[Competes2win]

szsori- Very good news, it will be nice to be able to have a scrapper type thing for the movie fanart. I'm still wary about movie fan art however, because I'm into a lot of foreign/indie films (among the popular ones too of course) but I'm not sure I'll be able to find artwork for nearly all of my videos...anyhow i digress...

Nuzecast- That website also looks great! however, if it were to become popular, how do you intend to restrict the bandwidth so you won't have the same problems djH has been running into?

[ibejaminben]

Djh I know you are a bussy man but could you preview some of the feature of Aeon assistant. I don't know how far you are or if you have decided to scrap it or something, but other might be able to add imput. However I feel like everyone is chiming in with so much it makes your head spin.

[tvdb-scott]

Are you looking at having a fanart DB and have the scraper auto-download the fanart when it downloads the IMDB info?

Hopefully. That's the goal from my end. It would just require the XBMC scraper to be updated.

[ewequeone]

I wonder if some sort of IP restriction could be implemented whereby you only allow an image to be downloaded once a week by the same IP / only allow X number of images to be downloaded by the same IP.

I know this would cause problems for people who are stuck behind a proxy, but it would help I would have thought.

Nuzecast- That website also looks great! however, if it were to become popular, how do you intend to restrict the bandwidth so you won't have the same problems djH has been running into?

[kakamenuvelet]

I am also in the middle of starting a site to hold all the beautiful backdrop images of movies, games, music, pictures and weather that people have been creating.

I originally was going to have just music backdrops but there are so many movie, game etc images floating around and getting forgotten or misplaced I thought I'd include those types too.
Hopefully people will upload all the different images they have scattered about.

Mine is very simple (just using Coppermine Gallery) and I'm sure szsori's will be much better, but I already registered the domain and paid the host, so it's full steam ahead.

I'm waiting for the domain to resolve but here is a test install I put up today.

http://querkz.com/musicart/index.php

As far as Aeon goes, it would be great to have the skin use a high quality music artist backdrop pulled from the artists folder.jpg when viewing that artist's albums ... it doesn't seem like it would need any further coding from the XBMC dev team as the ability to set an artist image is already in there.

Anyway, any comments would be appreciated.

Randy

Why wont all the artists backdrops will be under the artist name? it will get very messy the way things are now, as the gallery will grow.

[markiz]

@djh
It would be great if you updated your blog when you release a new version av Aeon. Me, and most of your users probably use your blog as a primary source of new info.

[digitalhigh]

My solution is pretty simple and is JUST for movie backdrops. The goal is to make it automated with the scraper so movies will get fanart automatically. As far as overall backdrops for the main menu, I'm not touching that.

My site is pretty simple and almost done. You just enter the IMDB ID to see all of the existing backdrops for the movie. At that point you can upload a new backdrop if you want. They're limited to 1280x720 and a max of 600k, which is plenty for these (most tv ones are compressed at 75% and still only hit around 250k).

The scraper will be easy... my site is structured like this:
http://mydomain.com/backdrops/<id>/index.txt
http://mydomain.com/backdrops/<id>/1.jpg
http://mydomain.com/backdrops/<id>/1_thumb.jpg
http://mydomain.com/backdrops/<id>/2.jpg
http://mydomain.com/backdrops/<id>/2_thumb.jpg

Index.txt just lists the images right now. I'll probably make it tab delimited so I can include the thumb URL in there as well. Scraping could be added to the IMDB scraper in 2-3 segments, I believe.

Szsori...I have IMDB .nfo tags for all of my movies. It would probably be pretty short work for me to dump my fanart and .nfo's into a file if you want, start adding them to the DB.

[djh_]

@djh
It would be great if you updated your blog when you release a new version av Aeon. Me, and most of your users probably use your blog as a primary source of new info.

I'm glad someone said that as I was wondering. Yes, I'll update it.

I've also uploaded half the posters to mediafire. The other half are going up now.

[nuzecast]

Szsori .. a scraper-friendly movie fanart site is great news .. and obviously I won't be doing a movie backdrop section

We'll see about the bandwidth issue .. my host states unlimited bandwidth so we'll have to see how that plays out.

The system is tag-based, like Gmail. I tried playing with a folder based layout but it was way too unwieldy as far as permissions ... this way all tags are indexed and search is really fast as long as the uploader adds proper keywords.

[Gamester17]

@szsori, great news about movie fan-art, but are you not working with zag2me of Movie-XML.com on this? zag2me said on the MeediOS forum that he want to host movie fanart on Movie-XML.com but he have not yet found a host/server that can handle the monthly bandwidth required at a good price.

PS! As you already know (but others here might not) Movie-XML.com is like TheTVDB.com but for movies.

http://www.meedios.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=876

The advantages of Movie-XML over IMDb are:
- It's faster
- It's user up-datable
- It has covers
- It has extra fields such as trailer, budget, world gross
- The interfaces hopefully won't ever need to be changed.

Movie-XML.com need users to:
- Upload covers (register on the site and you can upload covers max 419px wide)
- Add trailer links from http://www.movie-list.com
- Add wikipedia information for files like budget, boxoffice and movie company information.

[tvdb-scott]

I'm aware of movie-xml.com, especially since he branched the code from TheTVDB and since I used to be big into the Meedio scene. The problem is that he does need to switch his site to a new host for it to be a possibility. Until he does, I don't want to touch it since moving sites as large as ours is a huge task and I simply don't have time to dedicate to helping with that.

If he does switch to a new host at some point, I'll help him add the few dozens of lines of code required to get fan art working. Keep in mind that he branched TheTVDB over 2 years ago, so he's way behind on some of the internal functions that we use. That complicates it more, but not significantly.

Anyway, I was just aiming for something that would be easily integrated with the IMDB scraper for now. I'll happily convert everything to work with his site if the situation becomes more appealing to do so.

/end threadjack

[djh_]

Next time I get a free moment, I'm looking into Python skinning and setting up a template. Definitely going to see what's possible with showcase views and the Apple trailer plugin. Just thought I'd put that one out there.

[neal73]

fantastic idea - especially if it could be incorporated into the movies section so you don't have to go to scripts for it.

[djh_]

I'm certainly interested to see how seamless a transition it could be. Remember when you actually had to visit a screen for Settings?

[jokerz]

djh,

If possible can you start a new thread with links to when you update aeon. I find myself digging into the really long thread to find a new version is out. CAn A threads sole purpose be to just say/and/or link to download the new version would rock....