'Videos' Plugin for GB-PVR (Preview 1) - amazing youtube video must see!

[tvshowman]

Hi!

I have been messing around with the old videos plugin after watching this cool video someone posted on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3AmRN2KQno

Basically it is a a year old and already everyone out there is using folder.jpgs and background.jpgs etc... to create some killer cover art pages for your videos.

everyone is on the bandwagen and doing this from xbmc, media browser for windows 7 my movies, sagetv, mediaportal with moving pictures plugin... to name a few that I tried or looked at. (Gbpvr just works right so I won't migrate to the others..)

with that said I am happy to see that the video plugins author has released the source code and whurlston is trying to bring this project back to life.

On my experience the plugin works very good using the default blue skin only It crashes pvrx2 with a windows error but I can ignore that using the green button on my remote to regain focus and I can continue through the menus..

The serious problem we have is that their is no scraper for gbpvr users that I know of that will get the needed files to make the eye candy work on the directories.they are..
in directory.
video.mpg - your movie
video.jpg - coverart
background.jpg - movie walllpaper for the dir
folder.jpg - cool pic for the top menus
video.xml - movie description
folder.xml - short movie description for top filmstrips menu's

JavaWiz's metadatagrabber can grab the video.jpg and video.xml

The above programs have scrapers for this but I failed to make them work with the file names that gbpvr creates plus my added titles usings zeds awesome guide enhancer for date and rating
28 Days(2000)(Language)(2.5 stars)_20090908_09401125.avi
lol

I think that with javawizs metadatagrabber grabbing much info that someone can use that info lik mp3 taggers do to display and arrange files based off of year or actor or whatever (comedy)

sub probably has some sweet features already in the works for a future release so I hope the gbpvr programming community see's that together you all have already put the ground work up for what's needed and just have to get together to put all those pieces together to make one killer data skin with all the eye candy.

Well one can hope

Here is the videos plugin thread
http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...eos+plugin



I posted a thread a long time ago of the filmstrip view with added metadata using cs3.
http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=41600


I have modified that idea to work with whurlston videos plugin and I ran into problems with metadata displaying in the list views. No biggie since I am using the filmstrip view but I would love to get it to disappear when using the other modes.

I will post the skin file I moded encase anyone wants to play with it.

if you put the files in your video structure than the backgrounds etc... will display :d

I made 2 music video directories one acdc and one megadeth and man it looks cool going into each.

Sorry for the rambling. Can you believe this youtube video is a year old? Pretty awesome stuff!

[whurlston]

Actually, that video is of reven's "My Videos" plugin.

[pBS]

i kept waiting for him to release something to try, but it never came..
i find scrapers to be too unreliable to be relied upon...
i wish they would just show extensive stream info when it's not available, or something like that..
and dynamic views... if no video in dir, list mode, videos found, strip mode..

i wonder if the win7 epg data could be used for a more reliable source?
[i believe album art and movie art is available from win epg in mc2xml win7 ver.]

[reven]

yeah i got busy with live (had a kid) and switched to a ubuntu server with apple tv front end.
so stopped using gbpvr (again).

i got the source code, it just has a whole pile of "reven" in it, and some things are hardcoded (the db connection string, but the db code is all in a script so could be changed easily).

if someone wants the code, and will actually continue developing it, ill put in gbpvrlibrary as is, and let someone play around with it.

the skin needs work, as its using elements from boxee alpha, and it no longer looks like that youtube vid


oh and i switched it to be more db based, but still had a fill mode, basically it had
- Movies
- TV Shows
- Files
scrapping isnt that bad, as long as its maintained, websites dont change very often, the scraping was done in a external xml file that was designed to be regularly checked for updates. but the defaults used thetvdb and moviedb.org, both have apis.

[pBS]

that would be nice, as there's a lot of advanced stuff in there that could really make a killer plugin without too much modification...[hopefully]
we need a good ole xbmc killer plugin like this..

it's way beyond my skills, but just getting it working as-is would be great...i'm sure many would like it and use..

[reven]

its near complete, i started to change it to look more like boxee and added support to mysql which slowed me down, and when i nearly completed that, thats when i started using ubuntu and xbmc, playback on windows just wasnt as good, nothign to do with gbpvr

[reven]

ill try and dump the code into gbpvr library as is sometime over the next few days.

[tvshowman]

reven that is great news!

congrats on the new addition to your family. time sure flies!

now it all makes sense about the videos plugin and video plugin being different .. been scratching my head trying to figure out how you did the right click menus and things hehe

can you pm me a link to the plugin as it is? I would like to load it up and see how the skin looks and reacts.

great video btw

[reven]

sorry there is no current build of it, i was just manually dropping the dlls across to my htpc.
it also only currently supports Community Skin 3, another reason i never released it.

ill commit the code and hopefully a developer will take it over, or at least a skinner. i dont mind helping out just to get it available for general use, the installer is about 80% complete as well (just need to put the final touches on, but im pretty sure it does install fine - oh you cant select a db atm, well you can put the info in, but i think it ignores it )

i havent touched the code in about a year, im a little rusty.

[tvshowman]

awesome!

i would love to install it using dlls or whichever. let me know either way

I been installing tons of other software to see what their scrapers do and that dam program "My Movies" is horrible. I installed that and it gave an error code and I searched that and it suggested uninstalling sql so I did that and before the uninstall I got the dreaded BSOD lmao.

that was lastnight so I went in safe mode and disabled gbpvr since I knew that must be trying to access a component and I was finally able to boot into windos and install .net3.5 again. I got my pvr back up so now today I decide I want to see what that program can do and it keeps giving an error about sql so I search and download components for sql and I finally get the program installed and just as it was finishing I get BSOD haa..

I don't like that program much anymore since I have never got a chance to install the movie database manager...

ive givn up and I am installing xp again.

I did manage to use a scraper for xmbc getting some fanart.jpgs and folder pics doanloaded into the movies directories. Changing the names fanart.jpg to background.jpg made things look great in the videos plugin skin i used. lots of element adjusting.

I was modding that videos plugin skin to display the folder.xml in the film preview window and think I would have more fun and success playing with yours instead.

I'm off work for two days so I am having a blast.

Cheers!