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[Leifus]

Hi,

From what I've clicked about and discovered - JRMedia is fantastic and the best I've found so far for customisation etc blah blah.

However, I'm struggling with JRMedia. It's probably because I do not understand how to customise JRMedia and thus I am asking for your help.
Here's what I currently have in Theater View:

What I am trying to do is to display multiple tagged information for each file on MULTIPLE lines. Like this:

I have kind of played around with the expressions language within the "File Caption" to display 1 lined info depending on the media type, but it would be great if I can utilise that entire panel to display such information (Movie info for DVD's 'Director, Genres, Tagline, Certification, Synopsis) for example.

So basically, I think the question I'm asking is; is there any way to utilise the space under the file title to display a summary of that file?

Many thanks in advanced.

[Mr ChriZ]

That would be very shiny

[glynor]

I'd, personally, also really like an easy way to be able to display info like this about video files.  It's all been discussed pretty heavily on the forums before... Here's an old thread I commented on from last May: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=40589.msg277039#msg277039

Many changes were implemented as a result of that and other discussions, but we still don't have a way to display "advanced" info about tracks in the library from Theater View.

I'd really like a way to hit a key (Info on my remote) and have Theater View pop up a customizable Info Dialog that included Plot Synopsis, Director, Genre, timing, and other advanced info on the movie.  This dialog should be, of course, customizable on a per-View Scheme basis (so that it could be different for TV Shows vs. Movies vs. Songs vs. Pictures).  Even if it was only custom by Media Type that would help!

The pop-up method would be a lot more useful for me because the small font in your example would be completely illegible on my TV.  The Theater View UI is designed to be a 10-foot interface, that would work with both Standard Def and HD TVs, so you're idea (while valid) wouldn't work for lots of people.

[Leifus]

Thank you for the replies so far.

I'm guessing this is not possible with just a tweak or 10 using JRMedia (not just yet any way).
Do you reckon this is something I could build using the Developer's Ki or something?

I'm thinking this functionality would be useful for ANY type of media in Theater View. Custom User Fields to tag stuff is great, all we need now is to access/display this info!

Images (who's in it,where was it taken,date taken,camera settings etc)
TV (What's on now, Last recording, Next scheduled recording)
Audio (...), Video (...) You get the picture/video/idea hah!

Maybe as a CSS/HTML editable panel? So it could be designed however the user wants....?

[neFAST]

I second that. Theater view is a great tool but I believe it lack some customization in the way informations are displayed.

[raym]

the small font in your example would be completely illegible on my TV.  The Theater View UI is designed to be a 10-foot interface, that would work with both Standard Def and HD TVs, so you're idea (while valid) wouldn't work for lots of people.

But it wouldn't be if it utilised the same font(s) as the weather or news plugin would it? I assume you can read this ok? In any case, SD tv's are sooo 1998



Like glynor said, this has been discussed a number of times before and for what it's worth, I agree:

That would be very shiny

 

[glynor]

In any case, SD tv's are sooo 1998

Touché.

However, the fact is that some of us poor slobs are still stuck in interlaced 720x480 land...   

They implemented a way for Theater View to pop up TV Skinned message boxes for errors and other informational dialogs.  I just hope they make use of this to give us a way to access more detailed info on our media.  It'd be nice to be able to pop up a box for (I'd suggest allowing customization of course, but this is what I want to see):

Music files: "Track Info" (name, album, artist, track #, year), Artist Bios (possibly auto-filled via AMG or something similar), Lyrics, Length, Bitrate, Genre, Rating, Last Played/Skipped details, and other relevant stuff.

Video: Name, Artist, Genre, Series, Episode, Media Sub Type, Description, Date, Keywords, Lenth, Bitrate, Last Played/Skipped, etc.

Images: I don't really use images in Theater View much, but I imagine that people could come up with a list of stuff that'd be good for them.  Probably Name, Date, Rating, Size, Camera, Dimensions, Genre, Keywords, People, Places, and a few others...

[glynor]

Mostly, I'd like to use it for Video.  It'd make it well worthwhile to go through and mine IMDB for Details info for my movies.  Of course, as I mentioned in the previous thread, if it could auto-mine for details that'd be even fancier.  However, I'd settle for just a nice easy way to view those details.

Like a specialized Track Info plugin for Theater View that you'd use before you play a file, not while playing it (though possibly both).

[prod]

Hi Leifus,

Love your mock up! It's a beauty. As much as I like Theatre View and the lineup view, all that wasted space does my head in.

[benn600]

I also love what you showed, Leifus!

[)p(]

Me too, especially if we can customize it any way we want with expressions 

I also would like to be able to add some info like imdb rating and the movie length to all the movies in the list. But maybe that is already possible, I have not had chance to look into this in detail yet...so much to learn 

peter

[raym]

As much as I like Theatre View and the lineup view, all that wasted space does my head in.

Obviously, I agree, but I'd go one step further and suggest that this info be available also at the final level of a thumbnail view. For example:



MSMC does this quite well. Nice BIG thumb and plenty of room for movie synopsis etc..

Cheers.

[benn600]

Yea, lots of space for good stuff if you have one movie in your database.  How is it supposed to work with hundreds of movies?

So are all of these entries you are all showing DVD rips or are they encoded files?

[Leifus]

The DVDs listed on my examples are rips from the original DVDs (using DVD Shrink) - mainly because I wanted to retain the menus, extras and what-not and also because I didn't want to spend a very long time encoding each film just to shrink the size and then lose video and sound quality.

The whole reason for building my HTPC was so I can browse my ever growing (currently 600 odd) dvds and cd collections easily!!

And before you comment, the movies are both my choices and my partners! hahaha..

[benn600]

We use the same system.  well, uhhh, I guess system refers to Media Center!

One troubling issue I have at present is keeping DVD info between computers (databases).  So if you use full DVD rips (as long as they are VIDEO_TS rips) how do you transfer DVD details between MC databases?  Right now, I deal with two user databases plus the server's, which hands out read-only HTPC copies plus streams library server and UPnP server.  So I really have three databases to manage.

I cannot use otto because DVD titles and info get overwritten on every scan.  So I must *manually*
1. Import folder.
2. Fill properties from file name.
3. Quick find cover art.
4. And this doesn't allow me to keep other fields like episodes.  It only adds Genre and Name...I store them /Video/[Genre]/[Name]...

Have a solution for me?  It would be amazing if MC would write an XML file to the DVD file folder that would store the tags for the DVD.  This would save editing huge DVD files and would make it very easy to manually modify this info directly through Explorer.

[raym]

Yea, lots of space for good stuff if you have one movie in your database.  How is it supposed to work with hundreds of movies?

Huh? I think you've misunderstood. I too have hundreds of movies in my db. What I'm saying is, the screenshot shows what you get when you drill down to the "file" (final) level in the video navigational hierachy. In this case, I've selected "dodgeball" from my "Movies" viewscheme. It's here that I propose the kind of info like what has been discussed since there's soo much space available. 

[prod]

One troubling issue I have at present is keeping DVD info between computers (databases).

ANYWAY, whilst that is all terribly interesting, I'd really be interested in some kind of file information like Leifus demonstrated. I'm not so keen on glynor's idea of popups as an alternative (not a bad idea as an additional feature) because I feel there's too much space being wasted when the box expands over a selected item in lineup view, and also, as ChriZ said, it would look very shiny. 

[Leifus]

I think that, with this functionality in place, you would drill down to a list of files in whatever current fashion you do so..

-- by searching, by genre, by showing all files, by whatever...

Whatever the file format (audio, video, image) - as long as you are viewing a list of files (or have drilled down to one file), you could setup which information you want to display from the tag files.

So, you could setup a 'file list' view, an 'individual file' view using the already useful expression language.
Without details (you could do a check to see what type of files you are viewing and therefore display the relevant info for that file type, check if there's only 1 file returned and perhaps display MORE tag info [seeing as there's more space to play with])

That would accomodate what I'm after and Raym's suggestion.

But hey! All this is great, but not doable hehe... so why am I still typing?

[c1c9k72]

Count me in as backing this idea.  It is one of the diminishing number of issues I have with MC12, that the Theater View doesn't quite furnish enough information for my liking.

[benn600]

If it did I'd feel compelled to populate it all!!  Is there an easy way to pull info in?  The reason I'm talking about saving DVD info between databases is because if I did go to all the work to justify this feature request, then it would be worthless on other computers.

How do you all do it?  For those using complete DVD rips, what is your procedure?  How do you save tags?  Am I missing something obvious that solves this (major) problem?

[raym]

Benn, your questions are all great but not really relevant to this topic. I'd suggest starting a new thread. You may get better feedback that way.

[benn600]

I've started several on the issue but don't remember anything extremely worthwhile.

Yes, I tend to ramble about things I've been anxiously asking for because maybe, just maybe, someone will read the requests from the right perspective to implement them.

[prod]

Ben, not sure how you make the link between a Theatre View specific UI request concerning displaying file info and sharing DVD tags between databases. Don't take this the wrong way I mean it as a friendly aside, but thread hijacking can be pretty annoying - I doubt you'll get what you want that way.