Visual Movie Browser

[jam_zhou]

First, external player is important to me because I like to sometimes use vlc or mpc-hc to play my videos. I use vlc because it can skip right to the menu or right to the movie and I use MPC-hc sometimes because it can handle "broken" encodes better.

As for showing genre icons I think this is only really necessary if you will be doing it in a database format. Since it's database format then you can let the user sort the movies into genres, actors, rating, year...etc. In this case, if you choose genres instead of showing a list like crime, action, drama, thriller, etc., you would be able to show it as icons and have pictures associated with it. I'm being selfish here because I've got kids and they just point to the screen as to what they want to watch. For instance, my genres would be Feature films, thomas, dora, disney and wiggles and they would see pictures representing those genres.

Since you are doing it as a directory structure then it's not a problem because I would assume that you'll just take the folder.jpg and display it.

BTW, for some reason the boxes like WDTV live are having a hard time trying to figure out what's the best way to implement this viewer for TV series. It's more for standalone movies - which is fine with me. I'm kind of partial to the Mede8er video wall - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4TvuYdnD4c. I would really prefer if it was compatible with this.

As for expectations, the two things that I'm waiting for in npvr are external player and dvd ripper (which might be there already).

Right now I'm still stuck using "My Videos"

Thanks for listening.

[imilne]

First, external player is important to me because I like to sometimes use vlc or mpc-hc to play my videos. I use vlc because it can skip right to the menu or right to the movie and I use MPC-hc sometimes because it can handle "broken" encodes better.

One of the things I was planning on was making video selection act a bit more like the Recordings screen. It's always bugged my wife that play/resume/delete etc are handled in different ways between Videos and Recordings. So selecting a video in my plugin will pop up a menu with options similar to what you see in Recordings (Play/Close/Delete and so on; I'm not sure if Resume can be done). If I can get support for external players working, then I'll add an additional option (Play Externally or somesuch). And I'll also add a user-setting along the lines of "Always use external player".

I'm kind of partial to the Mede8er video wall - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4TvuYdnD4c. I would really prefer if it was compatible with this.

Isn't their "wall" just the same as this sort of view in NPVR: http://www.gbpvr.com/nwiki/uploads/Skin/wave_pic.jpg ?
What do you mean by compatible with it?

[jam_zhou]

I look forward to the external player feature.

As for the wall...it's a wall then, when you click "ok" on the picture, it loads an about.jpg which shows fanart with a description of the movie. I'm not using npvr so I don't know if it's already in there - please forgive me if that's the case. With respect to the picture in the OP, you wouldn't have to click "ok" it would just bring up the about.jpg when you've scrolled to that movie - which in a way is better.

With respect compatible I mean that each movie is in it's own directory with all the metadata and jpgs in that directory. This is more important than the whole video wall thing in the end. That's how I've got it now, but in GBPVR, you basically have to click twice to view the movie - once to get into the directory and second to actually play the file.

The thing with the Mede8er (I have a PBO with the Mede8er firmware) is that all the info is pregenerated in that it's just showing different jpgs, it's not dynamically showing the info on the fly. Nonetheless, it's good enough for me.

Thanks.

[imilne]

I think I see what you're getting at.

I'm designing things that so that it supports folders full of videos, but also so that it treats a folder with just one video as "special". In these cases, you'll never browse into that folder, it will just act as if it was a video, playing it if selected, showing its fanart, metadata etc when highlighted.

That's the plan anyway - whether it'll work remains to be seen

[jam_zhou]

That sounds fine with me. Can't wait for the plugin!!!

[scb147]

If you can send me a PM with your email address, I'll try to get what I've got done so far sent over. As expected the baby has taken up pretty much all of my time, but I've managed to scratch together a basic framework to test a few ideas. Input from someone else would be nice though before I head off too far down the wrong path...

Just letting you know I got your email... I'm still processing it

[psycik]

Interesting project that I'd like to see going.

Have your thought about what sort of metadata files you'll support? There seems to be a number of formats, and I haven't yet figured out what the most popular is. I like the idea on an XML file for each video file, just haven't yet found a "common" way of doing this.

[imilne]

It's going, just very very slowly (new baby taking up all my time). scb147 has been looking at the metadata stuff, and has suggested mainly dealing with the output from Media Center Master to begin with. I still haven't really had a chance to play around with it much.

[psycik]

I know what that feels like....have a 20mo here

[agerdin]

It's going, just very very slowly (new baby taking up all my time). scb147 has been looking at the metadata stuff, and has suggested mainly dealing with the output from Media Center Master to begin with. I still haven't really had a chance to play around with it much.

imilne, hope things are well with your family. Any updates on the Videos+ Plugin?

\\Agerdin