Thumbnail / Cover-Art.

[colinjones]

Was wondering what the EMI was... So as its not free, I guess it isn't actually doing anything for us at the moment? How well does it work when it is working? Particularly for non-US (versions of) movies? Amazon is fully in the US-is-the-centre-of-the-universe camp, currently in this respect.

[tschak909]

read what I said, again.

The EMI uses Windows Media Services to identify _DISCS_ ... NOT AMAZON.

And actually EMI works very damned well. Put in a disc to see what i mean.

-Thom

[freymann]

read what I said, again.

The EMI uses Windows Media Services to identify _DISCS_ ... NOT AMAZON.

And actually EMI works very damned well. Put in a disc to see what i mean.

-Thom

 When I was testing the 7.10Release (which I'm running now with great success), I grabbed some of my store bought DVD's and inserted them into a MD.

 It came up and started playing the DVD... I click the green media button to bring up the menu (or F7 on keyboard) and told it to copy the DVD. When it was done everything was packaged up nicely for me, including cover art and attributes.

 To me, the EMI thing worked perfectly.

 I haven't ripped a music CD as I've already done them long ago using Windows Media Player and have dumped my music collection into the system. I really don't care about cover art on my music collection, I usually just hit Play All, then Random and pay no attention to the monitor/tv.

 I've also found that adding my own cover art (to videos), when amazon lookup doesn't work, quite easy.

 I just open up another tab in my web browser and go to imdb and search for whatever, then bring up the cover art, right click on it, copy location, and paste that into the LMCE web page (under Files & Media > Media & Files Sync). I find it quite easy to add performers or the long synopsis when needed too.

 I find this very simple to do. Amazon doesn't miss much from my collection, but when it does, it just pop open a browser tab, get the info, paste it into LMCE admin. Can't get much easier than that to me!?

 If you want a thumbnail directly from your video, while it's playing you can bring up the menu with the green media button or F7 keyboard and click on the Thumbnail option at whatever point you want to grab an image. Again, it's so simple.

 Granted, if you dump in a large collection of music or video and then want to auto populate the database with all your cover art and attributes automatically, that's a different story.

 There are plenty of scripts available from the MythTV project that do that... I would look into seeing if those scripts are compatible with LMCE and if not, perhaps trying to fine tune them for use here.

[colinjones]

read what I said, again.

The EMI uses Windows Media Services to identify _DISCS_ ... NOT AMAZON.

And actually EMI works very damned well. Put in a disc to see what i mean.

-Thom

Thom - I don't need to read what you said again, I got it the first time - I realise you are talking about _disks_. What I didn't understand was you said there currently isn't a free service out there that does this. So I assumed that EMI wasn't being used because it wasn't a free service (WMS), and so some other mechanism is being used to grab that data. Still not sure what you were referring to as not having a free version of...

[tschak909]

meaning we do not have source code.

-Thom

[royw]

And actually EMI works very damned well. Put in a disc to see what i mean.

Where EMI is weak is on older disks and less popular disks.  Also it's aggravating to put a single movie disk in and have it identified as part of a multi-movie pack.  Classic example is Kill Bill vol 1 (ISBN 786936-226997) and vol 2 (ISBN 786936-245783).  Two separately packaged and purchased DVDs.  LinuxMCE identifies both as the twin pack with poor cover art.  Amazon lookup gives the twin pack or the Japanese releases, again with poor cover art.

Also wherever the title comes from, there are a few percent with errors like extra/missing prefixes("A", "An", "The"), "and" changed to "&" (and vice versa).

I'd say EMI works good (when you have a good internet connection) and with a mostly reasonable lookup time, but the retrieved meta data needs improvement (too often missing the title or genres).

Personally, I've been very pleased with both the cover art and meta data now that I'm sync'ing my LinuxMCE database from my DVD Profiler database.

Have fun,
Roy

[tschak909]

if we were to use dvd profiler, we would need to find a way of properly fingerprinting the discs (the EMI uses some freaky hashing algorithm which it passes to the web service on the other end..)

Please look at media identifiers and the commands needed to implement, to do this right.

-Thom

[itspac]

you can already have the orbiter take a screenshot to use as a thumbnail. Between this, the ability to download from amazon.com and the ability to upload your own image, I think its already pretty feature-rich in that department

Am i missing something/ i have a Nokia N800 as an orbiter and I dont see that option when I am watching media. I know the on screen orbiter does for the media director, but you have to interrupt the video to use it.

[bulek]

you can already have the orbiter take a screenshot to use as a thumbnail. Between this, the ability to download from amazon.com and the ability to upload your own image, I think its already pretty feature-rich in that department

Am i missing something/ i have a Nokia N800 as an orbiter and I dont see that option when I am watching media. I know the on screen orbiter does for the media director, but you have to interrupt the video to use it.

AFAIK, this feature is only available on UI2.

Regards,

Bulek.

[royw]

if we were to use dvd profiler, we would need to find a way of properly fingerprinting the discs (the EMI uses some freaky hashing algorithm which it passes to the web service on the other end..)

Please look at media identifiers and the commands needed to implement, to do this right.

-Thom

I don't look at DVD Profiler as a practical solution for LinuxMCE, but more of as a band-aid to get good meta data and cover art.  It's drawbacks include that it is windows based (but does work under wine) shareware designed for DVD, HDDVD, & BD library management, which it does very well.  It does not support ripping or playing of media.  That said, there are some really good features that we should consider. 

* When you add a media to your collection, it syncs the identifiers (title, ISBN, disc ids) from the main site, then all of your additions are looked up locally.  This allows you to rapidly add by title, by ISBN, or by disc id.  On the rare times that a disc is not in the database, you can create an entry, fill in what you can, then optionally upload it to the main site.  If you find an error or omission, you can edit and optionally submit to the main site.

If we sync'ed the identifiers with cron.daily, then there wouldn't be the 10-60 second lookup delay when ripping nor the failures due to net outages.

* It supports updating your media profiles from the main site.  This allows your collection's meta data to improve over time.  Note, it does support locking of parts of your meta data to prevent override.

Another cron.daily task, then forget about it. 

* It depends on user support for the meta data.  Not a corporate entity that favours matching commercially available media (multi-packs) and has no interest in complete meta data.

The extensions to the LinuxMCE database would include adding a "media unique" identifier and "media last changed on main site" timestamp to pluto_media.file, then add some locking attributes (lock genres, lock cast, lock cover art,...).

I'm not sure if SqlCVS would be the way to handle the sync'ing.

Food for thought.

Have fun,
Roy