Progress Report 28/01/2010

Just an update on whats going on since its been a while since the last build.

Most of the work I am doing involves the updating of the preferences, it was my original intention to just split the preferences into three catagories, Global, Movie, and TV and add the tabs to the appropriate places, while much of this remains the case, I am taking the oppurtunity to make some changes to the way they work.
Some examples of these would be:-

• Splitting the preferences has resulted in more space which allows more detailed information about their functions
  
• When adding and removing folders to TV Shows and movies, the rebuild will only remove/add those folders that have been removed/added
  
• TV Shows will have two lists, one for root and one for seperate folders, the idea is that root folders can be parsed for new folders on startup, or on the selection of a menuitem
  

Work on TV Show handling is ongoing:-

• Filters are now enabled, these are manual filters (When selected, MC parses for missing fanart/posters etc) so are not as fast as the movie filters, but for something that will rarely be used I think it will be fine.
  
• When scraping new episodes, a check is performed that looks for a series poster and attempts to download one if none exist. This should remove the issue of missing posters for ongoing shows.
  
• I haven't started it yet, but I still plan to implement auto scraping for newly added tv shows, maybe for the next build.
  

Since Christmas I have moved from being just the programmer to someone who has used MC extensively in setting up my own XBMC library, and have seen some other shortfalls that made some functions within MC a bit of a pain, I have also attempted to address some of these issues.

• The Movie layout has changed again, to place the "Sort" and "Set" controls at the top, near the save button.
  
• The IMDB scraper now also returns alternative titles, and the main title is now a combobox that allows users to select from the various titles.
  

I've also addressed a number of bugs that have been raised

It is not east to predict when the next build will be available to download, there is still quite a bit of work that needs to be done, but I would estimate a couple of weeks, although once the preferences are finished I may upload an interim build.

Regards

Billy

Looking forward to the new build. Keep up the good work

No worries Billy, looking forward to the next release.

Wow. Sounds like you're going all out with this update. I can't wait to see what you've done. Looking forward to your work. Take your time - no need to push anything out hastily.

Its an excellent bit of software, and i'm happy even with the small improvements. So, I agree with everyone above when saying take your time, make sure it works and you're happy with it and don't think that we (well, ok, me) will only be happy with major releases.