Hulu: Possible to Use XBMC Hulu Plugin to create SageTV Plugin?

[Brent]

I've been following the many workarounds popping up to allow the Hulu plugin for Boxee & XBMC to work again and was wondering if any user-developers could comment on the possibility of getting one of these to work in SageTV.

Here's a few of the links I've been reading on Hulu w/XBMC and Boxee:

XBMC forum - plugin for Hulu
Jake Marsh Hulu TV Library plugin for Boxee

[grauchy]

I've been using the Hulu plugin on XMBC (Xbox Version) for about 2 weeks now.

It works great but I'd love to consolidate everything to Sage.

The only thing missing from Sage currently that I use XBMC for is Hulu and my movie collection. (Sage does a horrible job of organizing my movie library. XBMC organizes my movies perfectly with no maintenance needed by me.)

[Brent]

Originally Posted by grauchy

The only thing missing from Sage currently that I use XBMC for is Hulu and my movie collection. (Sage does a horrible job of organizing my movie library. XBMC organizes my movies perfectly with no maintenance needed by me.)

Could you explain how XBMC organizes your movies perfectly with no maintenance? I'm curious on how it's doing that - what specifically is it doing?

[grauchy]

I ripped all my DVDs and I have them saved on a network share in a folder called \\mediaserver\DVDCollection

As long as I name the files with the same movie title text that imdb uses and throw in the year for good measure everything works out. Here are a few examples:

\\mediaserver\DVDCollection\30 Days of Night (2007).avi
\\mediaserver\DVDCollection\Alien Resurrection (1997).avi
\\mediaserver\DVDCollection\Batman Gotham Knight [2008].avi

XBMC uses the filename as an imdb query. The first hit is always the one that it uses to grab the synopsis, DVD cover, Genre, and all the meta data.

What I really like is that it automatically updates the library if I drop a movie in the folder.

XBMC lets me browse for movies by Title, Actor, Year, Genre, and more. And you can display them with the DVD covers in a "cover-flow" format or a list but my favorite is a sort of combination that puts the DVD cover in the upper right corner with the synopsis on the lower right corner and the list of movies on the left.

It's so easy to use and find movies that my Wife and Children are able to use it to spin up any movie on demand and you know we do a lot of that with Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks movies.

I can still browse that same folder in SageTV but I have 580 movies in that share drive and with SageTV there's no way to find anything. No way would I expect my Wife or kids to find a movie in my collection using SageTV it's just really bad at organizing my movies.

I know somebody wrote a plugin for SageTV for Batch uploading of movies into SageTV. I haven't tried it because it looks like a lot of work and heavy on maintenance. I'd rather just drop a movie in the share drive and have my media player find it, scrape the metadata, and organize it for me which XBMC does.

I haven't setup a Boxee yet but I imagine it handles a large movie collection just as nicely since Boxee is based on XBMC. I like the way XBMC does it so much in fact that I bought a bunch of used XBox consoles and I have a SageTV HD extender + XBMC at three locations in the house.

Plus now that I have Hulu working on XBMC I'm even more enamored.

[Texas-Hansen]

Originally Posted by grauchy

I ripped all my DVDs and I have them saved on a network share in a folder called \\mediaserver\DVDCollection

As long as I name the files with the same movie title text that imdb uses and throw in the year for good measure everything works out. Here are a few examples:

\\mediaserver\DVDCollection\30 Days of Night (2007).avi
\\mediaserver\DVDCollection\Alien Resurrection (1997).avi
\\mediaserver\DVDCollection\Batman Gotham Knight [2008].avi

XBMC uses the filename as an imdb query. The first hit is always the one that it uses to grab the synopsis, DVD cover, Genre, and all the meta data.

What I really like is that it automatically updates the library if I drop a movie in the folder.

XBMC lets me browse for movies by Title, Actor, Year, Genre, and more. And you can display them with the DVD covers in a "cover-flow" format or a list but my favorite is a sort of combination that puts the DVD cover in the upper right corner with the synopsis on the lower right corner and the list of movies on the left.

It's so easy to use and find movies that my Wife and Children are able to use it to spin up any movie on demand and you know we do a lot of that with Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks movies.

I can still browse that same folder in SageTV but I have 580 movies in that share drive and with SageTV there's no way to find anything. No way would I expect my Wife or kids to find a movie in my collection using SageTV it's just really bad at organizing my movies.

I know somebody wrote a plugin for SageTV for Batch uploading of movies into SageTV. I haven't tried it because it looks like a lot of work and heavy on maintenance. I'd rather just drop a movie in the share drive and have my media player find it, scrape the metadata, and organize it for me which XBMC does.

I haven't setup a Boxee yet but I imagine it handles a large movie collection just as nicely since Boxee is based on XBMC. I like the way XBMC does it so much in fact that I bought a bunch of used XBox consoles and I have a SageTV HD extender + XBMC at three locations in the house.

Plus now that I have Hulu working on XBMC I'm even more enamored.

I'll agree that XBMC does a nice job of it's combined list and cover art display when scrolling through movies.

I have found that SageMC (via HD200) works nice when set to display the cover art and you can narrow down the title you are looking for by moving over to the right past the last cover art displayed and an A-Z pop up comes up and you can select a letter of the alphabet to find the movie you want quicker.

SageMC is not automatic but I've found a pretty good work flow that gets me what I want. I'm running My Movies on my WHS and when I rip a DVD to the WHS video share, My Movies automatically catches it and adds cover art and data to the folder for that movie. The cover art, IMO, is better than IMDB as the files are about 2 to 3 times the size and display well in large format on the screen for the HD200. With the cover art in there, I run a scan of the import folders via the HD200 (I guess you could set this to automatic scanning), which pulls in all the new ripped DVDs to the HD200 with the cover art. I then go to that movie and do a IMDB scan and save only the "description" info...giving me the best of both My Movies and IMDB. Maybe, some day Sage will automatically make use of all the metadata in those folders, but for now, this works for me. I can see where it might be a bit tedious with a really large collection, but once done, it's pretty easy when adding a rip here and there.

[QueOnda]

Originally Posted by Texas-Hansen

I'm running My Movies on my WHS and when I rip a DVD to the WHS video share, My Movies automatically catches it and adds cover art and data to the folder for that movie. The cover art, IMO, is better than IMDB as the files are about 2 to 3 times the size and display well in large format on the screen for the HD200.

I do agree the cover art is better in mymovies. I use it to get the cover art for all my movies. Someone on the forum is asking to build an xml importer for mymovies information.

[grauchy]

You can set XBMC to get cover art & metadata from whatever source you want. I just happen to have left it on the default which is imdb. But based on your input I just changed it to MyMovies and it's scanning as I'm typing this message.

You can assign one metadata source per folder and you can have multiple folders in your library. When browsing the library you won't see which network share the files are in they'll be separated by whatever filter you apply i.e. Genre, Year, etc.

Here are the supported meta data sources in XBMC (At least the version I have which is 2 weeks old)

(I wrote these down then typed them in I may have lost some spelling in the process)

Adult CD Movies
adult film database
allocine.fr
AsianDB
culturalas.es
falmaffinity
filmUP.lt
filmweb.pl
IMDB
Jaded Video
Movie-XML
OFDb
Excalibur
KinoPois.ru
Adult DVD Empire
Film starts
MovieMaze
MyMovies
Stration
Amazon UK
Amazon US
PTGrat & IMDB


Brent-

I didn't mean to hijack your Hulu thread and turn this into an XBMC discussion Just answering your question about what XBMC does for me.

I'm a big fan of SageTV and the proud owner of SageTV HD extenders and I'd love to drop my old Xbox machines and simplify my life but I don't see anything that does the job of a movie jukebox better than XBMC.

If you know of a plugin or mod to SageTV that does a good job let me know. Browsing all my movies A-Z by title is not satisfactory I want to be able to apply filters like Genre, Year, Actor and I don't want to have to manually enter the metadata either I want it to automatically scrape from the internet.

Taking this back to the Hulu on XBMC discussion....

Here's the forum thread for the Hulu plugin on XBMC if you are interested:
http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=42041

[cncb]

Originally Posted by QueOnda

I do agree the cover art is better in mymovies. I use it to get the cover art for all my movies. Someone on the forum is asking to build an xml importer for mymovies information.

You can see all the MyMovies data (including cover art) in SageTV using the MyMovies to J. River Media Center (JRMC) importer that I wrote. Then, using the Sage JRMC plugin you can browse and search using any criteria (year, actor, genre, etc.) and play it back in Sage without having to also import your files into Sage. You would have to buy JRMC eventually but it is definitely worth it in my opinion especially if you want to manage/organize your photos and music. It might not be for you but I just thought I would mention it.

[grauchy]

Originally Posted by cncb

You can see all the MyMovies data (including cover art) in SageTV using the MyMovies to J. River Media Center (JRMC) importer that I wrote. Then, using the Sage JRMC plugin you can browse and search using any criteria (year, actor, genre, etc.) and play it back in Sage without having to also import your files into Sage. You would have to buy JRMC eventually but it is definitely worth it in my opinion especially if you want to manage/organize your photos and music. It might not be for you but I just thought I would mention it.

I'll check it out this weekend.

Oh by the way my Hulu plugin on XBMC ins't working today even though it was working over the weekend. Apparently after the Hulu plugin got all that press on Lifehacker.com it got the attention of Hulu and they made some changes. Now it's become a game of cat and mouse with the plugin authors releasing updates everytime Hulu changes their code.

So I'll probably just wait a week or two and try it again when the dust settles.