Movies beta

[jam_zhou]

works perfect out of the box. quality code there vik.

regarding above suggestions:
#1 I agree with the above of having categories but it is not clear to me how you would assign a film to a certain category given that this is driven from the external xml files.
Let me illustrate how my family access movies atm (via the built in videos plugin)
My movie folders are configured as moves\adult and movies\family. All the R-rated films go in adults (no "daddy" movies I might add) as well as movies only the wife and I would ever want to watch (the Piano for example) and the rest go in family (i.e. all the kids and family films).

Now I have 2 kids aged 13 and 16 so the 16 year old gets to watch movies rated as [15] so I and they need to see the classification (MPAA). So all my movies (and movie folders) are named in format [movie] (year) [MPAA] so they can see the age rating for a film. Historically I did the renaming automatically using the free media centre master program but it does tend to get the MPAA rating plain wrong (and doesnt read UK ratings) so I usually have to fix manually... This is what you have to do without a database driven front-end!!

so the kids just look in the family folder when the want to watch a movie and aren't traumatized by scary/racy folder art and also don't have to wade though list of films that they aren't allowed to watch
(or interested in).

I would just use the root folder as the category and allow the plugin to read nfo file, thumbnail and fan art in that root folder as well. I want to display the fanart and nfo file because I want to also have a description of what kind of movies are in the category.

I think most people already have it organized in something like this.

[agerdin]

vik, really nice Plugin I have been waiting a long time for

I really dont know if my request is feasible but I would really like to be able to have 2 instances of the plugin running at the same time. In the NPVR main menu I could then have "Movies" and "Children Movies". In each I could then have categories as already requested in this thread.

What do you say, can this be acheived?

Regards,

\\Anders

[vik]

I agree. I used this as a reference(see: 2.1.1 Movies):

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Imp...rt_library

However for reasons I don't remember now, I ended up with Ember as a scraper, so I've worked with the output Ember provided. I tried some other scrapers and I've found that all "Media Managers" work a bit differently, they use extra tags or omit some. Also I haven't found to much info on what is a valid value in a certain tag, and I've seen variations. e.g.: Ember has a "certification" tag, xmbc does not seem to have it. This certification tag can have a list of the contentratings for many countries or it can hold a specific country and value pair, or just the value, based on settings in Ember:

<certification>USAG / UKG / Sweden:11 </certification>
<certification>West Germany:12 </certification>
<certification>12</certification>

while the mpaa tag for Ember has something like this in it:

<mpaa>Rated PG-13 for violence and some language</mpaa>

Hence in this case, not necessarily the best decision, but I used the certification tag, because you can choose to put a country specific value in it (at least with Ember). Note: In case of list I try to extract the US ratings.

Because of all the variations, I tried to keep the tags in the nfo I'm relying on to the minimum (at least for a start). I attached an nfo for example that Ember generated for me, I stripped out the tags I'm not using, so it's pretty simple. The tags are all lowercase.

[vik]

Sounds like a good idea. I think not necessarily the easiest but in my opinion the best way would be to allow the user to define categories on the settings screen, specify name, description, fanart, and a sophisticated filter that would work on the tags of the output.xml. Using filters on one or more tag(s) and potentially using regular expressions could give you a lot of flexibility. e.g.: You could use a filter on the full name of the video file in case you have your categories based upon directories or filter on content rating or both...

With this option I could filter the videos/movies either on the list/covers/icons view in some fashion e.g.: cycling trough categories kind of like sorts or views, and/or add an extra screen before I get to the list/covers/icons view.

jam_zhou: However the plugin only works on movies with nfo and with certain basic tags in the nfo (id, title...), so I don't see how would it handle home movies, or music videos or other categories that might not have the same nfo structure and the same basic tags?

[vik]

Yeah, I see your point.

The reason I ended up with the build in the settings because:

• I'm adding movies manually to my directories, I'm running the scraper manually, hence one more step to build the xml not an issue for me, I don't turn on the TV, I just VNC to my mediapc
  

• I'm not adding movies too frequently
  

• More importantly, I like to see the result (Movies.log) of the build, and see right away if something goes wrong, if you run it from NPVR using a remote, I assume you don’t want notepad popping up, if you run it in batch you don't want it pop up either. So you won't have any immediate feedback.
  

I like to have full control over the build, but I definitely see the convenience of just set it up and forget it.

[jam_zhou]

Yeah, I see your point.

The reason I ended up with the build in the settings because:

• I'm adding movies manually to my directories, I'm running the scraper manually, hence one more step to build the xml not an issue for me, I don't turn on the TV, I just VNC to my mediapc
  

• I'm not adding movies too frequently
  

• More importantly, I like to see the result (Movies.log) of the build, and see right away if something goes wrong, if you run it from NPVR using a remote, I assume you don’t want notepad popping up, if you run it in batch you don't want it pop up either. So you won't have any immediate feedback.
  

I like to have full control over the build, but I definitely see the convenience of just set it up and forget it.

Here's what I would do when adding a movie:
1. run xbmc to scrape and import or run thumbgen to scrape
2. transfer movie over the network to the htpc
3. when the wife is done her show or I have a second I just press update

I think on the HTPC box itself touching anything but the 10ft interface takes away from the cool factor.

As for the home movies and such...xbmc has a utility that will create nfo files from the file names which I believe can be done through the 10ft interface.

Finally, for the categories, I prefer the extra screen of categories rather than sifting through views. I think it's much more intuitive and keeps all controls to arrow keys and enter.

[vik]

Other questions:
what happens with DVD folders and video_ts.iso files?

It should work for both .iso file and VIDEO_TS folder.

[duicy]

I've installed the plugin but it won't create the output.xml file needed.
Do you have any suggestions on how to rectify the problem

[vik]

I've installed the plugin but it won't create the output.xml file needed.
Do you have any suggestions on how to rectify the problem

Did you check update mode on the settings screen when building the XML?
You must have nfo file for the movie, video file (based on VideoLibrary extensions in config.xml), id tag in the nfo, title tag in the nfo to make it to the output xml.
I've posted an example nfo earlier for reference. The tags are lowercase in the nfo.

The Movies.log should give you info in case of exceptions/errors.

[vik]

vik, really nice Plugin I have been waiting a long time for

I really dont know if my request is feasible but I would really like to be able to have 2 instances of the plugin running at the same time. In the NPVR main menu I could then have "Movies" and "Children Movies". In each I could then have categories as already requested in this thread.

What do you say, can this be acheived?

Regards,

\\Anders

Running multiple instances: Yup, I think it's possible, if I could drive the name of the plugin from external source, though I don't think it's the way to go.
However, running multiple instances could give you an initial solution for the categories request. Potentially you could run multiple instances with different directories specified, and maybe combined with the SubMenu plugin you could have different fanarts per category/instance. I'll think about it.