2011-09-20, 15:48
Hi guys,
You'll see a lot more of me on the forums in the coming time, mainly because I'll be asking loads of irritating questions. I've been an XBMC user for a while, and like a lot of open source projects, it's both frickin amazing and bloody annoying!
There's a lot of documentation missing, and while that's not something to complain about really, after all everyone puts an enormous amount of time in for free, I need some help with something that I really hope should benefit the community a lot in the long run.
I'm building a new 'media manager' if you want to call it that, with the aim of being the quintessential 'media manager' for XBMC. I've had a lot of varied success with the various methods of getting media information for movies and tv, etc, XBMC scrapers get the wrong title, metabrowser doesn't take into account a lot of features of XBMC, and so on. The idea is that through extensions to the main core, I hope to take account of all major (and some minor) extensions to XBMC like TvTunes, fanart (clearart, logos etc as well) and the rest.
It's being built to enterprise standards of development (at least very nearly all of it ) as that's where my day job lies. The intention is that it will be open source, but closed control in that extensions that it uses will go through testing before being available to the vast majority of users (yes, 'advanced' users will be welcome to do whatever they want, except complain if they break it).
I'm already about 80% finished on the core, but only about 50% finished on the essential extensions for launch. One of these extensions I consider essential is the ability for the system to work with the users selected skin. All the skins use similar core metadata and artwork, but there is a lot of variation in exactly which bits are picked for each skin. Therefore this core extension will contain knowledge of individual skins, and exactly which bits of metadata to use for which fields or artwork spaces. Therefore hopefully increasing the users enjoyment by not having weird stretched pictures or empty fields appearing when browsing. Ultimately I would like this to become so reliable as to allow skin developers to remove things like TvLogo scripts from their skins and rely on this as an external service (although that is way way waaaay off as this needs to make it across all platforms first).
So my request... I'm hoping all the major skin authors will volunteer to open a dialogue with me, to help me identify exactly what information or artwork is used for each of their fields in each of their views. That's it. All that bumpf just to get here, but as I said at the top, I know everyone puts in vast amounts of personal time into this stuff, and I'm hoping that all that explanation will describe why I hope it's worth you guys getting in touch with me.
And for everyone else, feedback is always appreciated. I will be honest and say that although my development is fairly far along, the release will still be a while as I have vast amounts of stuff to test. I will however hope to open a closed beta fairly soon as I will need the feedback for bugs.
Thanks guys, hope to hear from anyone soon.
Adam.
You'll see a lot more of me on the forums in the coming time, mainly because I'll be asking loads of irritating questions. I've been an XBMC user for a while, and like a lot of open source projects, it's both frickin amazing and bloody annoying!
There's a lot of documentation missing, and while that's not something to complain about really, after all everyone puts an enormous amount of time in for free, I need some help with something that I really hope should benefit the community a lot in the long run.
I'm building a new 'media manager' if you want to call it that, with the aim of being the quintessential 'media manager' for XBMC. I've had a lot of varied success with the various methods of getting media information for movies and tv, etc, XBMC scrapers get the wrong title, metabrowser doesn't take into account a lot of features of XBMC, and so on. The idea is that through extensions to the main core, I hope to take account of all major (and some minor) extensions to XBMC like TvTunes, fanart (clearart, logos etc as well) and the rest.
It's being built to enterprise standards of development (at least very nearly all of it ) as that's where my day job lies. The intention is that it will be open source, but closed control in that extensions that it uses will go through testing before being available to the vast majority of users (yes, 'advanced' users will be welcome to do whatever they want, except complain if they break it).
I'm already about 80% finished on the core, but only about 50% finished on the essential extensions for launch. One of these extensions I consider essential is the ability for the system to work with the users selected skin. All the skins use similar core metadata and artwork, but there is a lot of variation in exactly which bits are picked for each skin. Therefore this core extension will contain knowledge of individual skins, and exactly which bits of metadata to use for which fields or artwork spaces. Therefore hopefully increasing the users enjoyment by not having weird stretched pictures or empty fields appearing when browsing. Ultimately I would like this to become so reliable as to allow skin developers to remove things like TvLogo scripts from their skins and rely on this as an external service (although that is way way waaaay off as this needs to make it across all platforms first).
So my request... I'm hoping all the major skin authors will volunteer to open a dialogue with me, to help me identify exactly what information or artwork is used for each of their fields in each of their views. That's it. All that bumpf just to get here, but as I said at the top, I know everyone puts in vast amounts of personal time into this stuff, and I'm hoping that all that explanation will describe why I hope it's worth you guys getting in touch with me.
And for everyone else, feedback is always appreciated. I will be honest and say that although my development is fairly far along, the release will still be a while as I have vast amounts of stuff to test. I will however hope to open a closed beta fairly soon as I will need the feedback for bugs.
Thanks guys, hope to hear from anyone soon.
Adam.