Progress report 15th September 2009

Almost there now, this is going to be close, as you may know I am going away on Sunday evening for a couple of weeks, and I wont be able to do much, if any work on MC.

So far I have completed the TV Show handling, and tv shows can now be added and scraped, series/season posters and fanart can also be auto-scraped (The add TV Show browser is much the same as gen1), the scraper library works exceptionally well and will even download posters in your preferred language if they exist, there should be no more errors from dodgy xml parsing.

After the folders are initially loaded, a cache file is created that cuts down the startup time from several minutes to almost instantaneous on my setup.

The TV episodes can be loaded and browsed, but cannot be scraped yet, this is what I am working on currently, at the very least I want this to be completed by the weekend, much will depend on TVDB, it was down for much of Sunday, one of my best programming days, and I need it to be available for testing, I'm not the sort of person who can write 1000s of lines of code then test it on a weekend, I tend to write a section that performs a specific task, then test it to check it does what it's supposed to.
If I get time, then I will also be looking at fanart and poster browsers, but I suspect these will have to wait until I get back.

It also may be the case that the facility to get actors from the IMDB for episodes is not included in the initial release. TV Shows do have this facility, but it is far less complex since the TVDB contains the IMDB ID of the title, for episodes this is much more difficult since the IMDB ID is not usually included within the TVDB episode info, the episodes have to be manually looked up and is a little more complicated.

XML errors are highlighted in red, as are TV Show folders that no longer exist, the handling of this is not ideal and I will look at it closer once the basics are completed.

Overall I am quite please with the work so far, I dare say that when I get back from my vacation there will be lots of bug reports, but I expect that these will be cleaned up fairly quickly.

I also feel as if I am finally approaching the functionality that was available in gen1, it's taken longer than I thought, but the code is much better, and I can see no issue with continuing to build on this now.

That is perfect timing! The fall season is almost upon us. Just the super basics would be great.

I for one LOVE your program. I have tried a couple others and could not stand them. I have been using a second xbox to scrape TV shows and export the data for now. Not as easy.

Keep up the great work. I wish I could have worked with you and learned .NET myself. I still use VB6.

J_K_M_A_N

Thanks Billy, I appreciate your efforts & enjoy your break!

Great news Billy!

Love MC, couldn't live without it anymore.
Gen2 works great for movies already, I hope I can soon switch from Gen1 to Gen2 to scrape my tv shows too!

just wanted to say THANKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

id be lost without your great program.
i dread the day you retire from this.
i hope that wont be for a LONG time!

This is starting to get irritating, anytime I start working on this TVDB is down, MC can now search for episodes and add them to a download list, and save them, just need access to the TVDB API so I can get the episode scraper done.

Damn you, TVDB, damn you to hell!!!!!!

TVDB finally came back online this evening so I managed to complete the scraper (A whole day wasted).

I've tested it and the scraper works ok.

Multi part files also scrape and save fine, although I think I will be dreaming of childchildchild.append(childchildchildchild)

Still got a fair amount of work to do, got to download the episode screenshot, create the mediatags, add the imdb actorscraper, and general housekeeping stuff such as the scraper progress update.

I also am finding the episode handling to be a little buggy at the moment, nothing serious, but niggling things that just need time that I haven't got to sort out, should be able to get something out before I go away though, wish I had a bit more time to spend on this, it is my first experience of using a treeview and it is slowing me down a bit.

Oh well, off to bed now, got an early shift tomorrow , no rest for the wicked.

Sweet!

You're making some serious progress now apparently! Keep it up!

Hey mate...

since you took the last fairly stable one offline a few months ago.. I think 2.0198... I think...

i have gone off and tried everything else and nothing else was as good as that version...

to say thanks here is a couple of beers..
Confirmation number: 95X34180BA0714030.


keep up the good work... i am looking forward to the new one and enjoy your holiday

konradwalsh wrote:

Hey mate...

since you took the last fairly stable one offline a few months ago.. I think 2.0198... I think...

i have gone off and tried everything else and nothing else was as good as that version...

to say thanks here is a couple of beers..
Confirmation number: 95X34180BA0714030.


keep up the good work... i am looking forward to the new one and enjoy your holiday

Thats very generous of you, thank you.

And I am really looking forward to my hols, I need the break.