104 replies to this topic

[sambo99]

Well as some of you are already aware the Video Browser team have been busy working on a revamp of the Video Browser backend as well as a bunch on UI enhancements. We have decided at this point to rename the addin to Media Browser. It can be installed along side Video Browser but I would recommend uninstalling Video Browser first. In order to allow it to be installed side-by-side we have moved it to the menu strip with the recordedTv on it in the UI – VMC seems to have some strange limit of one add-in per strip.

Many thanks to those of you who have been following our work and helping with testing the SVN builds, you have helped ensure the quality of this release.

Highlights

* Automatic metadata fetching
* Faster performance generally
* New views with backdrops
* Banner view for tv series
* Configuration though the interface
* New triple tap implementation


New Feature Details

* Recursive indicator of number of unwatched items in a folder
* Configuration screen
* New thumbstrip view
* Backdrop support in Poster and Thumbstrip views
* Option of using banners instead of posters
* Sorting and indexing on a wider variety of fields (genres for series, rating etc.)
* Genre metadata collected for series as well as movies
* We have a range of metadata providers
o Loading images from the media locations for folder, banner and backdrop
o Loading TV metadata from TVScout style xml files
o Loading Movie metadata from mymovies.xml files
o Fetching data directly from tvdb (exact matches only, but is a series has been setup with an xml file using TVScout we should fetch all subsequent data ok)
o Fetching movie data directly from themoviedb exact name matches only (allows for the year to be included in brackets at the end of the name)
o folder, backdrop, banner support for people, genres, years etc. via a ImageByName provider that check a specific images folder for folder that match the item name and contain images for it (more on that in a separate post)
o Thumbnail generator – for episodes we now generate thumbnails where one isn’t available for download
o Hopefully more will be added over time
* MPAA Ratings supported for Movies and TV Shows
* New layout for Movie details page
* Ability to play movies from the poster/list view using the play button
* Clear button can be used to toggle the watched flag for an item, works recursively
* Option to enable file system watching for detection of changes
* New triple tap implementation that hopefully fixes the issues we were seeing before
* You can add thing to filenames in [] as comments and then will be ignored when working out the name for looking for metadata etc.
* Resume support for multiple file movies


Probably a bunch of other things I’ve forgotten.

Anyway download it, give it a go and let us know what you think...

http://videobrowser....ser_2_0_0_0.msi

Screenshots are available here

Feel free to post any questions you have here or alternatively you can try our forum at
http://videobrowser.ch

[TheRob]

Pardon my ignorance on this, but if I typically only record TV from the FTA channels (movies, series and docos) and never rip DVDs or download stuff, is Media Browser still useful to me. I'm a "watch and delete" kinda guy, so I'm not really into archiving stuff, but the default Recorded TV display for VMC is pretty limited and it would be nice to have some more functionality.

[sambo99]

Well we do not have a DVR-MS provider yet so Im not sure if this will help you out that much, once we have a DVR-MS provider it probably would be quite useful.

Also, part of the reason we renamed this to media browser was so we can support more types of content, down the line we will look at supporting video podcasts and streaming.

So the quick answer is that given your use case Im not sure if its useful to you yet, but down the line this will be useful to you as well.

(any code contribution is welcome)

[StarTV]

Definitely something I'll try on my holiday break!

[Dir]

I'm a noob to this thing, but for those of us with no history of using this plugin's predecessor, how do you configure it? When I ran it, it prompted me for some values as a first run; I accepted defaults and looked for somewhere to tell it where I keep my movies, tv episodes, etc. The closest I could find was a free-text field labelled "Initial location". But it's free text. I tried typing in "\\server\share" (without the quotes) but I have no idea if it worked or not. Since I have a huge library, it's possible that it's still doing something in the background. But since it was a free text field, I suspect this isn't where I tell it where my collection is.

Also, the default value pointed to a local directory that had a few small quickcam vids in it. I played one for a moment, pressed stop, and went back to trying to configure it. Now, whenever I minimise VMC and re-maximise it, the video starts playing again.

In the 5 minutes I've been typing this, I've gone back into it but it still doesn't show any of my collection, and there's no disc IO, so I suspect I was right. So how do you tell it where your movies are? I keep mine on my server, each in it's own directory named exactly the same as the IMDB name.

[bwhinnen]

Great work! The TV Shows section is brilliant.

I did try and add a Movies folder, with folders underneath and then the avi file in it but it crashed when I tried to go into the Movies folder in VMC. I'm probably just doing something stupid!

Shame it still reads the hidden folders that the old metadata was kept in when using TV Meta Data Finder... Although I still use that to rename the files.

[PierreLo]

Hi all,

This is a copy of az post I made on the videobrowser (mediaborwser) forum. Sorry for crossposting but I really need some help here.

Here is the case:
On first launch, Mediabrowser asked me to configure, which I did, then I clicked COntinue, screen stayed still so I went back to Vista main page and launched Mediabrowser to discover the new wonders.

All I got was a blue box with :
"The MediaBrowser program has stopped responding and you will be returned to Media Center."

No matter what I do, I cannot launch Mediabrowser at all. It immediately pops up with this error message. If I manually delete the xml config file, and start Mediabrowser again, I am asked to configure it again, and then same problem appears.

I am running Vista Premium, and had no problem whatsoever with Videobrowser.
I have the same Films.vf file I had before with Videobrowser, located in the default Videos folder.

Can anybody help ?

Thanks in advance

PierreLo

Edited by PierreLo, 19 December 2008 - 12:47 PM.

[bwhinnen]

Enable logging and the look at the logfile in c:\programdata\mediabrowser, you want the current logfile, it will give you some details. When I first started I pointed it to a separate disk which had the System Volume information Folder (the user logged in had no permission to read the file) I changed the permissions on it to allow the logged in user to have access to it and Media Browser worked flawlessly.

[sambo99]

FYI we just released a new version to address Pierros issue and a few other small issues.

[PierreLo]

Yes indeed, the team did fix it as soon as I mentioned it on the dedicated forum.
Impressive, but not so impressive as the software itself.
Believe me, this is some cooool piece of software. Absolutely brilliant and built with the average user in mind. Fqmily already worships it.

For me there are now two first class plugins for Vista MC: the great MediaBrowser and the amazing myTV.

People, go ahead and try MediaBrowser 2.0.2, this is just great
(give a shot to myTV too, it is worth trying...and buying)

PierreLo:cool:

[nickwil]

Sambo,

Let us know when the .DVRMS issue is resolved so we can run our movies through our 360’s. Then I’ll make the change from My Movies 2 to Media browser. Looks good on the screen shots.

Cheers,

Nick

[Aceisno1]

Great work! The TV Shows section is brilliant.

I did try and add a Movies folder, with folders underneath and then the avi file in it but it crashed when I tried to go into the Movies folder in VMC. I'm probably just doing something stupid!

Shame it still reads the hidden folders that the old metadata was kept in when using TV Meta Data Finder... Although I still use that to rename the files.

I get the same problem. Everytime I select my "Movies" folder Media Browser would crash and return me to Vista main menu. All the other folders work except my movies folder.

I have e:\Videos\Movies\Movie Name\Movie.avi directory structure. At first I thought it would be because some of my folder names are in Chinese and media browser didnt recognise it. But I have tested it with all english folder names and media browser still crashes.

The Folders that work have the same directory structure as the Movies folder.

Its an awsome plugin and have been wanting something like this for awhile, but I hope someone can shed some light on this.

P.S I've tried the older version video browser and I get the same problem.

[bwhinnen]

I get the same problem. Everytime I select my "Movies" folder Media Browser would crash and return me to Vista main menu. All the other folders work except my movies folder.

I have e:\Videos\Movies\Movie Name\Movie.avi directory structure. At first I thought it would be because some of my folder names are in Chinese and media browser didnt recognise it. But I have tested it with all english folder names and media browser still crashes.

The Folders that work have the same directory structure as the Movies folder.

Its an awsome plugin and have been wanting something like this for awhile, but I hope someone can shed some light on this.

P.S I've tried the older version video browser and I get the same problem.

I found that if I had at least one AVI in the root of my 'Movies' folder it wouldn't crash. However all my movies I ripped for my boy from our originals seem to think they are 4:3 in VMC, oh well, time to re-rip them again

[HecklerUK]

I am getting a crash when ever I go into my movies, 99% of them are simply avi files inside a folder (on my PC) but a few are collections such as the Alien Quaridlogy or Blade trilogy and so forth... in these folders are subfolders which contain the movie file.

Each folder has a folder.jpeg as do the sub folders.

The file structure would be like this

D:\movies\Movie Collection Name\Movie Name\movie.avi

Each time I try to enter one of the folders containing sub folders VMC crashes and has to be restarted.

I don't know why it's only doing this for the Movies folder as my TV shows folder has multiple folders with multiple sub folders where the folder structure would be like this

E:\TV Shows\Family Guy\Season 6\1.Blue Harvest.avi

I can't figure out why it works on one and not the other as the file structure is basically the same


Video browser on the other hand works perfectly with these folders and sub folders.


If I remove the sub folders and place them directly into the movie folder I can access them fine... But I don't want to clutter up my listings with an extra 40 or 50 movies that can be placed in sub folders and worked fine that way in video browser.

Aside from that, it's great... although I can't figure out how to get it to get the meta data for movies... Some have it and some don't.

[sambo99]

Heckler,

Can you try version 2.0.4 which is posted at videobrowser.ch ?
Also, I would really appreciate it if you posted something on our forum so the rest of the dev team can look at it.

My goal is to have this plugin crash free ASAP

Cheers
Sam