyVideos did not always provide complete information.
3) The UI for managing my collection in the config screen was very slow and non-intuitive.
4) The UI in MediaPortal itself supported too many media types (movies, tv shows, video clips, music videos, etc). This in my opinion created a less focused and therefore inferior interface.

Item #4 above is the main reason I chose to create Moving Pictures rather than contribute to MediaPortal and MyVideos. The focus of MyVideos is just too broad for me. I use MPTV-Series for my TV shows and I needed a separate (but similar) view for my movies. MyVideos did not provide this, it was too generalized and generic to suit my needs. Hence, the creation of Moving Pictures.

 

[ryan20021982]

I still go back to use MP's buitin cuz it's a 1 click from the menu and no background pictures (so its better to see the text)

Its 1 click away for me too.
You can edit the xml's to not use fanart.

Movingpictures is far superior to the internal myvideos.

I still use the internal myvideos for little things that I dont want to keep or dont need scanned in for info, like some documentaries and other little videos.

 

[ysmp]

abut the topic ;we have a say in korea " Why Drive A Matis Car When You Can Drive In A Mercedes Benz " ...

but what i will rally love to see in moving picture is ablity to edit movie info manuly ,, so i can put my home video also in moving picture ....now with the new catgory it will be nice to use one plugin ,

 

[RoChess]

I tried the Moving Pictures plugin a long time ago and it just didn't satisfy my needs compared to the build-in MyVideos. Later on the MP-TVSeries plugin become the only way for me to keep track of all the TV shows that I watch, especially because the import process is fully automatic. The cover/banner/fanart visual aspect is just a bonus, I could have gone with just a textual version if needed.

However once I really start using the MP-TVSeries plugin to the max, the graphical side became more of a bonus. That's when I started contributing to Online TV Database - An open directory of television shows for HTPC software to make sure my entire personal collection was complete regarding all the images (and as a bonus help others who might share the same interest).

Eventually MP-TVSeries was working so well for me (high WAF gratitute), that I started missing the same function for movies. There is a skin (forgot name) that allows fanarts on MyMovies, but the import of movies would still be semi-automatic via the database update inside configuration panel.

So I decided to give Moving Pictures plugin another try and v0.7.5 was extremly nice. I did miss a few features that I used on MyVideos a lot, such as Genres and a few other things, and while scanning the forum and SVN (as well as boring fforde with some questions), I noticed that a lot of the features I was looking for were already planned. And just as I was looking at how complicated compiling the SVN source would be, they released the v1.0.0 beta that same day.

If I had to nitpick, sure there are still a few things I like to see added, but it works amazing so far. The auto import of the movies is amazing and it's like a 99.9% match if you have the right title and release year be a part of the folder or filename. If you are lucky enough to have an NFO with the imdb reference inside, then it's a no brainer. Adding a new dynamic filter for 'Actors' manually, makes this plugin for my usage almost ideal.

I'm sure the programmers on MediaPortal/MyVideos are working hard on updating the scraper and such (which can actually be updated seperatly, but I wasn't seeing any recent ones), and lately a lot more movies were simply not found. Especially finding covers automatic was starting to become a disaster, because the MyVideos main source amazon.com (forgot the other) wasn't exactly working well for nice matches. I'm still using v1.0.2 so maybe I should have made the jump to v1.1.0 RC, but seeing as I then had to redo my entire database I wasn't looking forward to that. With Moving Pictures at least I could run test alongside, since it is seperate. Right now after many weeks of intense tweaking (in the little free time I had), I've actually deleted my entire MyVideos database, that's how happy I've been with this plugin.

The development of a plugin can occur much faster then the main program, so I'm pretty sure that is what fforde's main reason was to create this plugin and not try to make it a part of the MyVideos internal setup (I'll let him answer that for the real reason). It would have been much harder to integrate, because the whole point of MyVideos is to be much more generic and cater to a lot more then just movies. It would be nice if the programmers on MovingPictures could also look at MyVideos to possibly fix the scraper code on covers in that one, since that works much better in this plugin. Perhaps they are already, so I'll stay out of that discussion, unless they want to jump in.

As for your remarks:

1. Adding MovingPictures to your main menu is as simple as right clicking the configuration plugin icon and enable Home.
2. If you can not see the text, then modify the skin, but on the v1.0.0 beta with Blue3Wide it is very nice by default. The fanarts are covered with a colored layer, to make the text easy to read (on Blue3Wide that is).
3. As a last resort you can just disable the fanarts completly, as ryan20021982 suggested.

I still keep MyVideos around and that is simply to manually scan certain folders for media that I do not care to integrate (yet). But for me the MyVideos menu entry is now under 'Plugins' and MovingPictures is under 'Home'. My wife hates change, but recently already asked me "why didn't you do this sooner?"

to everybody out there helping MediaPortal become better then sliced bread