Anime Library - Support Thread

[Takkun]

Hi Ommina! Nice plugin you've made.

Unfortunately, I have no idea if I have it setup correctly. Yes, its connected to my (new) AniDB account and I've scanned my collection.

I would like to request some documentation on how the plugin acts (in ideal conditions, of course) from the GUI perspective. For example, when browsing the collection, what is the full list of menu options? When/why would any of these not be available (due to config settings or system settings).

I think my problem is a configuration-error on my part, as I nearly had to muddle my way through it (the [?] buttons did help, thx!). It could also be a key-combo I am unaware of. In my specific case, I cant get to a title's info-screen or vote-screen. I can find no option for it. I can think of a number of ways why this would be intentional (configuration removes it, all info not yet gathered, etc...). Oh! If only I had some reference on how the GUI works, then I could look all this info up myself... :p BTW: As a web-dev, I'm very nitpicky on myown program-documentation and have become fairly good at assembling professional (and pleasing to the eye) docs. So if you don't want to bother with the visual aesthetics, I'd be more then happy to organize & publish the docs for you (doc, htm, or pdf).

On a side note, updating your first post (in this thread) would help others locate the latest info for your plugin. While scanning for info, I eventually found your "install" notes barried in the thread. I wasn't sure if these were the latest/greatest install-procedures but (after more searching/scanning) they were the only ones I could find. This kind of thing would go great within that first post (links work too), and could be updated as the program evolves. Visiting the thread from the Wiki brings them to that first post anyway, so it's only natural.

Thanks

[Ommina]

Hello Takkun! Thank you for your comments.

As you're discovered, my documentation-writing skills stink. It's boring! But you make good points, so I'll respond to your questions here and, if they are roughly what you were looking for, will also copy them into the OP so they don't get buried. If you really feel motivated to polish them up, by all means, do so! Happily, improving on my work shouldn't be too difficult...

MAIN MENU

Select: The obvious one. Select the currently highlighted item in the right-hand list. Same as just hitting ENTER in the list itself. I'm probably going to remove this one, since the menu is getting too long, and it does not really add anything, other than a passing resemblance to the gbpvr Video Library.
Watching: This will provide a list of all titles for which you have watched at least one, but not all, episode in the past 30 days, and for which you have at least one unwatched episode available. Essentially, the series titles you are currently viewing.
Not Started: This is a list of all titles for which you have not yet watched an episode.
Finished: This will provide a list of all titles which have been watched "from beginning to end", that is, you've watched the complete series. A qualification on this one though -- a series is only considered finished when all episodes produced are watched, not just all available files on the HD. That is, if you collect at watch 20 episodes of a 26 episode series, it is NOT finished, as there is still six episodes to go. If an additional file is added to the collection, the title will appear under 'watching' instead.
All Titles: All titles, regardless of watched state. Just a complete list of what titles you have in your collection.
Categories: A list of anime categories, from which you can select a category of interest and get a list of all titles that have that belong to the category selected. I'm not at all fond of the v1.7 implementation of categories.
Unlisted: Files that are not listed in AniDb will be displayed here. Depending on the file's source, this often means the file is corrupt in some way.
Notifications: Only displayed if "listen for AniDb Notifications" is checked. This works in conjunction with the 'notification' system of AniDb itself. Using it, you can, for example, be notified when a new file is released for a particular title. Primarily useful only if you are collecting titles that are still in production, as you will get an indication in the plugin as soon as the file is added to AniDb. (Well, within a minute. Close enough.) Presently, notifications must be enabled and disable via the AniDb website.
Messages: Only displayed if "listen for AniDb Notifications" is checked. A copy of AniDb messages are sent to the plugin. Most usefully, the messages provide an indication if a new relation is created between a title you are collecting, and one you're not (such as a sequel, OVA, etc).
Folders: Only displayed if "enable folder view" is checked. Displays the contents of the directories, entirely unfiltered, as if you were simply using Video Library. I'm still considering removing this.
Calendar: Not released yet. Not sure why I'm even mentioning it.

Let's see... what else might you see.

A "TV with a minus sign" icon in the far left of the title list represents missing episodes. The complete title is NOT available.
A "green plus sign" icon in the far right of the title list represents a "new file" notification for that title. Again, only appears if notifications are enabled.
The "eye" icon in the far left is the "watched" indicator.

POPUPS: Popups (where the vote / info screens are found) do not have menu options. Your remote may vary from this, so I'll give both the (typical) remote button and the keyboard shortcut as well

Title info: "info" on the remote, or "home" on the keyboard, while an TITLE is selected in the main list.
Episode / file info: "info" on the remote, or "home" on the keyboard, while an EPISODE is selected in the main list. (That is, you get info based on what you have selected).
Title Description / Summary: "green" on the remote, or "Ctrl-G" on the keyboard. (Alternately, pressing 'info' again while viewing the title info will toggle between the image and the text summary).

I think that covers it all for the moment. Should probably copy it all the the wiki as well -- to my mind it should really be the first and (ideally) only necessary stop for documentation.

But did I mention it's boring?

[Takkun]

Yep, I've got it! Thank you so much Ommina. As it turns out, I just didn't know how to get the popup as its a little different then standard GB-PVR behavior.

Boring, LOL! I can understand. Believe me, my last coworker felt the same way! I like to think of it as a way to avoid countless hours of simplistic tech-support. Still, it's not for everyone.


Oh, wait. I see that [vote] works on Anime-Titles (not episodes) whilst using the 'home' popup key. However I am unable to select a vote-level nor highlight the submit button (perhaps cause the level=0). I'm currently trying to do this with a keyboard and mouse because I've been unable to get my cheap eBay IR device working on my computer (but remote-buttons do help others).

[Ommina]

Correct on the episode voting. AniDb does actually maintain episode votes, but I could never see the point (nor a way to include it without making a horrible mess of the UI). Is anybody going to skip an episode because it has a lower rating than the one that follows?

To actually cast a vote, use the actual number on the keyboard, one through zero. Or, presumably, the same number on the remote. That will light up the 'submit' button.

As it turns out, I just didn't know how to get the popup as its a little different then standard GB-PVR behavior

I did try to keep it as much like the base GBPVR screens as possible, but could not think of any place where gb provided a detailed popup like that, so went with what made sense to me (the info button).

I still can't think of any, but since I don't do any video capturing, I may be missing areas of gb knowledge. It may be too late to change now, but what would be a better way to pop up the popup? Perhaps I can use both behaviours.

[Ted the Penguin]

I did try to keep it as much like the base GBPVR screens as possible, but could not think of any place where gb provided a detailed popup like that, so went with what made sense to me (the info button).

and from left field....


actually, in cases such as the TV guide, it is brought up by just hitting 'ok' (or enter) on a show, to watch directly it you just hit play I believe.

[Ommina]

actually, in cases such as the TV guide, it is brought up by just hitting 'ok' (or enter) on a show, to watch directly it you just hit play I believe.

Interesting.

While I modelled the plugin after the Video Library, using the TV Guide behaviour makes a lot of sense to me, although I kinda hate to make such confusing changes a year later.

But only kinda. I'm going to try it out here and see how it feels and how long it takes to get used to the change. It opens up a couple other door too, so I'm quite tempted to run with it. Thank you for the note!

[Takkun]

Obviously not "officially" supported, I've been trying to trick Anime Library to use a Network Share folder.

I've had some success by creating a symbolic link (called a "reparse point" on xp) on my GBPVR client that loads the "real" db3 file, over my network, from my PVR-PC. This enables things like, anime listings, flagged anime (watched), and basically all DB stored info.

Unfortunately, no files are actually listed. Remembering my initial anime scan was on my local-drive, I went back to the plugin-config to change the path and re-scan but could not select (in any way) a networked path. I also took a peak in the db3 file (capitalized table names?!?) and sure enough, no. So, I opened gbpvr/config.ini and changed it there. Sure enough, the path listed in the config app shows the correct path.

I opened aniscan.exe again and it detected nothing! Confused, I renamed the db3 file to something else and moved in the empty db3 file I kept on my client install of aniLib. Once again aniscan detected no files.

So, I was wondering, because XP network shares are not accessible from AniLib's Config-GUI, is this a limitation of the software or just an unknown fluke? (I wouldn't call this a bug)


In a pinch: At this point, I just need aniscan to access a network folder. Possible?

1:53 :eek:, time for bed...


EDIT:

in cases such as the TV guide, it is brought up by just hitting 'ok' (or enter) on a show, to watch directly it you just hit play I believe.

Well said!

While I modeled the plugin after the Video Library, using the TV Guide behavior makes a lot of sense to me, although I kinda hate to make such confusing changes a year later.

You know, that was exactly why I was confused with the info-popup. I had expected the popup to be an intermediary between the listing and the playing functionalists (specifically mimicking "recordings" tho). I would recommend AGAINST modifying version 1 though, having an already-established UI. There's plenty of time in which version 2 can improve upon that stuff.

[Ommina]

Hmmmm.

While I exclusive used networked drives here, I do so through mapped drive letters. I get the impression that may not be an option in your case, unless extra care is taken to ensure the drive letters used on the GBPVR machine match those used on the machine that is running the hashing application. And it would get even more frightening if you have GBPVR on one machine, run the hasher from a second, and have the database itself on a third.

The first thing the hasher tries to do when starting is ensures that the directory presented to it exists. Since .NET will not try to authenticate a share and will return 'false' when checking to see if an unauthenticated shared exists, I'm guessing (just a guess) that this is why it is not finding any files.

For giggles, try to browse to the share via explorer and then run the scanner. In theory that should be sufficient to authenticate the share. In theory.

But.

Even if you get that working, what you're doing is not without risks. SQLite cannot lock the database across a network, so if you are making database changes from multiple sources, you are running an (albeit quite small, I should think) risk of database corruption happening because of it. The risks ARE quite small (the timing would have to be pretty precise, I imagine) but they're there.

Moving on the the popups and general navigationness.

I changed the keys locally to use the same kind of behaviour as the recording screen. Pressing select/enter brings up the file popup, which, in turn, has a [play] button. Pressing play/Ctrl-P, well, plays the file. Yay.

But not quite perfect. What I do not like about it is that it changes the key used to bring up the popup, depending on circumstances. On the list of anime titles, for example, Select/Enter needs to be used to drill down into the episode list. On the episode list, Select/Enter needs to be used to return to the title list.

That means for these cases, I need to return to using the original Info/Home key to bring up the popup, and I dislike having the popup key being Select/Enter in some cases, and Info/Home in others. However, that said, in lists in which Select/Enter has no function at all (notification list, message list, calendar) having their associated popup use the Enter key feels much more natural.

So, so far I'm unconvinced in either direction. Thankfully, it's easy enough to change the keys around. I guess I need to decide if the plugin is more like 'Video Library' or more like 'Recordings'. Maybe something in between, but probably closer to the latter.

[Takkun]

I think I'm going to give up on networking AnimeLib, at least until IP addresses (\\192.168.168.192\j-recordings\[] THEMED\[] ANIME) can be used instead of a drive letter. I'm fairly convinced that, for whatever reason, aniscan expects a drive letter. Honestly, mapping drive letters is an option of mine but I dislike more setup and maintenance and almost always shy away form such things whenever possible. At least I can still get to my anime collection through the Video Library.

I did try your suggestion though, navigate to the share in explorer then run aniscan. The app simply turns green saying, "No Files Waiting To Be Hashed -- No new files found.... bla, bla" and the database file remains empty. It seems the app isn't detecting any files at all, yet no error.

General Navigationness

There you go with the calendar again, lol.

Select/Enter needs to be used to drill down into the episode list

I think I understand what you mean now. Typically, pressing [HOME] on an anime title brings up it's info. Consider this: Leave the [HOME] key functionality in tact, clicking on a "title" does drill down as usual, when the user clicks on an episode, the INFO popup would show up (always) about the anime (possible episode-info in a future release?). In both cases the "play" button can be used. (If your up to it, playing on an anime-title (before drilling down) could queue all titles and start playing them in order.)

If you decide to go this route, make sure [PLAY] is automatically selected/highlighted in the popup; for those of us that use keyboards, so we can "skip" the popup by pressing enter twice.

[Ommina]

I did try your suggestion though, navigate to the share in explorer then run aniscan. The app simply turns green saying, "No Files Waiting To Be Hashed -- No new files found.... bla, bla" and the database file remains empty. It seems the app isn't detecting any files at all, yet no error.

Ah well, a vague hope, if futile in the end. Sadly, this is not likely to change, as it's a limitation of the framework itself. Even were I to remove the checks that the directory exists, it would just fail on the next step, since it still would not have access to the share.

Hm. Or, maybe not. I have an idea, let me get back to you on this.

I think I understand what you mean now. Typically, pressing [HOME] on an anime title brings up it's info. Consider this: Leave the [HOME] key functionality in tact, clicking on a "title" does drill down as usual, when the user clicks on an episode, the INFO popup would show up (always) about the anime (possible episode-info in a future release?). In both cases the "play" button can be used. (If your up to it, playing on an anime-title (before drilling down) could queue all titles and start playing them in order.)

If you decide to go this route, make sure [PLAY] is automatically selected/highlighted in the popup; for those of us that use keyboards, so we can "skip" the popup by pressing enter twice.

This is pretty much how I have it now, in fact, including the pre-selected [PLAY] button. But it just feels... odd. Sometimes [ENTER] performs a action (drill down, back up), sometimes it brings up a popup. I'm left with a feeling of ickyness. To get the file popup I press enter (or home), to get the anime popup I press home.

Which MAY just be leftover from having used the original behaviour for the past 18 months.

I wonder if changing the episode's [ENTER] popup to a smaller, concise summary of the file (roughly the same size as the built in recordings popup) would feel better.

---

There is not much episode, in contrast to file, details available on AniDb. While AniDb does have provisions for users to enter an episode summary, for example, very few people bother. I think I've seen two in the past couple years.

The "queue and play" idea is fun. I think I'll look into that -- assuming I can determine if a file ends 'naturally' and should continue to play the next file in the queue or if the user hit STOP, in which case the playback should probably end there.