pms-mlx (12-04-01 v0.7)

[killa339]

Thanks, I appreciate all that you've done. I'm a big fan of PMS and your work added in all the missing features I had hoped for! I only recently decided to add cover art to all my videos. I had lived with a generic icon for a long time, so waiting a bit more won't kill me.

[taconaut]

Had a look at the code and it's pretty straight forward. When videos are being imported using TMDB, the covers are being saved in the pictures folder and named <moviename>.cover.<ext>. When storing the video in the DB the field THUMBNAILPATH (belonging to the FILE table) is being inserted and used when you configure a folder to diplay the cover for videos.
Unfortunately there is no easy way to view this path (expect looking into the DB itself). I'll make a change for this field to be visible in the library view for the next release. At some point we'll be able to refresh this kind of information from the library view, but this isn't implemented yet.
For now, clearing the video files and reimporting them would probably do the trick.

[edit] hehe, digging a bit deeper I've found out it's already there. In the library view, show the column 'cover path' and please check if the picture with the shown path exists.

[killa339]

Hmm, the cover path is blank for every video. The TMDbID is also 0 for everything. Could this be because I enabled TMDb cover support after everything was already imported?

I'll try re-importing everything and seeing if that fixes this.

[taconaut]

Yep, the import mechanism has to become smarter and an edit/update mechanism has to be added. Currently, a video is being imported if it doesn't already exist (determined by its absolute path) and will never be updated (except if you rename the file -> clean library -> import it again)

[killa339]

Re-creating the whole media library did the trick - cover art now shows up. I saw under the library that it grabbed tag lines, etc from TMDb. Can this information be displayed on the TV? I don't have a PS3, but go through a Bravia TV

Some issues/questions:

1. If I re-size a column under the Library listing, it no longer sorts by the column I had chosen (ie it resets to the initial view)
2. Is there a way to manually add covers that were not found? I mean, I can obviously just copy over the pictures to the directory, but how would I go about updating the db to point the videos to these paths?
3. I noticed in the log a bunch of my videos failed to have covers retrieved. It failed with an index out of bounds error. I'm confused why some of these failed. How does your extension handle when there are multiple choices compared to nothing being found? I noticed in the log that for several videos that had multiple choices on TMDb, it chose the first one. However, the following video also had multiple choices, but it threw the following error:

Code: Select all

[scan] ERROR 19:50:10.884 Failed to retrieve movie with title 'The Fountain'
java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: String index out of range: -1
   at java.lang.String.substring(Unknown Source) ~[na:1.6.0_27]
   at net.sf.jtmdb.Movie.parseJSON(Movie.java:1648) ~[pms.jar:na]
   at net.sf.jtmdb.Movie.<init>(Movie.java:173) ~[pms.jar:na]
   at net.sf.jtmdb.Movie.search(Movie.java:1073) ~[pms.jar:na]
   at net.pms.medialibrary.movieinfo.TMDbPlugin.importByTitle(TMDbPlugin.java:29) ~[pms.jar:na]
   at net.pms.medialibrary.movieinfo.MovieInfoRetriever.getInfo(MovieInfoRetriever.java:30) [pms.jar:na]
   at net.pms.medialibrary.commons.helpers.FileInfoHelper.updateFileInfo(FileInfoHelper.java:31) [pms.jar:na]
   at net.pms.medialibrary.scanner.FullDataCollector.populatePluginMovieInfo(FullDataCollector.java:178) [pms.jar:na]
   at net.pms.medialibrary.scanner.FullDataCollector.get(FullDataCollector.java:100) [pms.jar:na]
   at net.pms.medialibrary.scanner.FileScanner.run(FileScanner.java:199) [pms.jar:na]
   at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source) [na:1.6.0_27]

It now has a TMDbID of -1 under the Library listing. From what I can tell, videos that also failed to be retrieved (but didn't throw an index error) are also stored with an ID of -1. If you need, I have other examples that also failed with an index out of bounds.

[taconaut]

Cool that you got it working!

I saw under the library that it grabbed tag lines, etc from TMDb. Can this information be displayed on the TV?

Yes. You can either include it in the name of the video by editing it's mask or show it as a Folder (similar to the transcode folder with more entries). This can be configured if you edit a folder.
Go into a 'Detailed' folder to have an example if you've kept the default folder structure.

1. If I re-size a column under the Library listing, it no longer sorts by the column I had chosen (ie it resets to the initial view)

The library view is pre-alpha and will probably change altogether because of problems like that. You've probably noticed that the sorting when clicking on the column headers behaves strangely as well.

2. Is there a way to manually add covers that were not found? I mean, I can obviously just copy over the pictures to the directory, but how would I go about updating the db to point the videos to these paths?

Besides editing it directly in the database there is currently no way to do that. This will be possible in the library view with a itunes-like editing dialogue.

3. I noticed in the log a bunch of my videos failed to have covers retrieved. It failed with an index out of bounds error. I'm confused why some of these failed. How does your extension handle when there are multiple choices compared to nothing being found? I noticed in the log that for several videos that had multiple choices on TMDb, it chose the first one. However, the following video also had multiple choices, but it threw the following error:

This is an exception originating from the used tmdb library (jtmdb); not much I can do about it. It can be a bug in the library, the tmdb web services or there simply is no result.
A difference you might notice when comparing the results of a search for a movie title on the site itself compared to the results in pms-mlx is that the default language set for pms is being used. When you make an english search, it queries for 'en' whereas 'en-us' often returns better results. This is a problem on the tmdb side though.

[ExSport]

Hi taconaut
It is possible to integrate also other search engines to PMS-MLX? I mean something different from TMDB like CSFD.CZ?
You said you were inspired with MovieInfo plugin so my question is if it is somehow possible to integrate also other engines like it is in MovieInfo?
Many of my movie titles are in my native language so TMDB don't know them but CSFD.CZ knows my native title and also others like english, spanish etc.(depending on origin of the movie).
With CSFD.CZ engine I am able to find correct title regardless of title language.
Do you have some API which can be easily used or you have TMDB support harcoded?
Thanks for leading me so I can look into it hack your code somehow to support my preferred engine.
Many thanks

[taconaut]

Hi ExSport,

TMDB is currently hardcoded. As I got fed up with the JTable in the library view I've started implementing what you've request here (shush it's a secret ).

Here's how it will work (don't hesitate to add a comment if I've missed something):

• Instead of the 'Use TMDb' checkbox there's a 'Configure' button
• When the 'Configure' button is being clicked, a new (modal) dialogue opens
• In the dialogue there's a list of all parameters (name, year, tag line...) where the priority of the engines can be set (e.g. use tmdb to get the title, if no result try imdb and so on).
• The source of the video file properties isn't configurable there (e.g. frame rate, length, size). It can be set in FileParsingRenderer.conf if ffmpeg or mediainfo should be used

Import engines are pretty similar to plugins (they can be dropped inside the plugins folder). I'll describe the details when it's ready.

[ExSport]

It seems promising
Please if you will have some test plugin, please publish it so we can start modding parsing code part for other sites so when you will publish new version with plugin support, we can test it immediately.
Many thanks!
EDIT:
It is possible to filter some words like in MovieInfo plugin? Sometimes my movie names or folders includes something what breaks correct finds on movie pages like genre or audio/source format.
Thanks!

[renszarv]

By random coincidence, a couple of year ago, I've worked on a movie catalogizer desktop application, which had a pretty inteligent file system scanner, with a lots of heuristics to guess the name of the movie based only on the file and folder names, and after this, the app fetched a lot's of information from different sites, descriptions, pictures, covers, and ratings.
You can try it out, here : http://code.google.com/p/movie-browser/
The web scraper part is here: http://code.google.com/p/flicklib/ I fear, that some of the sites structure is changed since, so not everything works properly

I think, that would be a good addition to this media library
What do you think ?