File system improvement

[taconaut]

Hi (first post on the forum )

After having tried Windows Media Server, Tversity and Nero Media Home, psm is the first media server that works flawlessly with my ps3. Thanks a lot for that!
One thing none of the media servers handle nicely (except maybe tversity where I never even reached this stage) is the file system displayed when you're browsing the ps3. Displaying the actual windows file system as it's done in psm is my favourite for now, but there's margin for improvement.

That's how the structure could look on the ps3. - symbolize a collapsed folder or a file and + an expanded folder. The ones with multiple + or - are child folders.

- Movies
-- Action
++ Comedy
+++ Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
---- Description
---- English, None
---- English, English
++ Drama
--- Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
-- Recent french action without fantasy
- Family
- Friends

The movies are displayed according to tags and not their actual file path on the server. This makes it possible to group related content independently of its location and to group it as we like it to be. In this example the movie Little Miss Sunshine is tagged as being a movie (root node) and being of type Comedy and Drama. It has a name and a release year where we can generate the name to be displayed according to a mask.
When a movie is expanded it will show all available permutations of audio track <-> subtitle as children. The Description underneath a movie should open a web page displaying information about the movie (possible?). It would be nice if this folder containing movies had the icon taken from the movie file instead of the default folder icon (possible?).

How do we configure this?
Instead of the current Navigation/Parsing settings and Share Folders there would be a new Media Library tab where you could choose the display mode; File System or Custom. If custom is selected, you can build you're own file system in a tree view:
First, add one or multiple root folders. Each folder has properties that can be customized. For our example let's say we add the condition 'contains tag is Movie' to our Movies folder. Then we add the folder Action to Movies with the condition 'contains tag Action'; the property 'contains tag is Movie' will be inherited by the parent automatically.
A condition like 'year is greater then 2000 AND contains language is french AND contains tag is Action AND contains tag is not Fantasy' could be displayed as 'Recent french action without fantasy' and would show all movies satisfying these constraints.

Here are the conditions I see:
contains/does not contain tag that is/is not/starts with/does not start with/ends with/does not end with/contains/does not contain '...'
year is/is greater then/is less then/is in range/is not in range '...'
contains/does not contain language is/is not '...'
contains/does not contain subtitle is/is not '...'
name is/is not/starts with/does not start with/ends with/does not end with/contains/does not contain '...' (Useful to group e.g. all movies alphabetically in different folders A-Z)
display movies true/false (To avoid displaying the movies in the Movies root folder, but only in its children. This property is not inherited)

Server Job:
The server has to manage a list of files with attributes for this to work. Each movie can have following properties set: Name, Year, List of tags, List of languages, list of subtitles.
Presuming the file name contains the name of a movie, the correct name, year and list of tags can be retrieved through a web service (http://www.trynt.com/trynt-movie-imdb-api/ ?)
The list of tags and subtitles has to be read from the file (through mencoder?)
Besides automatic info retrieval it must be possible to edit it manually.

As I'd like to give it a try myself, I'm not sure the requests forum is the best place to post!? But on the other hand I've got no clue when/if I'm going to get this started. For now I've managed to put down the idea and could compile psm in eclipse (haven't touched java code in about two years...), that's it

[taconaut]

I gave it a look yesterday and was pleasantly surprised to see that the medialibrary already offers a good base to what I'd like to do (storage in db, the 'virtual' concept).
Is an improvement of the media library in the works? I've got this feeling while browsing the code.

[vguna]

Hm, any news on this? Would be really great if virtual folders could be possible.

So, creating a virtual folder called "Movies" that contains files from n folders. Shouldn't be that hard to implement I guess?!

Now I have 3 movie folders on different harddrives and I have to look into each to find a specific movie. With virtual folders there would be only one.

[ExSport]

http://ps3mediaserver.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1633

[taconaut]

For now I've made the proof of concept for most parts I'd like to be implemented. The start of the summer is a bad time to start projects like that, as its more fun to be outside then behind a screen Don't hold your breath, but as it's the number one feature I'm missing in psm now, it will definitely be done at some point.

[vguna]

any news on this ?

[taconaut]

It's a work in slooooow progress. I'll post here when I've got something to show The first version will be quite basic and I hope to make it grow over time then.

[loraderon]

Have you considered using the XBMC Library (sql lite database) as (an alternative) source for this media library?

XBMC is really good at scraping and getting thumbnails but fails miserably as a DLNA server.

[taconaut]

Hi,

Nope, haven't had a look at the XMBC implementation until now; just opened the SVN and saw lots of *.cpp; that's not really my world..
I've taken a lot of ideas from the current pms implementation. The same DB is used (h2), but changing the connection string wouldn't be a big deal if e.g. SQLite would be more appropriate.

I haven't introduced any new frameworks to pms (except log4j). Everything created for this media library is hand crafted (that's why it takes far longer then I initially expected).

The current state is:
- Media library fully functional on the client side for videos (little work has to be done for audio and pictures)
- The client side GUI is almost finished
- 'Special Folders' are currently being implemented (almost done). E.g. the current functionality to Auto discover contents of folders that are shared, the web config etc. will be shared folders working similarly to the current plugin system (a new interface has been declared in order to allow third party implementations)

The only thing I'm not happy about is how the information is populated in the DB. If anyone has a better idea how to do this, please come forward!
Currently all the information comes from imdb:
1) Use the file name without extension to find the title we're looking for: searchMovieUrl = "http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=" + URLEncoder.encode(title, "UTF-8");
2) Get the highest ranked title from the results and load the page:
3) Parse the needed info

I don't want to give any timeline on when the first beta will finally be put online, as I miserably failed with the last two estimations

[loraderon]

My suggestion was to only query the sqllite database (http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=The_XBMC_Database) that XBMC uses, no need to grok XBMC source code.

This way we could use XBMC to manage and collect the media information. This should probably be a plugin..

With your current plugin implementation would it be possible to create this plugin?
Required features would include:
* ability to create a virtual folder structure (eg XBMC/TV Shows/House/Season 2)
* set custom thumbnails to video items

I know that it is very hard to do estimations, I'm a C# developer myself. I could probably take a look at creating this plugin (if it's possible), but I need to get familiar with Java development on Windows first.