Wall of posters working concept - Need ideas.

I been playing with the idea of a poster wall view, see below, before I go any further I was just wondering what peoples thoughts were on this, is it something that people would like to see?

At the moment basic movie info can be viewed as a tooltip, I have also added a context menu, but other than play file, I am unsure what else to add. Double clicking the poster will also be used, either to zoom the image, or to select the movie and return to main browser.

I'ts not really a serious concern, just letting me work on something a little different to keep my interest levels up, i'm really just looking for peoples thoughts
Movie posters are actually cached as 150x200 jpegs, these are very small and load fairly quickly, although the initial caching takes some time, it only need to be done once, additional movies can be cached as they are scraped. The wall is also dynamic and the images are reloaded if the window width is increased or decreased.

Kool feature.

Me personally i dont think i would use it very often as i use xbmc on xbox to view and watch my movies.
I just use MC for doing all the scraping and organising stuff.

However from time to time i go away and take my laptop with me and a feature like this would help in letting friends and family choose a movie
as i dont have xbmc installed on my laptop. (a picture paints a thousand words)

Are you thinking of taking MC to a more of a standalone Media Manager? If you are it would be kool to see a couple of more views similar to XBMC library mode.

Long story short, I wouldnt use it much but a welcome addition none the less.

Cheers
Paybac

Perfect for the HTML output!!

Looks good, I assume this would work with the current filters?

I'd want to select the move when double clicking or have a button to do so if an enlarged image is displayed.

Hover - show tooltip
Left Click - return to main menu with movie selected
Double Click - Play Movie
Right Click - Cancel? i.e return to main menu without selection....unless you can find another right click option....

OR

Hover - Movie Title & year only as it may not be 100% clear from the poster. (The full movie details may be too large & obscure other titles if you are browsing)
Left Click - return to main menu with movie selected
DoubleClick - Play Movie
Right Click - Show Movie Details Plot/Length etc in Context Menu (not as sub menus but just as text)

Cheers

Was just thinking, how bout just creating a "Library" mode/tab whatever you want to call it. Basically a window that displays information you want
to see when selecting a movie, this could have view modes like the poster wall that the user could select, no editable functions an so forth, basically
similar to XBMC library mode.

This would be a great function for kids,family,friends etc


P.S. you mentioned in a few of your posts that making the posterwall was fun to do, but changing/updating the preferences is boring.
Just outa curiosity what makes one thing fun/interesting/boring isn't it all just typing in code and so forth?


Cheers
Paybac

paybac wrote:

Was just thinking, how bout just creating a "Library" mode/tab whatever you want to call it. Basically a window that displays information you want
to see when selecting a movie, this could have view modes like the poster wall that the user could select, no editable functions an so forth, basically
similar to XBMC library mode.

This would be a great function for kids,family,friends etc


P.S. you mentioned in a few of your posts that making the posterwall was fun to do, but changing/updating the preferences is boring.
Just outa curiosity what makes one thing fun/interesting/boring isn't it all just typing in code and so forth?


Cheers
Paybac

Thats an interesting idea i've got my hands full at the moment but i'll definately think about it. A listview control is not something I have used before and would prove interesting.

As to what bores me, repetitiveness, I see the wall as doing something new. A couple of years ago, adding controls manually at runtime was not an option for me, for the most part MC is desingned before runtime, I have tinkered with the creation of controls at runtime with the poster and fanart browsers, this is my first large scale attempt at a new idea, not only adding an unknown number of controls dynamically, in rows containing an unknown number of images based on the panel width. In addition to this, I have also learned to add the tooltip and context menu at runtime and can handle any event from these controls, easily identifying which control fired the event. You have to take into account that this is not my work, or even my choice of work.
I wrote MC initially because I got tired of needing to redo my XBMC, and scraping 1000s of movies and tv shows could take days. I shared it with people who had similar thoughts and it has grown from there. MC does what I need it to now, and does it well, but I discovered I actually enjoyed learning to program and while that is still the case I will continue with MC, but I have to say that a lot of the code is repetitive and not very interesting, things such as this wall idea is my way of stimulating myself.

I do take pride in MC, it has become important to me, and I also feel a strong oblication towards the people who use the program, but at the end of the day it is only a hobbie and I do need to take some enjoyment it the project, setting these little challenges for myself is how I achieve it.

Just found a limitation with this

Tha maximum number or rows has to be 159 due to the control maximum height in visual basic.

This will only really be an issue when viewing a large number of movies, or for people with very low res monitors. Viewing filtered lists will also be unlikely to cause an issue.

My monitor resolution is 1680x1050 so will allow 11 images on a row or a total of 1749 movie thumbs, for lower resolution screens, or if the form is in a smaller window then the ammount that can be listed is lower.

My current window size for MC is about 1100pixels which allows 7 images in a row or a maximum of 1113 thumbs.

The only way I could think of to avoid movies missing off the bottom of the panel was to increase the number of columns until all the movies take =< than 159 rows and add a horizontal scrollbar. If anyone has any better ideas then I am all ears.

One idea would be instead of having a scrollbar perhaps a page flip i.e. left and right buttons that change the wall completely.
Not exactly a great idea just an alternative

I'm using version 3.272 and I can't help but notice the Wall function is behaving oddly.

I had scrapped all my movies via XMBC and decided to give MC a try with my movies (I had since been using it only for TV shows).
When I went to view the wall (since I was messing with HTML outputs) all my movies were shown with the same cover, that of the first movie in the list.
I notice it scraped a jpg and placed it in the Postercache folder as ".jpg" (no filename just an extension).

I was able to go in to the item and change the poster by browsing to the .tbn file and it then showed correctly... until I restarted MC.. then it went back to the default.

If I wish to use MC to manage my movie collection, do I need to go back and rescrape all my movies via MC? (If so this isn't an option as many of my movies are not listed on IMDB due to foreign releases and such).

If that's the problem then oh well, I'll just keep using it for TV shows.. just thought I'd ask before I give up on it again.

DaGnome wrote:

I'm using version 3.272 and I can't help but notice the Wall function is behaving oddly.

I had scrapped all my movies via XMBC and decided to give MC a try with my movies (I had since been using it only for TV shows).
When I went to view the wall (since I was messing with HTML outputs) all my movies were shown with the same cover, that of the first movie in the list.
I notice it scraped a jpg and placed it in the Postercache folder as ".jpg" (no filename just an extension).

I was able to go in to the item and change the poster by browsing to the .tbn file and it then showed correctly... until I restarted MC.. then it went back to the default.

If I wish to use MC to manage my movie collection, do I need to go back and rescrape all my movies via MC? (If so this isn't an option as many of my movies are not listed on IMDB due to foreign releases and such).

If that's the problem then oh well, I'll just keep using it for TV shows.. just thought I'd ask before I give up on it again.

The issue you are having is caused because MC uses the IMDB ID to create the filenames used for the thumbnails (tt1234567.jpg), if there is no <id> within the info then the file is saved as '.jpg'.

Funnily enough, the same issue has also been raised today, but with regard to home movies.

A simple solution would be for MC to create an identifier for movies that do not have an id, perhaps 'mc0000001, mc0000002' etc, this could be implemented in the code in such a way that movies missing an id would automatically have one created. For existing movies this could be achieved using the 'rebuild movie nfo files' menu option.

If this is acceptable then I will implement it for the next build.

Ahh interesting... well don't do so on my account, my movies are nicely organized via XMBC already (through lots of hand editing of NFO files etc..) When I add a new movie I've got the process down to about 3-5minutes so it's no big deal to me. I just thought perhaps I was doing something wrong.