2008-06-10, 20:31
Time for a new program from me, I've been working on it for a while now and am happy with the functionality included in this initial release.
The idea was to create a standalone windows program capable of cataloging and browsing movies, with the addition of built in scraper functionality. Hopefully faster than the XBMC scraper
The Program Title is: "Media Companion" (formerly "XBMC Media Companion")
It allows you to select the icon for the thumbnail posters/covers as well as the FanArt image. Movie and TV Show metadata can be modified and edited from the user interface. It also uses API's from a lot of the same sites as XBMC, including the community driven and wiki basedthemoviedb.org (a.k.a. TMDb) and TheTVDB.com (which yourselves can contribute to directly), with images from mediaicons.org and impawards.com as well as meta data from IMDb.com
And now for a look at the interface.
This is the main page, when you first run the program most of this screen will be blank - use the "Add Folder" Button to add a folder containing movies, any folders you add will be saved to a config file located in the program root folder. The program will then scan the added folder (and subfolders) for nfo files. If your movies already have nfo files then these movies will be listed to browse. Likewise the the tbn files you have will be displayed. If you have no nfo files then the list will remain blank. You will have to scan your movies first.
To add your unscanned movies you will need to press the Scan Folders for new movies button - this is the 4th button across the top - the one with a + on it. Doin this will start automatically scraping each movie from IMDB and creating nfo and tbn files which it will place with the movie file.
With this option the First choice in an IMDB search is the one scraped. These IMDB searches appear to be pretty accurate, but mistakes are made and the wrong movie is scraped. in these cases there is quite an easy way to fix it. The 2nd button across brings up the Editor.
As you can see there is a button labeled "Search for a different title" select this to bring up the manual search window shown below:-
The above shows a simple browser with the page set to an IMDB search for the movie title - it's just a case of navigating to the correct movie and pressing the "Go" button, simple as that.
The editor window also offers additional options, as its title suggests if you make changes to the info in this mode and save it this will replace your current nfo file with a new one. Like wise the Cover thumbnail can be altered by inputting a url for the jpeg.
The Re-Scrape can be used to scrape the same movie from IMDB. This option also gets the first page of thumbnails from IMDB - this is usually 8 thumbs - any one can be selected - or can be added to by entering a jpeg url. - The chosen thumb will be saved along with the nfo.
The Scraper Speed is definately much faster than XBMC and seems to be limited by IMDB, during testing I was timing the scraper and it seemed to vary greatly between 2 and 10 movies per minute. The average seemed to be about 4.
It is my belief that this could go much further - I am currently thinking about where to go next, but the following is my shortlist of things to do.
1, Fix any bugs
2, Add support for TV shows
3, Add Standalone SQL DB support
This program outputs nfo files to a specific format, and only has the following entries.
<movie>
<title></title>
<rating></rating>
<year></year>
<top250></top250>
<votes></votes>
<outline></outline>
<plot></tagline>
<runtime></runtime>
<thumb></thumb>
<mpaa></mpaa>
<watched></watched>
<id></id>
<genre></genre>
<credits></credits>
<director></director>
<premiered></premiered>
<studio></studio>
<actor>
<name></name>
<role></role>
<thumb></thumb>
</actor>
</movie>
As many actors as is displayed on the IMDB movie page will be saved- usually 15
Download it here
p.s - this program was written with Visual Basic 2008, so make sure you have the latest .net framework installed
p.p.s. And let me know what you think, feedback is appreciated.
The idea was to create a standalone windows program capable of cataloging and browsing movies, with the addition of built in scraper functionality. Hopefully faster than the XBMC scraper
The Program Title is: "Media Companion" (formerly "XBMC Media Companion")
It allows you to select the icon for the thumbnail posters/covers as well as the FanArt image. Movie and TV Show metadata can be modified and edited from the user interface. It also uses API's from a lot of the same sites as XBMC, including the community driven and wiki basedthemoviedb.org (a.k.a. TMDb) and TheTVDB.com (which yourselves can contribute to directly), with images from mediaicons.org and impawards.com as well as meta data from IMDb.com
And now for a look at the interface.
This is the main page, when you first run the program most of this screen will be blank - use the "Add Folder" Button to add a folder containing movies, any folders you add will be saved to a config file located in the program root folder. The program will then scan the added folder (and subfolders) for nfo files. If your movies already have nfo files then these movies will be listed to browse. Likewise the the tbn files you have will be displayed. If you have no nfo files then the list will remain blank. You will have to scan your movies first.
To add your unscanned movies you will need to press the Scan Folders for new movies button - this is the 4th button across the top - the one with a + on it. Doin this will start automatically scraping each movie from IMDB and creating nfo and tbn files which it will place with the movie file.
With this option the First choice in an IMDB search is the one scraped. These IMDB searches appear to be pretty accurate, but mistakes are made and the wrong movie is scraped. in these cases there is quite an easy way to fix it. The 2nd button across brings up the Editor.
As you can see there is a button labeled "Search for a different title" select this to bring up the manual search window shown below:-
The above shows a simple browser with the page set to an IMDB search for the movie title - it's just a case of navigating to the correct movie and pressing the "Go" button, simple as that.
The editor window also offers additional options, as its title suggests if you make changes to the info in this mode and save it this will replace your current nfo file with a new one. Like wise the Cover thumbnail can be altered by inputting a url for the jpeg.
The Re-Scrape can be used to scrape the same movie from IMDB. This option also gets the first page of thumbnails from IMDB - this is usually 8 thumbs - any one can be selected - or can be added to by entering a jpeg url. - The chosen thumb will be saved along with the nfo.
The Scraper Speed is definately much faster than XBMC and seems to be limited by IMDB, during testing I was timing the scraper and it seemed to vary greatly between 2 and 10 movies per minute. The average seemed to be about 4.
It is my belief that this could go much further - I am currently thinking about where to go next, but the following is my shortlist of things to do.
1, Fix any bugs
2, Add support for TV shows
3, Add Standalone SQL DB support
This program outputs nfo files to a specific format, and only has the following entries.
<movie>
<title></title>
<rating></rating>
<year></year>
<top250></top250>
<votes></votes>
<outline></outline>
<plot></tagline>
<runtime></runtime>
<thumb></thumb>
<mpaa></mpaa>
<watched></watched>
<id></id>
<genre></genre>
<credits></credits>
<director></director>
<premiered></premiered>
<studio></studio>
<actor>
<name></name>
<role></role>
<thumb></thumb>
</actor>
</movie>
As many actors as is displayed on the IMDB movie page will be saved- usually 15
Download it here
p.s - this program was written with Visual Basic 2008, so make sure you have the latest .net framework installed
p.p.s. And let me know what you think, feedback is appreciated.