Better Media Organization / Browser

[indulis]

Thanks Chris. Exactly my point.  That contribution of time and effort is time and effort no matter which part of the project it is being done for.

Back  OT, I am also not a fan of filesystems being the storage/search paradigm for a media UI.  The database with search is potentially a better way to go if done right.

Noone wants their mp3 library to be accessed by directory sorted alphabetically by album name, so Linuxmce should naturally fall in more with the "mp3 media library" model.

I think the trick would be to give users a hierarchical set of predefined searches for things like "by series-by date" which could be easily navigated.  Then the option to create additional searches.

I think that would satisfy everyone. 

[tschak909]

This has been hashed over and over again, repeatedly.

But honestly, the way we have it STORED, is the right way to do it. The entire view is constructed on the fly in response to what needs to be shown in the view.

Where we fall short, and these are being addressed, is in these areas:

* Proper tagging of media. This system lives and dies by it. If you don't have any of your media tagged, of course it's going to be one big blob flat mess.
* more effective viewing of media that has a common title, but differing subtitles and discs, again, we have the code in the media plugin to handle this, it just needs to be dealt with.
* more effective visual cues as to which filter options are being selected. Right now, you can't tell if unviewed/viewed media is selected. This is a bug. There are a few others, but this is the gist of it...

Keep in mind too, that you  can select the black boxes on the details page, to turn on a filter for a given attribute.

-Thom

[nite_man]

Sure, proper tagging of media content will help to organize media library much much better. But it'd be nice to have possibility to store search preferences and use them when the LinuxMCE is up instead of default ones. Also I think  it'd be nice to use IMDB to get movie info together with Amazon. Its database is bigger and it provides more useful info. Will see how to implement it.

[los93sol]

...like how XBMC has been doing it for years now... 

[tschak909]

The issue isn't as simple as that. We have to be able to identify discs that are inserted too. Can't use IMDB or Amazon for that. *hmm* this issue keeps coming up, and I keep explaining it, and people don't seem to listen.

-Thom

[hari]

...like how XBMC has been doing it for years now... 

Maybe you want to add a method to store those settings via the general info plugin or some other way?

[los93sol]

Hari, can you explain how the current player is hooked into LMCE?  Could the player be replaced or is it hardcoded into LMCE? 

[tschak909]

The entire architecture is modular, and is designed to replicate house-wide.

You need to read up on DCE on the wiki, but the gist of it is:

* DCE Plugins attach to the Media Plugin to handle stream management and typing, these run on the router and provide the stream data house-wide. These send messages to Players to start a media stream etc.
* DCE Players, run on each media director or target device, and provide the necessary bits to do the work.

The most common player is the Xine_Player, which wraps libxine, but instead of xine-gui, a DCE interface is exposed.

All of this is handled by the Media_Plugin's MediaHandler class (MH Play/Stop/Move Media, etc.), and does all the necessary messaging to bound orbiters in a room to update their displays accordingly.

You'll need to look at the source code a bit more, but I can answer questions on the architecture.

-Thom

[nite_man]

The issue isn't as simple as that. We have to be able to identify discs that are inserted too. Can't use IMDB or Amazon for that. *hmm* this issue keeps coming up, and I keep explaining it, and people don't seem to listen.

-Thom

Sorry for not clear explanation. I talked about admin web interface and not about getting info on the fly when disc is inserted.

[nite_man]

I have over a thousand movies in my library, and twice that in my CD collection that i have imported in, and I am able to very quickly find what i'm looking for.

Thom, I'll be very appreciated to you for a few screenshots which show your conception of media library organization. If it's possible, of  course.

TIA

[chrisbirkinshaw]

I have over a thousand movies in my library, and twice that in my CD collection that i have imported in, and I am able to very quickly find what i'm looking for.

Thom, I'll be very appreciated to you for a few screenshots which show your conception of media library organization. If it's possible, of  course.

TIA

Yes, it would be great to have on the wiki a step by step guide to media organisation, to include tagging and searching, playing etc. That way when someone whinges about the interface, rather than just telling them to "F%&K off , it's fine as it is!", it would be possible to helpfully point them to a URL on the Wiki. Perhaps they might even then be converted and see its merits!

If you can send some screenshots (as I'm currently useless at finding my media too) I can put some words around it and make some pages.

Chris

[Glasswalker]

I'll just throw my 2 cents in here too, (and beat the dead horse a few more times lol)

I think the media browser in lmce is actually very nice, with a few minor issues (as thom has pointed out above). One of which is tv episode browsing that causes me some pain lol...

Anyway, but yeah the big pain point for most people is tagging their media. Without tagging, any nice media browsing system is useless (short of file folder browsing). Properly tagged media is key to a nice clean media browsing experience (a perfect example of this is what is accepted by many as one of the most intuitive music browsing interfaces around, that is the ipod/itunes). Without proper tagging, the ipod is useless. Luckily music bought through itunes is pre-tagged (and most downloaded music is at least partially tagged).

To this end I have re-written a chunk of media tagging code in LMCE web admin, it helps with tagging files in large volumes. It also has some nice functions specifically targetted at tagging tv episodes.

Anyway, check out my thread at http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=6571.0

It still has some minor issues but I'm working on it. Hopefully when I get the bugs ironed out (mostly relating to flac files) it will get merged into the 0810 release of LMCE.

Anyway, hope this helps some of you.

[golgoj4]

Sure, proper tagging of media content will help to organize media library much much better. But it'd be nice to have possibility to store search preferences and use them when the LinuxMCE is up instead of default ones. Also I think  it'd be nice to use IMDB to get movie info together with Amazon. Its database is bigger and it provides more useful info. Will see how to implement it.

xbmc uses a site called tvdb.org to grab tv show info. Frankly, i suck at coding. All my attempts so far have failed horribly to integrate this and while im not giving up, it would be nice if someone smarter than me looked at this and told me if im pissing in the wind or not.

http://www.thetvdb.com/ the site

http://www.thetvdb.com/wiki/index.php?title=Programmers_API

Ive gone ahead and registered so that i could start testing You can pm me for the api key if you want it.


Right now i see a manual lookup similar to the current one we use for discs. I really want to get this going but work and shrinking free time have really limited the time i can invest atm

About IMDB:

Imdb I looked into a while ago, but i believe the cost was around $15,000 us to get a static copy, and from what I could tell they were not into creating an api for other users. We could in theory approach them with a proposal to allow some sort of api just for us, but I dont see that as realistic without it being heavily branded and clustered with ads.

Also, someone mentioned that we should attempt to find more international sources for media, but i havent really been able to identify anything close to imdb as of yet.

-golgoj4

[tschak909]

TV lookups would essentially be handled in MythTV_Plugin..but..why? MythTV does a good job of this, already.

-Thom

[golgoj4]

TV lookups would essentially be handled in MythTV_Plugin..but..why? MythTV does a good job of this, already.

-Thom

I was thinking of existing shows that were acquired through other sources. Podcasts, Amazon eps, etc. You are absolutely correct that myth does it now. I actually copy the id3's over to my archive directories to use with torrents i download. I generally watch it live or close to live with myth, but my picture quality is a lot worse than what I can dl.