Media Info Plus - Movie Manager

[Fekker]

I am interested in configuring my open source free application to support Sage TV, something I haven't used a long time.

Right now it's geared towards xbmc, it outputs movie information into an xml file, images that are associated with the movie (poster, wide images, backgrounds, media covers, cd covers, and more).

What does Sage TV look for when bringing in media information?
folder.jpg? any .nfo file support?

Any backdrops (aka fanart, backgrounds) support?
Is there Large Image support? (posters, wide images) etc.

Thanks!
Fekker
MIP

[Brent]

Originally Posted by Fekker

I am interested in configuring my open source free application to support Sage TV, something I haven't used a long time.

Right now it's geared towards xbmc, it outputs movie information into an xml file, images that are associated with the movie (poster, wide images, backgrounds, media covers, cd covers, and more).

What does Sage TV look for when bringing in media information?
folder.jpg? any .nfo file support?

Any backdrops (aka fanart, backgrounds) support?
Is there Large Image support? (posters, wide images) etc.

Thanks!
Fekker
MIP

Hi Fekker,
I'm interested. I've seen your work on Movies Info Plus for XBMC and it's very nice. I'll leave most answers to those developers in the know, but will say that SageTV itself handles poster images, cd covers etc. There has been quite a bit of work on the 3rd party add-on called SageMC that supports fanart, backgrounds, large images, banners etc.

More info:
Movie Info Screen
TV Info Screen

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by Fekker

What does Sage TV look for when bringing in media information?
folder.jpg? any .nfo file support?

Any backdrops (aka fanart, backgrounds) support?
Is there Large Image support? (posters, wide images) etc.

Thanks!
Fekker
MIP

Natively, Sage has very little support for this, however a lot of work is being done via customizations that you can find on this forum.

1. The default Sage installation will display only a thumbnail image for recordings or imported movies. This thumbnail can be custom jpeg image (Sage looks for a file with the exact same name as the movie file or a folder.jpg in the same folder as the movie). If Sage doesn't find a custom image, it will automatically generate one by taking a frame grab a few seconds into the movie file.

2. SageMC is an alternate User Interface (STV) for Sage that among other things, adds fan art support. It will display movie or tv show specific backdrops and it will use the poster art for the thumbnails and various other places.

3. There is an import (STVi) for the Default User Interface that adds the capability to display backdrops and wide banners. TikiFanArt for Default STV

4. There are various imports for SageMC that take advantage of fan art. There is one that allows it to present an interface similar to Apple's Cover-Flow. There are others for customizing the movie or TV show detailed info screen to take advantage of backdrops, banners, and posters.

5. There are some scrapers that will go out and try to find fan art and save it to your hard drive automatically.

6. Sage supports reading meta-data about imported videos from text files with "*.properties" names. There are currently some limitations to this method of importing metadata. Details on Properties Files

7. There is an import for Sage that can automatically generate .properties files and .my files by scraping the IMDB website and can import data from these files into the Sage Database, and allows you to manually edit the metadata from inside Sage. RWMetaData STVi

Currently, there are a few different ways to name and store fan art and not all of the imports do it the same way. There is a group of developers that are collaborating right now to standardize the storage and retrieval of the fan art and create an API so that other import writers can take advantage of it, See this thread. At the same time, Sage seems to be getting behind this movement because they are adding some additional API functions to the Sage core that will allow for storing and retrieveing custom metadata properties to the new beta release.