New Release Media Companion gen2 3.230

Changes for new version 3.230

• Bugfix - TV Preferences could not be edited until a folder had been added, since shows are automatically scraped now, this prevented the user from setting preferences until after a folder had been added
  
  
• Bugfix - Error within IMDB scraper library not handling special xml tags within alternative movie titles
  
  
• Bugfix - Using the new Auto TV Scraper did not add language or actor preference to nfo
  
  
• Bugfix - Reworked the way runtime is got for multipart movies, MC is also now consistant using all scraping methods, using the media file for reference if possible.
  
  
• Bugfix - Drop down menuitem 'Search for new movies' was not used - not sure if this menuitem is needed, for now it starts the movie scraper
  
  
• Bugfix - Serious error when batch rescraping meant that whenever any part of the body was rescraped with the batch wizard, the whole body was rescraped.
  
  
• Bugfix - Traced problems that let to issues when using the runtime sort method
  
  
• Bugfix - Issue with the way additional profiles were created would lead to an exception after the first additional profile.
  
  
• Change - I've removed the top search box and replaced it with the one underneath, the only difference between them was that the lower searchbox searched for titles containing, where as the top search required the the string to have an index of 0. I have also added the option to search not only the list, but filename, foldername, genre, rating, imdb ID, outline, year, and runtime.
  
  
• Change - Multiple movies can now be selected for editing, while again this is something of limited usefulness, it does make some procedures much easier, for example adding all the correct movies to a set named 'Jackie Chan Collection', I just listed the movies with Jackie Chan, selected them all, then selected the set and saved, they are all updated at once.
  When multiple movies are selected, the fields on the main page will remain empty, and changes will only be applied to movies if they are not empty, eg, typing 'something' in the plot box, will save 'something' to the plot field of all selected nfo's, leaving it empty will not change the individual plot entries.
  The watched toggle becomes blank and grey if the selected movies have different watched status, but selecting the button will still set all selected movies to watched or unwatched.
  
  
• Change - Switching profiles resulted in the MC form switching size and position, I have disabled that behaviour from this build, the downside is that the default profile will in effect control the size and location of the form

NOTE:- The user created "genre_filterlist.txt" will no longer work, the filename now needs to be "filters.txt"

Profiles has complicated a few things, but I hope that things are running pretty smoothly now, as I said for the previous build, I intend to spend the next few weeks on a bug bash, so please bump unresolved issues, and report new issues.

The IMDB scraper library has been updated for this build, so be sure to overwrite at least that file when extracting the archive.
Download Version 3.230


Regards

Billy

Thanks for this I just tried to change a poster for The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans because it scraped a russian one and i got this error:



This was after selecting themoviedb as source by the way, but same happens for all the sources.

It will let me change posters for other movies, sucessfully tried: The Hurt Locker and The Watcher

Cheers,
Robbie

EDIT: After exiting out of Media Companion then going back into it it changed posters no problem.

Just wanted to say top job on the rebuild of the preferences, it really does MC justice.

Also to those of you out there that appreciate Billy's work and can spare a few dollars, how bout sending a donation his way. I know that he appreciates it. So go on, click the paypal button at the top of MC and show you support, if you can.

Are you still looking at working through these below after the bug bash? or have plans changed?

Quote :

The result of this is that I have decided to prioritise the TV Show handling of MC, over the next month or so adding the following features.

* A thread that will attempt to auto scrape tv shows, in the past I have not added this due to the high risk of error, and the potential downloading of 100s of incorrect episodes. To avoid this I will add an unconfirmed option to the locked option. It can be easily switched from this to unlocked. Perhaps a dialogue asking for confirmation before scraping episodes.
* The ability to download missing posters and screenshots, I found this to be the biggest pain. In addition I think adding a dialogue to the screenshot would be helpful, eg Rescrape screenshot etc.
* A filter function similar to movies that allows people to list episodes with missing art etc.



In addition to this I will be working on the following, most likely in this order:

* I will be finally reworking the preferences, i'm not looking forward to this, but I need to bite the bullet, you may find that in coming builds the preferences may be a little inconsistent as I gradually move appropriate settings into their new homes. The idea is that none of the new preferences will need a new window, but will be listed inside the tab. The current tab will be the main program preferences. The TV Show and Movie inner tab controls will each have their own preferences tab, relating to section it is located within. This may take a bit of time to get right, so please be patient.
* I want to create a basic startup wizard, that will assist new users in setting the correct preferences.
* An internal help system needs to be created, perhaps using F1 or similar, especially with regard to the preferences which can be extremely confusing.

I may be crazy, but where is the rename files option? In settings you can select how to rename, but I can't find where to actually rename?

Dropnuts wrote:

I may be crazy, but where is the rename files option? In settings you can select how to rename, but I can't find where to actually rename?

The tv episode rename feature can only be used on seasons at the moment, Right click the season that you want to rename and select 'Rename TV Shows', all the episodes listed under that season will be renamed.

I had plans to add the function to the root of a show, allowing all episodes within a show to be renamed but seem to have got a bit sidetracked, but it will be coming soon.

paybac wrote:

Are you still looking at working through these below after the bug bash? or have plans changed?

Quote :

The result of this is that I have decided to prioritise the TV Show handling of MC, over the next month or so adding the following features.

* A thread that will attempt to auto scrape tv shows, in the past I have not added this due to the high risk of error, and the potential downloading of 100s of incorrect episodes. To avoid this I will add an unconfirmed option to the locked option. It can be easily switched from this to unlocked. Perhaps a dialogue asking for confirmation before scraping episodes.
* The ability to download missing posters and screenshots, I found this to be the biggest pain. In addition I think adding a dialogue to the screenshot would be helpful, eg Rescrape screenshot etc.
* A filter function similar to movies that allows people to list episodes with missing art etc.



In addition to this I will be working on the following, most likely in this order:

* I will be finally reworking the preferences, i'm not looking forward to this, but I need to bite the bullet, you may find that in coming builds the preferences may be a little inconsistent as I gradually move appropriate settings into their new homes. The idea is that none of the new preferences will need a new window, but will be listed inside the tab. The current tab will be the main program preferences. The TV Show and Movie inner tab controls will each have their own preferences tab, relating to section it is located within. This may take a bit of time to get right, so please be patient.
* I want to create a basic startup wizard, that will assist new users in setting the correct preferences.
* An internal help system needs to be created, perhaps using F1 or similar, especially with regard to the preferences which can be extremely confusing.

Most of those are actually done now,

The preferences still need some tweaking, but are almost there.
TV shows can now be scraped automatically, as long as they are added from a root, and in my tests, seems to work as expected, I certainly have not received reports of any issues with this.
Filters to spot missing art for tv shows have been added.

Things still to do.
I still need to add the facility to automatically search for missing posters/fanart, and to create screenshots.
A startup wizard would be nice, but i'm not sure how beneficial it would be, the basic useage is fairly straight forward, it seems to be the more the advanced functionality that people need help with. An internal help system is also on that list, and while it would be very nice, it would be very time consuming, I just always seem to have other things that are in my mind a higher priority. Maybe I should just spend a few days creating a detailed guide for the website, which is well out of date now.

crash123 wrote:

Thanks for this I just tried to change a poster for The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans because it scraped a russian one and i got this error:



This was after selecting themoviedb as source by the way, but same happens for all the sources.

It will let me change posters for other movies, sucessfully tried: The Hurt Locker and The Watcher

Cheers,
Robbie

EDIT: After exiting out of Media Companion then going back into it it changed posters no problem.

The GDI error in this case is raised when a poster is opened, but not closed before MC tries to overwrite it.
In order to do this, MC opens the file to a bitmap, creates a new bitmap that is copied from the original, then the original bitmap is disposed, therefor closing the connection to the file. For some reason this is not 100% successful and this error occurs.

If I could find the exact circumstances that raise this error I would have a better chance of fixing it,

Until then, the next build will at least handle the error in a more elegant way.

billyad2000 wrote:

Dropnuts wrote:

I may be crazy, but where is the rename files option? In settings you can select how to rename, but I can't find where to actually rename?

The tv episode rename feature can only be used on seasons at the moment, Right click the season that you want to rename and select 'Rename TV Shows', all the episodes listed under that season will be renamed.

I had plans to add the function to the root of a show, allowing all episodes within a show to be renamed but seem to have got a bit sidetracked, but it will be coming soon.

Ah of course, it's always the one thing you don't try. Thanks.

I got some strange results running this version.

Many of the NFO files contained this text, even though the text has nothing to do with the movie:
The 82nd Annual Academy Awards (2010)

Is this a known bug or did I do something stupid? First time I ran MC so...

I'm using Win XP with service pack 3 and Media Companion gen2 3.230

Thanks, this looks like a great piece of software so far!

chinadoll911 wrote:

I got some strange results running this version.

Many of the NFO files contained this text, even though the text has nothing to do with the movie:
The 82nd Annual Academy Awards (2010)

Is this a known bug or did I do something stupid? First time I ran MC so...

I'm using Win XP with service pack 3 and Media Companion gen2 3.230

Thanks, this looks like a great piece of software so far!

Not heard of this before, could you paste me a copy of the entire nfo file?

I was getting this same thing if I dragged a new movie to the MC, that was dvd files. It would scrape each vob with it's own nfo, stating "The 82nd Annual Academy Awards (2010)" or "82nd Annual Academy Awards (2010), The".

I paniced, but found the extra nfo's and removed then, did a rebuild and all ok. tested this with removing the movies nfo and thumb, and let MC search for new movies. This worked perfectly, but drag and drop, started scraping each VOB set as separate movies, finding the above academy awards for each.

Hope this helps.

PS. Did this in older 3.19* version to. Weird.

jphoenix wrote:

I was getting this same thing if I dragged a new movie to the MC, that was dvd files. It would scrape each vob with it's own nfo, stating "The 82nd Annual Academy Awards (2010)" or "82nd Annual Academy Awards (2010), The".

I paniced, but found the extra nfo's and removed then, did a rebuild and all ok. tested this with removing the movies nfo and thumb, and let MC search for new movies. This worked perfectly, but drag and drop, started scraping each VOB set as separate movies, finding the above academy awards for each.

Hope this helps.

PS. Did this in older 3.19* version to. Weird.

Interesting. This was my first run. I did mistakenly forget to select the 'DVD' checkbox, but the errors that I saw related to non-DVD files. I will try grepping for the bad NFO contents and then deleting the NFOs, TBNs etc for these failed scrapes, and then try re-running. Might make sense that I try to create folders for each movie to encapsulate all related files together...

Bug described more in its own post here:
https://billyad2000.darkbb.com/bug-discussion-f3/media-companion-v3230-garbage-nfo-contents-t1026.htm

Hi,

I cannot scrape: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0814255/

Love using Media Companion and am on board with all the new improvements being more user friendly. However, I am missing one feature of the older builds that I had come to rely on and that was very convenient for my situation. Up until build 3.198 there was an option in the general scraper tab for additional fanart options to resize images to 960x450. I have a 24" 480i Standard-Definition Digital TV and the XBMC dev team recommends running the GUI in 720p and resizing fanart to 960X540 to help the taxed memory in library mode and to use certain xbox optimized skins. I can't seem to find that option anymore. Is it still available? I concede I may have overlooked it when acclimating myself to the most recent build. And thanks for all your hard work!

1. In the movie preferences set your fanart resolution to 960x540
2. From the movie menu option (at the top) choose Downsize all fanarts to the selected size.

Cheers

At the moment the option to resize fanart is located in the movie preferences, since you bring it up, maybe not the best location since it also applies to tv fanart.

The drop down menu item mentioned by stormynight resizes fanart to your preference that has already been scraped.

Ah Ha, found it! I only have TV Shows on my HD, so I have never even gone into the movie scraper settings. So, selfishly I'm grateful you are prioritizing the TV Show scraper. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. All my new shows now have right sized fan art.

If you're running a recent build of xbmc on the xbox then fanart resizing is no longer necessary in your media files. Xbmc now resizes fanart when it updates video library and caches the info. When I get home I'll try to find the revision number this happened in and the details for advancedsettings.xml

Dropnuts wrote:

If you're running a recent build of xbmc on the xbox then fanart resizing is no longer necessary in your media files. Xbmc now resizes fanart when it updates video library and caches the info. When I get home I'll try to find the revision number this happened in and the details for advancedsettings.xml

Even though this is the case, it will still be a useful feature for many, i'm sure that XBMC resizing the images can only slow down scraping.

Also, I run XBMC on an Asrock 330 ION platform, and while it can easily decode and output HD, i've found that full HD fanart can be quite slow to load, lowering the resolution does not affect the overall experience, but the fanart images do display a lot faster.

Good point about the scraping. And I've only got the xbox, so didn't realise page loading was slowed down so much by high res fan art.