Phoenix API

[stuckless]

Build 13 is available. It should fix a couple of issues.

Currently it should take MediatTitle and SearchNumber into account provided that the latest sage build is being used the the media file has those properties set.

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

I've got one, but it only works for backgrounds right now. How do you store your banner files, I can mod it and post it tomorrow.

My existing file structure looks like this:

<Banner Folder>\Genres\<category name>.jpg
<Banner Folder>\Movies\<Episode Title>.jpg
<Banner Folder>\TV\<Show Title>.jpg
<Banner Folder>\Music\<Artist Name>.jpg

<Background Folder>\Genres\<category name>.jpg
<Background Folder>\Movies\<Episode Title>.jpg
<Background Folder>\TV\<Show Title>.jpg
<Background Folder>\Music\<Artist Name>.jpg

I actually don't have any banners for Movies or Music, but if I did, that's where they would go.

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by stuckless

I don't this this will be a part of the "core" api since the use of "cleaned" filenames should be transparent to the api. But, that being said, a "clean" function does exist in the api tree today, and it's used to clean the titles. If you have to manually clean your own your own titles, because you are doing your own thing.... then you can use this api

sagex_phoenix_fanart_FanartUtil_createSafeTitle(string)

I don't why you need to call it directly, but if you provide more details, i may be able to some additional ways your ideas could be implemented.

I want to use it for Genre-Specific backgrounds and banners. I found that there are some categories with illegal characters in them (for example "House/garden" - this is a single category, not a category and sub-category).

My current STV looks for a show-specific banner and if it can't find one, it then looks for a banner with the Category name, if it can't find that, it looks for one with the sub-category name, if it can't find that, it gives-up. I do the same thing for the backgrounds. In the case of the banners, I print the show title on top of the Genre banner in a fairly large font.

Anyway, stripping illegal characters in Studio Code is rather cumbersome, so I would rather not have to repeat that chunk of code over and over - a simple java function is much cleaner.

The currently released version of my stv doesn't try to strip illegal characters from category names, so it can't handle a category like "House/garden".

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by jaminben

Here's another idea for you. Have you ever experienced "Have you watched blah blah yet?" I reply "Yes" she replies "Can I delete it then" I reply "Well yes if you've watched it". So how about a user oriented log on/watched api.

When a user first switches on their extender/client they are greeted with a log on option, this could be a nice graphic system or a plain text option. Once the user has selected their graphic (logged on) all items that they watch become identified as watched by that user. This could be expanded to say a max of four users and each users watched bar is identified by a color they specify in the log on setup process.

Its just an idea which I could expand on with a few made up screenshots using studio. If your interested then I'll go ahead and do those. Obviously I don't expect you to work on this straight away and have it done by the weekend, after all its just an idea

Ben

There has been talk of this in some other threads. I think it is a good idea to do something along these lines, but probably wouldn't make sense to integrate into the Phoenix API (should be a separate project). I would really be interested to know if Sage has given this idea any thought and may integrate multi-user tracking into the core at some point...

Personally, I don't like the idea of logging in and logging out. My idea would be to prompt you to select your user name when you take certain actions. For example when you create a favorite or a manual recording, it could prompt you to select your user name from a list. Then when you want to delete something, it could ask you for your name - if you are the one that created the show, you could delete it, otherwise it would tell you that "so-and so" is the owner of this show so you can't delete. You could also set a default user for each client or extender to make it fairly painless. Tracking Watched status gets a little tricky

[stuckless]

The sagex_phoenix_fanart_FanartUtil_createSafeTitle(string) api call, while it's not in the core api, is fairly safe to use. I use it in the Batch Metadata tools as well to create the same named folder that the core phoenix apis use.

[evilpenguin]

Hey Sean, are you still planning on posting the source code on your google code page?

[stuckless]

yes... definately i'll be posting the source code... but it's complicated

phoenix is subset of a larger project... so what I thought that i'd do is simply start including a source code bundle in the phoenix api build.

That way people can do with it as they please. If you make changes, you can submit the changes, and I can merge it into the core build.

Does that work for you?

[MeInMaui]

Originally Posted by stuckless

yes... definitely I'll be posting the source code... but it's complicated

phoenix is subset of a larger project... so what I thought that I'd do is simply start including a source code bundle in the phoenix api build.

Well, since the cat has peeked his nose out of the bag, I think maybe we should let him out to stretch a bit before we stuff him back in.

Phoenix is in fact a much larger project than what you see here. We are systematically developing a comprehensive set of api's for STV development that will culminate in the creation of a completely new UI, named (you guessed it) "Phoenix for SageTV". The api's will also be available for others to use to develop their own STV's and/or STVi's.

Because this is part of a larger project that is being systematically developed, it means that the response to feature requests will depend on how they fit in with our overall project goals.

That's all we can tell you for now, and before anyone asks, no we can't say when. This project is still early in its development cycle and it is quite ambitious.

Aloha,
Mike

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

Phoenix is in fact a much larger project than what you see here. We are systematically developing a comprehensive set of api's for STV development that will culminate in the creation of a completely new UI, named (you guessed it) "Phoenix for SageTV". The api's will also be available for others to use to develop their own STV's and/or STVi's.

do you need help?

[jaminben]

Sounds very cool, I'd offer my services as well but I don't think I'd be much help unless you need a tester.

Still the new pheonix api's are very cool and seem to work very well especially when grabbing fanart on the fly from within SageMC I'd post some screenshots but I dont think its appropriate to tout my imports here.

Keep up the good work.

Ben

[jaminben]

I've been using metadata-updater-plugin-2.0 and the example SageMC code to download images for movies via SageMC and I'm having a few problems. I realise these are beta's and this is the reason for posting so it can hopefully be fixed or I can find out if I'm doing something wrong.

1. The images that I grab appear to be too large for Sage to handle. These images range from 250k - 1.2Mb for backgrounds and 50k - 500k for posters. The smaller sized images work fine but the larger ones can cause long screen loading times (10-20 secs).

2. Another side effect is that not all the larger sized images display within SageMC correctly (See screenshot). This maybe a SageMC 6.2.8b.25 bug, I'm not sure.

3. Using odd characters in the show title seems to affect if an image will load or not. Examples of movies that don't work would be:

Title name: Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me - Actual file name: Austin Powers The Spy Who Shagged Me.mkv

Title name: Body of Lies (2008) - Actual file name: Body of Lies (2008).mkv

I assume that when using the new central fanart system that it shouldn't matter how the images are named as it uses what ever it finds in the appropriate folder. Also the folders are created automatically using metadata-updater-plugin-2.0, so I would think that these should be correct unless its using the file naming method to create the folder then the show title to load the image from that folder.

4. Once you start a scan from within SageMC you cannot cancel or interrupt the process if its taking too long. The only way to stop scanning is to close SageMC via end process.

5. An addition to the api could be to enable the user to specify how many images it downloads by default to save on time and bandwidth usage.

6. Can metadata-updater-plugin-2.0 be built into SageMC/Pheonix by default so STVi devs can use the tools without having to inform a user that they need to install a seperate STVi to use various features of an import (you've proberly already considered this).

Other than those few small issues its working great.


Cheers

Ben

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by jaminben

2. Another side effect is that not all the larger sized images display within SageMC correctly (See screenshot). This maybe a SageMC 6.2.8b.25 bug, I'm not sure.

I was having a similar problem a while back. Try touching the jpgs and having Sage rescan the import folders. The problem, at least for me, was that Sage thought the files were smaller than they actually were.

[jaminben]

Originally Posted by jaminben

3. Using odd characters in the show title seems to affect if an image will load or not. Examples of movies that don't work would be:

I've changed my mind about this as it also appears to affect any movie which has a number in its title. So Back to the Future 2, 3.10 to Yuma, 2001 A Space Odessy etc. The strange thing is it doesn't affect titles like 21 or 1408.

Originally Posted by babgvant

I was having a similar problem a while back. Try touching the jpgs and having Sage rescan the import folders. The problem, at least for me, was that Sage thought the files were smaller than they actually were.

I will try this but I don't think thats the solution as downloading is now all done automatically by the user from within SageMC. Well its not automatic, I mean if a user wants to get more images via the SageMC menu, scroll through those images and select a new one.


Oh, Sometimes once I've done a scan it leaves three files in the posters folder:

10_000_B_cover.C
10_000_B_mid.C
10_000_B_thumb.C

Not sure what these are or mean.

edit:

Originally Posted by babgvant

I was having a similar problem a while back. Try touching the jpgs and having Sage rescan the import folders. The problem, at least for me, was that Sage thought the files were smaller than they actually were.

I tried this on several images but it did nothing. When you say touching the jpgs do you mean looking at them with paint or similar program?

[stuckless]

[QUOTE=jaminben;348565]I've been using metadata-updater-plugin-2.0 and the example SageMC code to download images for movies via SageMC and I'm having a few problems. I realise these are beta's and this is the reason for posting so it can hopefully be fixed or I can find out if I'm doing something wrong.
[quote]

Thanks for testing

1. The images that I grab appear to be too large for Sage to handle. These images range from 250k - 1.2Mb for backgrounds and 50k - 500k for posters. The smaller sized images work fine but the larger ones can cause long screen loading times (10-20 secs).

2. Another side effect is that not all the larger sized images display within SageMC correctly (See screenshot). This maybe a SageMC 6.2.8b.25 bug, I'm not sure.

I'll look into creating a GetScaledImage function that will scale and cache.

3. Using odd characters in the show title seems to affect if an image will load or not. Examples of movies that don't work would be:

Title name: Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me - Actual file name: Austin Powers The Spy Who Shagged Me.mkv

Title name: Body of Lies (2008) - Actual file name: Body of Lies (2008).mkv

I assume that when using the new central fanart system that it shouldn't matter how the images are named as it uses what ever it finds in the appropriate folder. Also the folders are created automatically using metadata-updater-plugin-2.0, so I would think that these should be correct unless its using the file naming method to create the folder then the show title to load the image from that folder.

Ironically, the bmt tools is using the same api that the phoenix api is using for creating the folders. I'll play with some "creative" filenames and see what happens.

4. Once you start a scan from within SageMC you cannot cancel or interrupt the process if its taking too long. The only way to stop scanning is to close SageMC via end process.

bmt is basically a synchronous process... It'll need some restructuring to make it an async process... and then after that, it will take some clever stv work to do a real progress bar with a cancel function.

5. An addition to the api could be to enable the user to specify how many images it downloads by default to save on time and bandwidth usage.

That can probably be doable... I'll need to think about it.

6. Can metadata-updater-plugin-2.0 be built into SageMC/Pheonix by default so STVi devs can use the tools without having to inform a user that they need to install a seperate STVi to use various features of an import (you've proberly already considered this).

Eventually yes (at least in some form), but bmt was written to be a stand alone application for the most part. I was able to get it to work with phoenix with very little changes, but in the end, i'll probably just pull into phoenix the pieces that make sense and restructure the bmt project to rely on phoenix for it's operations. So longer story short.... yes, but later.

Thanks for testing.

[jaminben]

Originally Posted by stuckless

I'll look into creating a GetScaledImage function that will scale and cache.

I was thinking more along the lines of making the scraper's permanently resize the image. So if the scraper grabbed an image it would check its size and if it was greater than say 50k it would resize it to 50k (poster).

Originally Posted by stuckless

it will take some clever stv work to do a real progress bar with a cancel function.

Thats the sort of thing I was thinking about.

[jaminben]

Whilst playing with metadata-updater-plugin-2.0 I've stumbled upon a way of refreshing the background image once I've selected a new one without the need to restart the client. Whilst its not much good I thought I'd share it with you anway.
If you have more than 20 images in your folder you can select an image, scroll through the other images and hey-presto the new background pops up. I'm thinking that because theirs so many images and its caching them all its running out of memory so it has to give up the space the old image was using and the new one can then be used. As I said above, its not much use but I thought it may give you an idea about how we can refresh images on the fly without the need to restart.

Maybe it would be best if Sage could write a specific api to refresh the image cache? Something like ClearImageCache().

I dunno, I'm only guessing.

[stuckless]

Problem solved.... I can easily make java run out memory

[jaminben]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Problem solved.... I can easily make java run out memory

[jaminben]

Something else I've been thinking about is the ability to delete images, I'm pretty sure this has been mentioned before but thought I'd bring the subject up again

Could we have two types of delete?
One would just be a bog standard delete which could only delete one image at a time.
The second would have the ability to delete whole folders and their contents. This would be usefull if you wanted to completly delete a show/movie from your system and also remove all relevent fanart folders/images.

phoenix_api_DeleteImage()
phoenix_api_DeleteAllImages()

[jaminben]

Another thing I've noticed is the labeling of folders which proberly relates to the post I made yesterday and fanart not working for some movies.

Example:
Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace.mkv (Film title and file name)
Star Wars Episode I - The Phantom Menace (folder which gets created using metadata-updater-plugin-2.0)

So you can see your tool adds "-" into the folder name which obviously means that fanart wont work for that movie.

I maybe repeating myself but I'm bored