New Release Media Companion gen2 beta

New Release Media Companion gen2 beta

This is a little earlier than planned due to the IMDB scraper being broken on the last version,

The movie handling is almost complete, scraping, editing, poster and fanart handling should be working fine.

This is a beta release, there are some functions and preferences that are not yet enabled (such as profiles), The output logs are incomplete, and exception handling is very basic.

Known issues that will be fixed in the next couple of days:
Adding new folders in the preferences does not automatically add the movies within, present workaround is to use menu option 'rebuild movies'
Posters are not added in the edit movie page, they cannot be cropped.
The output log will be completed

TV Show Handling is fully disabled in this version.

So whats new.
On the surface:

• New clean interface
  
• Sort movies by a-z, movie year, date added, and rating
  
• filters include genre, watched, unwatched, top250, and problem movies(ususally movies which failed to scrape)
  
• List movies by title & year, filename, or foldername
  
• Invert order of displayed list (eg a-z becomes z-a)
  
• the option to include poster urls within the nfo from IMPA, TMDB, IMDB, and MPDB, these poster urls can be browsed via xbmc
  If someone lets me know the format for including fanart urls in the nfo then i will add support for this.
  
• When listing by Title & year, movies starting with "the" are renamed "movietitle, the"
  
• the top search box searches for matches starting with search text
  
• the bottom search box searches for matches that contain search text
  
• all searches and filters are realtime, and uses a match all system (AND), this means that movie will not be returned unless it returns a match for every filter and text search
  
• The main display will now in a tab, the only one active at the moment is movies, but the idea is a a seperate tab for tv shows, albums, etc
  

Beneath the surface:

• The code has been changed from procedural to Object based, this will allow new features to be added easily
  
• The origional MC used very outdated multi dimensional arrays (although I didn't know they were outdated when I started.) These have been wholly replaced with structures and classes.
  
• The Media Scrapers are now external to the main program body. I had several reasons for this, mainly to make it much easier to fix a broken scraper, but it will also make it possible for others to create scrapers for other sources. A scraper for TMDB is on the way, If you have the ability and would like to create a custom scraper(s) then pm me.
  
• MC now uses Xml serialization to read and write xml files, it used to use the StreamReader class (I know, but I had never heard of xml a year ago )
  

Installation, just copy the folder within the archive to your selected location. For the moment the config file will be saved within this folder so make sure wherever you place the folder has write permission. As long as it is kept in its own folder, this verison will not interfere with any previously installed versions. It is suggested that you don't use a config created by previous versions, but let MC create a fresh config when you run it for the first time.


I've got some spare time over the next week and I should be doing quite a bit of work on this,

I am not looking at feature requests at the moment, I am just looking to get basic functionality back up and running ASAP so that I can get cracking on TV Shows.

Any other issues should be reported in the bug forum, please make sure that bug reports mention that it is for MC gen2. reports that dont state the version will be ignored.


Download Media Companion gen2 beta

Hi there,
Testing the beta version and works fine to me. I love the fanart-poster split-screen. No bug to report yet ;-)
thanks alot !