A new version of Video Browser for Vista MCE
almost 17 years ago
Video browser, is a little plugin for Vista MCE that let’s you browse your videos the way they were meant to be browsed.–
Here is a very rough initial release of my video browsing plugin for Vista MCE. It seems pretty functional though it still does have a few quirks.
New in this release:
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Supports metadata for both TV shows and movies
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DVD playback direct from the hard disk
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Native Vista MCE plug-in (ported from XBAP for MCML) - Meaning the remote and scaling should work better
!/images/screenshots/VideoBrowser_tv.png!
!/images/screenshots/VideoBrowser_movies.png!
The installer is available “here”:http://www.samsaffron.com/downloads/1.
I have not tested this on XBOX extenders or Vista X64.
To get metadata for your movies use “MyMovies”:http://www.mymovies.dk/
To get metadata for your TV shows use “the following ruby script”:http://www.samsaffron.com/tvdb_scraper.rb.
You will have to install Ruby first and type: Ruby scraper.rb [Path for TV shows] in the command line.
The Ruby script is provided as is to the community using the public domain licensing Sqlite uses. The script contains a useful command line switch which will rename your videos to a more human readable format. It uses “thetvdb”:http://thetvdb.com/ as the source for its meta data.
There are quite a few areas in the plugin that need improvement, I will address them in a future version:
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Navigation between listview, sorting area and now playing window needs to be improved - it does not work in a predictable way.
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First time you navigate to a page the thumbnail on the left is not refreshed.
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When holding down the up or down remote buttons continuously it does not zoom through the list.
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I lost my new videos section (this was an areas that sorted the entire collection by date)
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Not displaying all the available metadata
Hope you enjoy this, please feel free to comment or post any suggestions.
I posted this on TGB also, but just to make sure you have it I post it here also Where would you like requests etc in the future? e-mail me if you want further requests or ideas, I have plenty!
Alright, I have this baby installed and I would call it a good start!
I simply love the fact that you can simply put in an xml-file with data and voila, you have a movie synopsis! This is just what I have been looking for.
I have a few ideas already, that you may consider:
- The posibility of getting one (or maybe two) user selected information from the xml-file shown on the same page as the movie itself. #1
- A subpage with detailed information. #2
- The posibility for the user to decide how many lines of movie synopsis there should be displayed. #3
- The posibility to delete a folder/movie. #4
Explenations:
#1: Often I flip through my movies, looking for a movie I could just squueze in before bedtime, meaning that I often look for movies that are of about 90 mins length. The ultimate solution would be if you could sort movies according to categories or runtime, but I guess that a rather big thing to ask for, so what about adding the posibility for the user to decide for an extran information on the same page as the movie? It could be done as simple as editing a config.xml or something. Extra field = runtime or something.
#2: The product as of now is great for an overview, but as you have mentioned yourself it would be cool to display all of the data. I don’t ever think you should change the easy way of navigating to a movie as it is done now, instead a subpage to each movie could be available. How about if you press Play on a movie it plays (doh) and if you press OK you enter the subpage!
#3: Pretty self explaining, but for people with a high res monitor or tv it would be nice to have the posibility to change how many lines of synopsis is displayed. Again, this could simply be put in a config.xml for now.
#4: I simply hate the fact that the option of deleting a folder, including all content, have been removed from Vista media center. On media center 2005 I always watched a movie, if I disliked it, I would delete it right away. Now I have to connect to my htpc remote and delete all content. So if you do a subpage, include a delete movie folder button.
I hope you will use my input, I assure you I will start using your application and report any faults etc to you as I go along.