Where do you want MC to go next? (Suggested Feature List)

As people may have noticed over the last couple of weeks there has not been much happening with MC. I have been taking the oppurtunity to tidy up the code a bit, fix a few bugs, and iron out a few niggles that people have mentioned.

This will likely remain the case for the next few weeks, or until the christmas period is over anyway.

When christmas and the new year is over I will be looking at where to go next, there are several options

• Rework the preferences, at the moment they are a mess and it is very difficult to know what some options actually do
  
• Add support for XBMC xml scrapers. Over at XBMC Nicezia has created a library that allows 3rd party software to use XBMC scrapers.
  
• Add album support, this would be more easily achieved if support for XML scrapers had been added
  
• Add advanced options for TV Shows, I am not talking about filters for missing screenshots here, I am talking about more advanced stuff, such as automatically renaming and organising files, reworking the procedure needed when a new show is added
  
• Trailers - add additional scrapers and add a trailer tab that allows trailer selection and
  
• Expand support for platforms, such as Popcorn Hour
  
• Add a first use wizard to get people started
  

It is my personal belief that reworking the preferences and adding support for Nicezia's ScraperXML library should be the highest priorities

Any other ideas or comments are welcome.

First off... thanks again for a fantastic piece of software... I did a full "how to use it" article on my blog and its one the highest read stories on http://tech-n-life.com


Features I would love to see

• 
  I would love to see music and music videos looked after
  
  I would love if it could rename and start downloads like TV Rename does
  
  I would love to be able to add other options to the rename function. I want to use S0XE0X - Showname - Title

Thanks
Konrad

I 2nd the request for Music. My music library is a mess on Xbox Media Center and has Media Companion written all over it

Whatever road you take I'm sure the results will be great. Thanks for the great program!

Subtitle scraping. I like to have subtitles for every movie/tv show, as most videos do not have them hardcoded for 1 or 2 minutes when a character speaks another language. Nothing bothers me more than getting half way through a movie to have the most important scene in a different language and no subs. It would be a nice option.

Another great feature would be a "catch-up" button on TV show listings. MC already knows what shows you have, and what shows are in a season/series. So it should be fairly easy to deduce which episodes you're missing. Take those episodes and generate a url from an openBT tracker. It could be as simple as sending "ShowName S01E01" to a browser post function (like is done with IMDB) and then return a download link.

A wizard (along with other "noob-friendly" tweaks to the preferences) would be great. I like the idea of having a "Preview" pane for options. When a user checks Fanart for instance, they see a screenshot of XBMC with Fanart enabled, when the uncheck it, you see an otherwise identical screenshot of XBMC, but with no fanart enabled. Now the user who is unsure of what results they'll get can see how it changes the final output of their media center. This could make many of the features easier to understand, as well as enabling non-English users to figure out what the options do without need for a full translation.

Trailers sounds great, but I think there may be some upcoming changes in XBMC with trailer flagging, so it's probably better to wait a while on that one.

TV renaming is the best overall suggestion. Currently I have to use 2 separate programs for that. Including it in MC would put this app over the top as the best media management utility.

As for expanded support, I vote nay. I like some of the other media centers, but XBMC remains the standard for most people. It's installable on many platforms, so it naturally has the most users. As the code gets forked by projects like Boxee, or other projects like Popcorn Hour... well their code drifts from the standard, they'll implement different tagging systems etc. You then increase your own workload trying to support features of one that are incompatible with the rest. I'd rather see MC as a program that solidly supports most (but not all) people's media organization needs, than see it try to support everyone but with flaky compatibility issues. If it were opensourced or you had 3-4 other full time developers for it, I'd change my tune. MC still needs some work to iron out the few remaining quirks, and there's plenty of room for additional features. This could become a huge increase in code complexity and ultimately hurt the program's adoption by new users.

XML scrapers, Music Scrapers etc. This is the next logical step. I don't really view it as a new feature, it's just the natural progression of a product like this.

Hi Billy...

Advanced TV Shows Functionality i think is tops!

If you can integrate similar functionality that is available in TV Rename, it would make MC the undisputed champion of media managers!

Functionality i would love to see :

- Scan a folder (ie. Downloads) for episodes and automatically move and rename them into the appropriate TV Show\Season folder
- Built in RSS reader that automatically downloads .nzb or .torrent files for new episodes and saves them into a folder to be processed by our favorite Newsreader or BitTorrent client
- A scheduler that will do the scanning, moving, renaming and .nfo/.tbn creation automatically at a set time of day or at intervals
- HTML Export for TV Shows

Thanks for all your hard work man!

-Pr.

I love Media Companion and XBMC, but in the future I might have to move to Windows Media Center 7, it would be great if your app included support for creating xml's for 7WMC, or some way to export data to be compatible with it.

Support for all movie scrapers already built in XBMC or include them somehow in your program.

Thanks

I'm not sure how to phrase this correctly, but I have a number of DVD's of TV series. When I rip these DVD's to my harddrive as ISO files I have an entire DVD with multiple episodes. Media Companion does not recognise these DVD's under the "TV shows".

I would like to be able to have some sort of organisation for TV-show DVD's.

Thank You for one of the best programs around today!! Really excellent work!!

alchemist wrote:

I'm not sure how to phrase this correctly, but I have a number of DVD's of TV series. When I rip these DVD's to my harddrive as ISO files I have an entire DVD with multiple episodes. Media Companion does not recognise these DVD's under the "TV shows".

I would like to be able to have some sort of organisation for TV-show DVD's.

Thank You for one of the best programs around today!! Really excellent work!!

I believe if you have your dvd .iso's named correctly then they should be recognised no problem.

This is how i would structure the folder and name the iso file

\TvShowName\Season1\s01e01e02e03e04e05e06.iso

just tried that with my Firefly dvd's

structure is: O:\tv shows\Firefly

files are:

S01E01E02E03.iso
S01E04E05E06E07.iso
S01E01E02E03.nfo
S01E04E05E06E07.nfo

Media Companion will detect both .nfo files and display them correctly - But XBMC will only detect "S01E01E02E03.iso" and will ignore the other (ie. only show "1 episode" in the library)

(let me know if I should move this to a bug report - but i'm just following the previous posters advice)

see file content below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<episodedetails>
<fileinfo>
<video>
<width>
</width>
<height>
</height>
<codec>
</codec>
<format>
</format>
<duration>
</duration>
<bitrate>
</bitrate>
<bitratemode>
</bitratemode>
<bitratemax>
</bitratemax>
<container>
</container>
<codecid>
</codecid>
<codecidinfo>
</codecidinfo>
<scantype>
</scantype>
</video>
<subtitle />
</fileinfo>
<title>Firefly episodes 4,5,6,7</title>
<season>1</season>
<episode>2</episode>
<aired></aired>
<plot>Disc 02 with episodes "Shindig", "Safe", "Our Mrs. Reynolds" and "Jaynestown" </plot>
<playcount>0</playcount>
<director></director>
<credits></credits>
<rating></rating>
<genre>
</genre>
<actor>
<name>
</name>
<role>
</role>
</actor>
</episodedetails>

I believe this may be due to xbmc being in library mode. Switch off library mode, go the the

S01E04E05E06E07.iso

file, and select add to library.

this happened to me when I added
Highschool Musical1.iso
Highschool Musical2.iso
&
Highschool Musical3.iso

Only showed as Highschool Musical1. once out of library, added #2 and #3 to library and switch library back on, the 2 & 3 covers showed as individual movies.

Hope this is of help.

I would like to the preferences section get a makeover. Perhaps once this is done you could class it as a stable release?


Major features i would like to see added in order of my own personal preference:

1. Preferences makeover

2. XBMC xml scrapers

3. Offline Movie support (as discussed here https://billyad2000.darkbb.com/feature-requests-f4/dvd-database-offline-movie-collections-t743.htm)

4. Album Support (I think this would be a pretty massive task, but it would make you the undisputed king of media managers)I think the problem that you will face with Album support is that the majority of people will believe that they can just click one button and their entire music collection is going to be sorted/tidied/album art/Fanart etc. is going to be added. The reality of cleaning up a music collection is that it is a song by song or album by album task. As there are so many different releases for songs under different albums/Labels etc,etc. not to mention all the tag info variations. Don't get me wrong i am excited to see this feature added and am excited to see how you implement it.

5. Trailers

6. Homemade movie support



Other requests that i believe would help grow the community and access to MC as a whole. (I think that most of these requests would be beneficial to growing your community, but not required by your veteran supporters)

Language support
Startup Wizard
MC Updater
Updated help guide (incorporated into MC rather then just the readme)
Support for other Platforms

Cheers
Paybac

The features I would most like to see are:

1: Scraping of trailers
2. Music video support. There is no program out there that manages music videos. This feature alone would cement this program as king (IMO anyway).

I also agree you don't need to expand platforms at this stage. You're working hard enough to get this perfect for XBMC. One man just doesn't have the resources to do this for every media program simultaneously.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions, not much is happening at the moment, the run-up to christmas seems to be eating most of my time up. After friday it will be worse because thats when the kids break up from school, i'll try to get another build out before christmas, although it will just be bugfixes.

@alchemist
MC is already supposed to manage dvd images, this may be a bug, i'll look into it.

@Everyone else
Re-working the preferences is a given, it's at the top of my list right now

Support for XBMC xml scrapers is also a high priority for me, this would also make it much easier to implement music album support, I don't think it would be all that complicated, but the structure would have to be fairly strict eg.
Artist 1
.......Album1
................Track01
................Track02
.......Album2
................Track01
................Track02
Artist 2
.......Album1
................Track01
................Track02
.......Album2
................Track01
................Track02
I'll have to think of what regex will be needed for the song tracks so that as many as possible are supported. I think that support for albums is one of the biggest thing missing from MC.

Home movie support is also a good idea. It's been mentioned before, but I forgot all about it, something to think about that should not be to complicated.

Trailers is another area I want to work on, my biggest concern is finding a source for trailers. Apple trailers would be ideal, but I spent a great deal of time a few months ago trying to create a working scraper for apple trailers without success, it is something I intend to go back to, but I don't really want to be spending months on this.

Offline DVD support is also on my toto list, I have not forgotten about it.

Multi-Platform support is not likely to happen ever, I am using VB.net to program MC and this is where my knowledge ends, I have wasted much of this year re-writing MC and I feel I am only now finally moving ahead of gen1, I don't relish the task of having to repeat this on a different platform in a language I am unfamiliar with. On the other hand, I cant see why MC would not run on a Linux system under Mono, I have deliberately avoided incompatible components such as arraylists, and MC is compiled for .NET 2.0 and Mono supports VB.NET 2.0 it should in theory work.

A help guide incorporated into MC is a good idea, but one that is likely to be very time consuming. A comprehenive guide could take me many weeks of work. A better idea is that of a wizard to get people started, once they have the basic setup working it would be easier for them to experiment with various options, this could be helped greatly by a reworked preferences, at the moment they are very disorganised, and it is not always clear what some of the preferences do.

As for xml support for platforms other than XBMC, this would be simpler to implement than it sounds, the input and output components for the nfo files is actually quite simple and very small. Additional routines could be fairly simply added that would allow other formats to be input and output, the easiest way would be for a user to choose the format they wanted, but it would not be impossible for MC to determine the format when it is loaded, the main processes would not need to be altered, although any of the functionality gained by certain tags, eg the genre filters, would obviously not work if the format did not contain that data.

While I would like to see MC identifying missing episodes, I personally can't see it as a program that finds, downloads, and organises tv shows all without user intervention. I'm not saying it will never happen, if I was to get all of the above working then I may start looking for new directions to move in, but at the very least it is a long way off.

While I am still not 100% where I will be going next, it seems probable that it will be the preferences, but you can be sure I will be spending a great deal of time thinking about it over the next couple of weeks.

billyad2000 wrote:

A help guide incorporated into MC is a good idea, but one that is likely to be very time consuming. A comprehenive guide could take me many weeks of work. A better idea is that of a wizard to get people started, once they have the basic setup working it would be easier for them to experiment with various options, this could be helped greatly by a reworked preferences, at the moment they are very disorganised, and it is not always clear what some of the preferences do.

Why not set up a wiki or similar so anyone can update it, then also if you get asked a question in the forum rather than answering the same question over and over you could update the WIKI for any missing info then point users to the page with the answers.

That is what I do for my MAKEMSI tool (my user group has 600+ users) except I don't use a WIKI.

Bye,
Dennis

Personally Media Companion does almost everything I need for media management. After getting the issue with custom shows worked out it's been easy to add new shows and get them sorted out.

These are the only things I would want -

I think music and music video support would be great, not necessary but a nice +.

A missing episode list, just a list and nothing more would be helpful. I wouldn't want MC to do anything with torrents or downloading.

Missing tv show items is a big need. A way to filter and display items that are missing posters, screenshots, descriptions, etc.

And this one is a dream but I would like to scrape for individual episodes regardless of tv show. For example I set up a custom show for Christmas episodes and had to indivdually edit the information for each show in there. I kept thinking it would have been nice to right click the file, or click on a tab, and scrape the info from imdb.

I would still like a way to select a number of shows and and grab screenshots for them with one button push.

And finally a way to start an update on XBMC for movies and tv shows.

I agree with Doughboy, personally my priority list is this:

#1 - Music and Music Video support. (I use a number of other utilities for naming and tagging my music, but XBMC is the only program I've found that will scrape album and artist info like biographies and reviews, and it is very difficult to edit incorrect / missing info. If Media Companion added music scraping I would be even happier with this already awesome program. Also, scraping lyrics would be great)

#2 - Missing TV episodes / missing information

I use Bulk Rename Utility for renaming files, so file renaming isn't a concern of mine, but it obviously wouldn't hurt to add this function.

Also, I would like an option to download ALL posters / fanart for movies and TV shows. (I like to change things around every so often, and it would be nice to be able to download everything automatically, all at once).

SchismatiK wrote:

Also, I would like an option to download ALL posters / fanart for movies and TV shows. (I like to change things around every so often, and it would be nice to be able to download everything automatically, all at once).

Wouldn't that be an abuse of bandwidth of the sites that are providing this info to us for free? Also whenever I've gone to mix things up myself I've noticed that a lot of the extra posters are the same poster with varying qualities or the same poster with French (Taiwanese/Greek/Esperanto) title. Why would you need them all?

Billy,

While everyone has their opinion on new functions. I personally agree that the preference need a looking at and the TV Eps (missing, renaming..whatever). It's be nice to finish off those two sections before getting to adding the music stuff - as this will bring a whole new list of items to add.

Music, Music, Music - XBMC doesn't manage the scraping/configurability of music and albums well at all. If we could get the ability to "pre-scrape" it and have XBMC just pick it up, that would be AMAZING.

I'll throw in another thanks for a great piece of software Billy - I use it daily.

..about wishlist..

1. remember List and Sort order upon exit!!

2. when clicking on actor thumb - open imdb related page

3. rename movie Folder (and Files) to something like:
Paranormal Activity (horror, mystery, thriller, 2007)
or
Paranormal Activity (2007) (horror, mystery, thriller)

4. add more sources to choose from to fanart tab


5. keep up the good work!!

First of all, thank you very much for a truly useful program, has saved me LOTS of time and trouble to have my media files tidy and organized!!!

From your list of suggestions and adding my own, these are, in that order, my personal preferences:

• Add support for XBMC xml scrapers.
  
• Rework the preferences
  
• Download subtitles from sites like www.opensubtitles.org
  
• Detect missing episodes
  
• Detect new TVShow directories (hanging from a "root" one) (Is this one of the "advanced options"?)
  
• Add advanced options for TV Shows
  
• Trailers
  

For me, support from other scrapers is the most important one, since most of my movies are not in english and have the title translated, so they are not easily identified in IMDB (and many are not even *listed* in IMDB!!!)

BTW, www.opensubtitles.org has a system to detect movies, creating a (very fast and easy computed) hash of the file, so a program can search for the subtitles by hash regardless of the file's name. Even if you do not need the subtitle, that can be very useful to identify the movie since www.opensubtitles.org gives the IMDB ID. And there is no need to parse HTML pages, there is an API to exchange information.

constructacon wrote:

SchismatiK wrote:

Also, I would like an option to download ALL posters / fanart for movies and TV shows. (I like to change things around every so often, and it would be nice to be able to download everything automatically, all at once).

Wouldn't that be an abuse of bandwidth of the sites that are providing this info to us for free? Also whenever I've gone to mix things up myself I've noticed that a lot of the extra posters are the same poster with varying qualities or the same poster with French (Taiwanese/Greek/Esperanto) title. Why would you need them all?

I too think this is a bit more than required. Not only do I not need all the posters in differnt resolutions, sizes and languages (as I have already picked the one I wanted), the abuse factor weighs in here. Not to mention I'm trying to get MC to run faster and not have it bogged down with 'extras' like this.

My opinion of course...

Hello Billy,

first : A VERY BIG BIG THANK YOU
then : one more !

MC facilitates my life soooooooo much, you have no idea !

I just saw that IMDB is now available in other languages than english (i.e imdb.fr). Tell me if I'm wrong, but your scraper is managed with the imdb.dll => would it be possible to have an XML file to store IMDB.dll parameters (such as the main API website to call => wether it is imdb.fr or imdb.com).

This way, you would not have to manage multiple languages in your settings window (as you alreaday do with the tvmdb.com, which is very nice !).

Do you see what I mean ?

One more time, thank you for your work...please keep enjoy us and our media libraries !

I just want to throw in another vote for subtitle support. I liek them because I have a young son, and often find myself watching movies quietly, so as to not wake him. issue is everything these days is super loud music and FX, super quiet dialogue. pain in the ass.

Love the app. My only real suggestion is taking a long hard look at the visual aspect. it's a powerful app, but it ain't the prettiest thing in the world.

TV Eps (missing, renaming).

Would be nice to complete the TV Section