This is probably a pretty complicated request but i thought i would throw it out there.

How about adding a feature for our offline DVD/VHS/BlueRay etc collections.

This is how i see i working, The user inputs The title of the DVD and the disc number/location of the DVD. MC then creates the Folder for the movie, then creates the .AVI video that says "PLEASE INSERT DISC NUMBER *", MC then creates the NFO, downloads the poster, Fanart at as normal.

Obviously there would need to be a bunch of options for this to suit everyone, and i know there are other programs out there that can just do certain parts of this. Just thinking this would be a an awesome addition to MC.

Like i say tho, I dont know if this is even possible just putting it out there for your consideration.

Cheers
Paybac

basically like this built into MC

http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=40329

Most of what you have said you could already do in MC........


Assuming you can create your own avi with the correct information on it....you would then....

Rename that avi to the DVD Movie title that you want to import into MC,
MC would then scraped it as per normal.


If a user selects that title in XBMC, the avi would run & show which DVD to insert....


The only other issue I see is that at the end of the avi, XBMC reverts back to the menu so your avi would have to run long enough to be readable.


Thoughts?

PS I appreciate this would be tedious for a large DVD library...

yep this can all be done currently with the use of a couple of programs.

i.e.
1. make a spreadsheet of Disc Number and DVD Title in Excel then save as .CSV file (This is the tedious part)
2. Use Offline Creator to create the Movie Folder and .avi file(think the avi length is adjustable) based off your spreadsheet you typed up step 1.
3. Run MC

What i was after was perhaps the the top 2 steps could possibly be added into MC.

i.e. Input the Disc Number and DVD title and then MC would create the the Movie folder and .avi file, then scrape for movie as normal.

Kinda like a one stop shop kinda thing.

Yep, I agree!

Do you know of an offline creator at the moment that will use a csv?

Perhaps a freeware program that can take commandline options could be called from MC......

Cheers

Ok I had a bit of a play, I couldn't find a simple commandline driven video title creator, but i was led to http://www.videospin.com/Redesign/.

This is a free program that allowed me to create a short video using pictures & titles like the screenshot below...



PS the picture is from the XBMC folder....

I created this as a 10 second (8 frames per second - to save space) video for use with my 'offsite' DVD's....it can be found here...

XBMC Orange 2 (556kb) http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4XA768BG

This version has a short sound effect (also from XBMC) coverted to mp3 since the above program would only save the audio as PCM - this has reduced the video size considerably....

Cheers

http://www.mediafire.com/file/mzddzldzjny/Offline-Creator-1.2.zip

This is the link to the offline Creator that i use, It is quite a number of bugs and is quite simple to use. It creates very simple .avis with an INSERT DISC NUMBER * title in the centre of a black screen that lasts 10secs long.

http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=40329
The post for this program can be found here. It is no longer being developed unfortunately.

Thats a sweet looking avi u created there stormy.

Thanks, I'll have a look.....


OK I've had a look...

The Offline Editor looks promising in the sense that perhaps we can use it externally to MC, perhaps by running another program that calls the Offline Editor program. What I was able to do was to use the background function to created a movie with a background like what I have already done above. In addition I was able to change that graphic & then make that file read only - Then when it created the movie, it used my modified graphic. The point here is if we can create the picture we want, Offline Editor can be made to create the video from it.

Also it uses Mencoder to create the videos, logically it would be easier to have a program to call it directly, but there probably is a steep learning curve for little short term benefit.


It would be nice to have perhaps a movie poster as the backdrop too, along with the required information as to which disk needs to be loaded.....

Hmmm....

I've had a look at MEncoder,

I was thinking maybe the fanart as a backdrop, with a text message to insert the Disk,

If someone wants to work out the commandline to achieve this then feel free.

MC can easily add a caption to the fanart, so its just a case of working out the commandline that creates a 10s or so clip from a jpeg. Actually, for this purpose, a tiny framerate would be needed, this would make the encoding fast, and the resulting file tiny.

If a still image is all that is needed then it seems a waste, perhaps it would be a better option to ask the guys over at XBMC if they would add a feature that looked for a jpeg with a specific extension for example, "moviefilename.oph" (Offline Place Holder), if the jpeg exists then just display it until the disk is inserted.
I could add a simple feature within MC that allowed someone to add a movie manually by title, perhaps using the change movie setup and MC would save the information to a specific folder, the nfo, poster and fanart could be edited and displayed as normal, but the addition of the "moviefilename.oph" file would allow it to be seen as an offline movie.

This is way over my head at the moment but i'm trying to figure it out

Here is some info i found that may be useful to someone looking to help billy out with the commandline to create avis from the fanart .jpegs.

http://www9.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-enc-images.html

Thanks for the additinal info, yes Offline Creator must use this same method as it creates a txt file which basically is a list of the png frames to create the final avi.....

Quote:

Creating an MPEG-4 file from explicit list of JPEG files (list.txt in current directory contains the list of files to use as source, one per line): mencoder mf://@list.txt -mf w=800:h=600:fps=25:type=jpg \ -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:trell -oac copy -o output.avi

So assuming we use a movie poster, we can somehow resize it to what size we need, we then need to be able to add some user defined text over the top & then call mencoder to create the avi.

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My Setup...
Using MC on XP SP3 32bit, Media is on NAS unit, XBMC on 2 XBOX's & 1 XP PC