Skins. Grrr. Argh.

[imilne]

BTW, just wondering where you're getting your fanart from?

Mainly from Media Center Master I think. I've also been playing around with Ember, but it seems to be a bit of a dead end. I know folk will want this plugin to go find metadata automatically too, but that's something I'm just not going to think about for now.

Iain

[smajor]

Yeah, I stumbled across the 4x3 series caps when watching some old Star Trek TNG and DS9 episodes. I don't know where Iain is getting his fan art, mine downloads as part of the media scrape when I use Ember Media Manager:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/emm-r/

[Northpole]

I must not have things setup correctly because I tried Ember Media Manager and I get alot of mismatches. I must admit I haven't spent much time looking at it. I only have one image right now that I've been testing things with. Maybe I'll give Media Center Master a go. Thanks Iain.

[imilne]

Media Center Master also returns multiple fanart files per movie, which is nice, but complicates what I might have to do in the plugin. It's possible Ember can too, but if so, I never sussed out how. One of them was useless with TV shows as well, but I can't remember which.

It's actually been a while since I've used them because I've spent most of my time getting the "Videos" part of the plugin working rather than the "+" bit

Iain

[smajor]

Ember works well for movies, providing they are named even close to the IMDB name. It gets confused on remakes that have the same name (unless the year is included in the file name.) Very similar when you set it up with TV Series, providing you're pretty organized, and I find it helps to have some format like (S01E01) for season/episode, it can often sort that out with just the series name. Obviously your hits get better if you have the episode title in there. With the season#/episodes# plus episode title, I've had 100% accuracy for an entire series. I think the last one I did was Star Gate Atlantis.

I'm curious as heck about this plug in, but I don't want to confuse the issue with multiple metadata grabbers nor do I have much time right now to help test it. I'll throw my hat in the ring once the core stuff is done (and I'll have time later in the fall to test it if my input is wanted.)

[imilne]

I'm curious as heck about this plug in, but I don't want to confuse the issue with multiple metadata grabbers

Confuse away if you can, because the more I know now the less likely I'll be to run into problems at a later date.

Most of the core stuff is done now. Browsing around the folders works, with each folder maintaining its view. Video files and DVDs are detected correctly (not blu-rays yet, but that's planned). A ripped DVD folder will show up as if it were a single file, so you don't need to browse into it (and then into the VIDEO_TS folder) to get it to play. Folders with just a single video in them are treated differently too, as that's pretty common with metadata stuff. Basically, the following structure:

Code:

Video1.avi
Video2.avi
DVD1\VIDEO_TS\<dvd files>
MyFolder\Video3.avi

would show up in the list simply as:

Code:

Video1.avi
Video2.avi
DVD1
Video3.avi

Similarly, the fanart/metadata detection happens at multiple levels, so you'll always see it when a video is highlighted, regardless of whether it came from that video file or just the folder itself.

There's also PIN protection at both the folder and individual file level, and a history of recently accessed videos too. Playback and resume of videos is working. Playback of DVDs also works, but I can't control resume yet as that's still under sub's control. ISO playback is written, but not working very well. All playback/resume/deletion etc is handled by a popup window similar to what you see with Recordings, rather than having to select something, then go into the hidden menu. Oh, and there's playback via an external player too (if configured). Delete doesn't actually work yet, because I'm waiting until I've done more with the metadata because I'm not sure how much to delete: just the video, or all its accompanying stuff too. I'll probably also add don't-allow-delete and only-delete-if-PIN-active options.

You can also configure some other minor things like whether or not to show the "up" navigation icons, whether [folder names] should be written in square brackets, and so on...

Iain

[smajor]

That all sounds pretty impressive! So long as the metadata that works with NPVR works with it, all should be good for my data.

One thing comes to mind: Ember saves the .nfo files for TV Episodes with an XML tag of <episodedetails> whereas movie data would be <movie>. This caused NPVR to not recognize the .nfo as valid for my TV Shows. I haven't done any new show rips since the last couple of versions, so I don't know if sub ever added the above as an alternate to <movie>.

My solution to just write a simple one line script using sed that parsed all the nfo files in a given directory looking for "episodedetails" and replacing it with "movie". Worked like a charm.

[Northpole]

Confuse away if you can, because the more I know now the less likely I'll be to run into problems at a later date.

Currently, npvr can read a metadata xml file that has the movie or show description in it. I was curious if you had a particular metadata.xml format in mind. Martins' ImageGrabLite program is easy to use and generates a image and a .xml file for a movie or show. Current, however, the npvr video screen doesn't read that format. I'm sure Ember and Media Center Master also generate .xmls though I haven't check there formats.

[imilne]

At the moment it's reading movie.nfo files (xml) generated by Ember (which NPVR also reads), and also mymovies.xml files as generated by MCM. Depending on how complex additional formats are, it shouldn't be a problem adding more. There's basically an ordered list of what it goes looking for (in terms of xml, posters, fanart, etc), and once it finds a match it stops looking.

Here's a sneak preview of one of the views, now that I actually have it reading a bit more metadata:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]31377[/ATTACH]

The non-fanart bits top and bottom are because it's a 1920x1080 image, but I'm running this on my laptop with a non 16:9 screen ratio. It'll hopefully look better when filling the screen.

Iain

[Northpole]

Here's a sneak preview of one of the views, now that I actually have it reading a bit more metadata:

Wow, that looks good!