STV Import: MovieTimes Movie Listings Import v0.57 Beta

[aperry]

Yep, I'll include a fix for this in the next release (the one I'm currently working on).

[aperry]

I just uploaded the new version of the MovieTimes import. New in this version:

1. Program should now work with "incomplete" movie details. Prior versions had problems when parts of the details were not included.
2. Movie or theater data should be cleared out as you navigate (i.e., if you select a theater, then a movie, then go back, you will get a list of all theaters rather than just those for the movie you selected).
3. The MovieTimes import will now automatically load new movie details information when it detects that new data is available. Prior versions required exiting out of Sage to load new information.

[mike1961]

aPerry - worked the first time out. Looks great and works like a charm.

Thanks for a great plug in. I now have it working on my server and worked the first time on all the workstations as well. I'm going to enjoy this.

Thanks again,

Mike

[mkanet]

Does the external executable need to stay resident in memory all the time or does it pull the information once a day for a short period of time and exit memory? I guess I'm not a real big fan of external executable dependancies.

[cmaffia]

I'd love to see this feature in a simple STVi (with necessary associated files) in the future. It seems a little time consuming to set up. Not that I am not capable of installing it, I guess I am just spoiled with importing new features.
Perhaps it could be widdled down to something no more complicated than say Nielm's webserver which is not too difficult or time consuming but also not click, import and ready to go. With that being said, I think this is a great addition to Sage!!

Originally Posted by mkanet

Does the external executable need to stay resident in memory all the time or does it pull the information once a day for a short period of time and exit memory? I guess I'm not a real big fan of external executable dependancies.

[mike1961]

Any idea when the movietrailer feature will be ready?

Also - is the plan for this to download the entire trailers of all movies because that seems like it could take a lot of time. Rather - is the plan to stream the download when it is requested?

Thanks again for a great plugin,
Mike

[aperry]

Originally Posted by mkanet

Does the external executable need to stay resident in memory all the time or does it pull the information once a day for a short period of time and exit memory? I guess I'm not a real big fan of external executable dependancies.

No, the program runs just long enough to download what it needs.

Regarding the external executable, it might evolve into something else eventually, but don't plan on that anytime in the near future. Key master wrote a wonderful program to go out to the necessary websites and download the information we need. I saw no reason to "re-invent the wheel" given that he had already gotten it all working.

I won't say that I'll never remove the dependency on his program, but things could change someday...

[aperry]

Originally Posted by cmaffia

I'd love to see this feature in a simple STVi (with necessary associated files) in the future. It seems a little time consuming to set up. Not that I am not capable of installing it, I guess I am just spoiled with importing new features.
Perhaps it could be widdled down to something no more complicated than say Nielm's webserver which is not too difficult or time consuming but also not click, import and ready to go. With that being said, I think this is a great addition to Sage!!

I think that the program is pretty easy to install. The only reason the instructions are so long is that I tried to go into detail to show exactly how to install and configure the program. The program is very capable as well, offering multiple countries, multiple locations, prioritization of theaters, setting theaters as active or inactive, etc. So, that wide range of possibilities means that the configuration is more involved.

In short terms, to install, you extract the ZIP files, install the STVi, add a menu item somewhere in Sage so you can access the MovieTimes menus, setup mtsa to run on a schedule, do some configuration, and you're done.

The only part I can think of that is a little "extra" over other installs is setting up the mtsa program to run as a scheduled task (though you only have to do that once). I plan to have the executable called from within Sage at some point in the future, so you won't have to setup the separate scheduled task.

Beyond that though, I don't see a way to get it any easier.

[aperry]

Originally Posted by mike1961

Any idea when the movietrailer feature will be ready?

Also - is the plan for this to download the entire trailers of all movies because that seems like it could take a lot of time. Rather - is the plan to stream the download when it is requested?

I thought I mentioned it previously, but there is no real ETA on the movie trailers. Since SageTV does not really support Quicktime MOV file playback, I have to figure out a way to play them. Assuming that things in the current version prove to be stable, I should be able to spend some time looking into the trailers.

The SageTV developers have done a program called SageTVPlayer (which is actually the MPlayer program). It comes as part of their PlaceShifter package though it will be useable without having to pay anything extra since MPlayer is an open source product. I might add support for other players as we go, but SageTVPlayer/MPlayer will be where I'm going to start.

Keep in mind that adding trailer playback will complicate the install/config a bit more as you are going to have to download SageTVPlayer and configure the MovieTimes plugin to use it.

As far as downloading versus streaming the trailers, the mtsa program allows for high (or low when available) quality trailers downloaded locally, or stream-high or stream-low. I think that the streaming playback should be doable with SageTVPlayer/MPlayer.

[mike1961]

Are you familiar with the GermSage plugin? It allows me to automatically load a different media player to play my mp4 files in the media library. Perhaps there might be a way for the user to specify the media player to play the trailers with the same way we can in GermSage. For example, I am also now using GermSage to play my DVD's because I can't seem to play them anymore in Sage Version 5 (it plays them fast and wierd...hard to explain but plays fine in the external media player). Here's an example of my GermSage dvdplayer.cmd file:

"C:\Program Files\Nero\Nero 7\Nero ShowTime\showtime.exe" %1

It then just plays the %1 parameter that is passed to it. I was also wondering if I did download the trailers, would it download them every time or just once. It just seems like it would take a long time to download all the trailers for all the movies. Also, would it erase them when the movies are no longer playing?

Thanks,
Mike

[aperry]

Originally Posted by mike1961

I was also wondering if I did download the trailers, would it download them every time or just once. It just seems like it would take a long time to download all the trailers for all the movies. Also, would it erase them when the movies are no longer playing?

I do reference this in the "notes" in the first post of the thread, but to be clear, if you download trailers and/or posters, it will only download them the first time they are needed, and will delete them once the particular movie does not show in your listings any more.

Regarding GermSage, this has been asked before. My plan at this time is to get some sort of player working (probably SageTVPlayer/MPlayer as previously mentioned). Once that is working, then I can look into doing some sort of thing like done in GermSage. I need to eliminate variables, meaning that if I support multiple players for trailer playback and something goes wrong, it's much tougher to figure out if it is something wrong in my import or in the player itself.

[BBCritical]

Are there any plans to get this to work within SageMC... it works great for me in the default STV....

Thanks for the great work aperry

[aperry]

The short answer is no, there are no plans to support SageMC at this time.

I may support it in the future, but there are no plans at this time. This STV relies highly on the built-in screens of the main STV (repurposing many of them for its own use), so supporting SageMC would likely mean having to completely redesign all the screens and/or create all new ones for the items that would be missing in SageMC.

[deria]

Originally Posted by aperry

The short answer is no, there are no plans to support SageMC at this time.

I may support it in the future, but there are no plans at this time. This STV relies highly on the built-in screens of the main STV (repurposing many of them for its own use), so supporting SageMC would likely mean having to completely redesign all the screens and/or create all new ones for the items that would be missing in SageMC.

Actually its more a matter of eliminating the themes used in your menus and replacing them with the appropriate SageMC theme. This is sort of a tricky issue with SageTV. When developing my weather monitor and disk utilization monitor and (to a lesser degree) winamp media player plugins for SageTV I struggled with the choice between re-using the default themes (ie: pasting references) or making my own personal copies of those themes so that they would remain the same when imported into another STV other than the default. In the end I decided to go with the latter option (because I really like SageMC).

In any case, I installed and configured your plugin under the default STV, then I imported your STVI into my heavily customized SageMC and quickly hacked up the MovieTimes menus to get them working with SageTV. Its a real hatchet-job, but it works. It took me about an hour. If you talk with Nielm, he might be willing to do a real conversion for you (or help you with one). I wouldn't bother until after you UI is static (ie: not going to change) though since its not the kind of thing you want to do more than once.

On a more general issue, the latest version of your module is working very well for me now. This has been the only piece of the puzzle that I've been missing. I now have visualizations, movie listings, disk space monitoring, hardware temperature/voltage/fan monitoring, weather monitoring, and the SageTV core. Thanks for spending all this time creating this module! Very nice job! I would offer two suggestions, however:

1) If you only have one theater selected, you might want to just bypass the theater selection screen that shows up after you click on a movie poster. Many people only go to one theater complex.

2) There doesn't seem to be a way to run mtsa from within the menu system. I'm guessing that it is expected that you would schedule the mtsa update outside sagetv, but if you could update the listings on the fly without exiting sagetv it would be nice. Then again, if its scheduled frequently enough I suppose it shouldnt be necessary.

[aperry]

Thanks, deria, for the suggestions for SageMC, ideally I'd like to see it work in there as well, but as you pointed out, it's not exactly something that you just do, but at least it does seem to be doable. In my ideal world, I would set things up so that themes are used according to the base STV, so if you were using SageMC, then it would use those themes, otherwise, it would use the standard ones (assuming that is even possible).

Originally Posted by deria

1) If you only have one theater selected, you might want to just bypass the theater selection screen that shows up after you click on a movie poster. Many people only go to one theater complex.

I agree on bypassing the theater if you only have one active theater. I could probably also eliminate the "List Theaters" item in the main menu too in that case. Not quite as straight-forward to implement as you might think, but should be able to do it.

Note that I would not translate this to bypassing it if the movie is showing at only one of your selected theaters. For example, if you had 5 theaters, but only 1 was showing your particular movie, you'd still go through the theater selection screen. The reason for that is that if I want to see a particular movie, my next question is where it is playing, and I get that on the select theaters screen, rather than having to go to the schedule portion of the details screen.

2) There doesn't seem to be a way to run mtsa from within the menu system. I'm guessing that it is expected that you would schedule the mtsa update outside sagetv, but if you could update the listings on the fly without exiting sagetv it would be nice. Then again, if its scheduled frequently enough I suppose it shouldnt be necessary.

I have talked about, and still would like to, calling mtsa from within the program. In fact, it is already called whenever you update your theaters.

The thing I am hesitant about is that I would need it to not "block" the Sage UI from doing anything else. It can take 30 minutes or more sometimes to download everything, especially if you have a bunch of theaters all showing different movies, and you are downloading trailers. Blocking the UI for that long would be just plain mean. Assuming that I don't block, then what do I do if it is downloading and someone tries to go in and view the movie data? Their information would be old until the actual download finished. I envision a lot of posts reading "hey, it's not working, oh wait, now it is"...

Ideally, what I'd like to do is to have an icon show up (a la the recording icon) in the UI that would let you know an update is underway. But I wouldn't even know where to start on getting something like that going.

I'll figure out something eventually that will satisfy our needs in some way, but for now, I think as long as you use your scheduled task to do daily updates, you should be fine.

[jlabrue]

Awesome work aperry! I think everything functionally is working for me now. The only thing I am unsure of is the automatic refresh. When I checked it today it still showed Sunday listings. I checked the file and it had updated this morning but the listings had not changed. I will check again tomorrow and see if it was something on my end. After restarting the GUI it did refresh.

Thanks a ton for your hard work. My wife thinks this is too cool. We love to go to the movies so this is going to be used a lot!

[grooves12]

Originally Posted by cmaffia

I'd love to see this feature in a simple STVi (with necessary associated files) in the future. It seems a little time consuming to set up. Not that I am not capable of installing it, I guess I am just spoiled with importing new features.
Perhaps it could be widdled down to something no more complicated than say Nielm's webserver which is not too difficult or time consuming but also not click, import and ready to go. With that being said, I think this is a great addition to Sage!!

It took less than 5 minutes to setup for me...

[grooves12]

Originally Posted by aperry

Thanks, deria, for the suggestions for SageMC, ideally I'd like to see it work in there as well, but as you pointed out, it's not exactly something that you just do, but at least it does seem to be doable. In my ideal world, I would set things up so that themes are used according to the base STV, so if you were using SageMC, then it would use those themes, otherwise, it would use the standard ones (assuming that is even possible).

I agree on bypassing the theater if you only have one active theater. I could probably also eliminate the "List Theaters" item in the main menu too in that case. Not quite as straight-forward to implement as you might think, but should be able to do it.

Note that I would not translate this to bypassing it if the movie is showing at only one of your selected theaters. For example, if you had 5 theaters, but only 1 was showing your particular movie, you'd still go through the theater selection screen. The reason for that is that if I want to see a particular movie, my next question is where it is playing, and I get that on the select theaters screen, rather than having to go to the schedule portion of the details screen.

I have talked about, and still would like to, calling mtsa from within the program. In fact, it is already called whenever you update your theaters.

The thing I am hesitant about is that I would need it to not "block" the Sage UI from doing anything else. It can take 30 minutes or more sometimes to download everything, especially if you have a bunch of theaters all showing different movies, and you are downloading trailers. Blocking the UI for that long would be just plain mean. Assuming that I don't block, then what do I do if it is downloading and someone tries to go in and view the movie data? Their information would be old until the actual download finished. I envision a lot of posts reading "hey, it's not working, oh wait, now it is"...

Ideally, what I'd like to do is to have an icon show up (a la the recording icon) in the UI that would let you know an update is underway. But I wouldn't even know where to start on getting something like that going.

I'll figure out something eventually that will satisfy our needs in some way, but for now, I think as long as you use your scheduled task to do daily updates, you should be fine.

Wouldn;'t a good solution be to add it into a script that runs when Sage does the program guide updates??

I'm currently using Demedius' xmlv import tool... and it has the option of running any series of applications before the update. Theoretically I could insert the MTSA program in there and get a nightly update in Sage. As you said, because of the long downloads, I see no point in having it run immediately upon checking the theater, as movie houses generally have their lineups scheduled at least a week in advance. So, maybe you could just add in a line somewhere in the Sage.properties that would execute the downloader daily.

[Humanzee]

aperry,
It would be nice if on one of the screens maybe the first one, where you select, List Movies or List Theaters you could also list the modification date of the moviedata.xml file. This would give us an indication of the last time the data was refreshed.

If you can't get it from the file attributes you should be able to get it from the 3rd line of the log.txt.

I also noticed that some trailers download only really small files. For example, the X-men 3 trailer is 6k. I delete it but it comes back at only 6K. Is this a default error file or something, so that it doesn't try again?

[aperry]

Originally Posted by Humanzee

I also noticed that some trailers download only really small files. For example, the X-men 3 trailer is 6k. I delete it but it comes back at only 6K. Is this a default error file or something, so that it doesn't try again?

I have noticed that on a couple of my movies and have seen this happen before. A lot of them work, but some of them have either really small files or are missing all-together. When I mentioned it to key master in the past, he said that they change the trailer info around a bit, meaning he has to tweak his software. I'll ping him with an email to let him know that it's happening again.