[Alexpoet]

hello all.

my movieguide script has been available on the downloads page (http://dwl.xboxmediacenter.de/redirect.p...211cc775be) for a while now, and i noticed it had gotten several downloads.

i'm just curious if any of you have tried it out and, if so, if any of you have opinions/feedback you'd like to offer. i'm very open to criticism, as i'd like to make this tool as useful as possible (which, admittedly, isn't much, since all you have to do is open a webpage or pick up a phone/paper to get the exact same information...but still...).

my biggest complaint is with the white text on light background which, of course, would be easy to change in the skin. i should have done that already. i just kept trying to find a way to change that font instead, and couldn't.

[luma]

i'd love to use this script, but i can't get it to work. the background image won't appear, using the default or replacing it with another background.png. not a big issue, but odd.

the theater list shows up in the left pane, and the movie list shows up in the right pane, but i can't ever get it to show movie times no matter what i select.

oh yeah, and it doesn't seem like there's any way to exit the script without rebooting the xbox. maybe binding the "back" key to exit would be helpful.

i'm looking forward to the next version of this as i'm sure it'll be handy to have. thanks for your work on it!

[hurtz]

alexpoet -

i wanted to take my kids to a movie this weekend, so instead of reaching for the newspaper, i decided to try out your script.

you know what i would change? nothing! this is sweet. works very nice, and now i can even see whats playing at the imax downtown. very nice work - don't change a thing.

hurtz

[Alexpoet]

hurtz, i'm very glad you had success with it. i showed it off and impressed some friends this weekend when we were looking for times for dodgeball. it's still got at least one major problem, though, not refreshing showtimes on up/down.

luma, i'd really like to help you out. what zip code are you using? it's quite possible i'm not parsing movie showtimes perfectly--i just did some guessing with regular expressions based on a few tests. i figured it could still use some tweaking.

as for the .png thing...you might try replacing it with .gif (save as on the image and change the filename in the script). i have no idea if that would help, but i read something about python preferring gifs. that info might be way out of date, though.

[kinghowdy0]

one hell of a script! how else would i know what time to go see spiderman 2?

[Tacheon]

i love the script, very useful...
only that i use my xbox in 720p and your script only supports 420p. so i set out to modify the script for 720p, any help you can provide would be much appreciated...

i've expanded the backround.png to 1280x720, but am having trouble getting the listbox's and text to allign properly.
will keep at it...

thanks...

[Alexpoet]

tacheon,
the thing is, i haven't bothered yet learning how to script for different resolutions. i started out with a 640 x 480 image i'd used for an old avalaunch skin, and it worked perfectly for my crappy little tv, so i put all of my development time into making it work, and never messed around with resolutions.

not that i'm unwilling to--i just haven't even glanced at it yet.

i'd be glad to work with you on it, and between the two of us if we get it working, then i can add it into the official release, and i'll know how to do multi-resolution support for everything else i build.

now...all of that is regarding automatic multi-resolution resizing, or whatever. to just get yours running probably isn't as hard. all i did was open up the background in photoshop, turned on the measurements info, and drew selection boxes in the space needed, then made control objects using those pixel sizes.

for 1280 x 720, it should be (doing it the way i did it) :

self.pic = xbmcgui.controlimage(0,0,1280,720, rootdir + "background.gif")
self.primarylistlabel = xbmcgui.controllabel(54, 122, 418, 33, "", sf[0], sf[1])
self.primarylist = xbmcgui.controllist(54, 163, 418, 268)
self.secondarylistlabel = xbmcgui.controllabel(479, 122, 418, 33, "", sf[0], sf[1])
self.secondarylist = xbmcgui.controllist(479, 163, 418, 268)
self.showtimeslabel = xbmcgui.controllabel(255, 445, 635, 105, "", sf[0], sf[1])
self.outputlabel = xbmcgui.controllabel(54, 564, 841, 102, "", sf[0], sf[1])

note that these are the lines you'd need to change. i've included them in the right order, but they're spaced throughout the init function.

if you've already tried these numbers (or numbers close to them), then it's probably a more complicated issue than simple hard-coding corrections will resolve. but this might be a quick fix.

let me know.

[Tacheon]

alexpoet,

thanks for your help, i was starting to open up photoshop when i saw your post heh heh... saved me the trouble..
i will give the values you posted a try and post the results...

have a little free time on my hands, so i started looking over different scripts to see if i could get an idea on how the auto res. might work.

still though, excellent script, one of the more useful ones out so far next to webradio. good job..

[PainBreak]

i found this script earlier today but didn't like how it was displaying on my ntsc television/xbox(default 720x480). i did a few minor adjustments and created a simple background for it that i feel does it well. i believe this will help a lot of people gain more interest in this script, as this should be ready-to-go.

http://204.185.75.14/~jmarsh/xmovieguidentsc.zip

i hope this helps out, as you have created an excellent script!

[Alexpoet]

painbreak,
i really like that background image! thank you for providing it. it seems better suited to the purpose of the script than my general-use background.

as long as you don't mind, i'll distribute that with my official releases (i'm pretty sure that's what you had in mind when you provided the zip, after all...). one of my next plans for movieguide is to add multi-resolution support (as i said above), so it will draw a different background depending on your tv.

i'd be interested in resizing the image you provided and using that one for all the different ratios. by any chance, have you saved a copy of it with layers? i'm not particularly adept at photoshop, so it could end up ugly if i just tried stretching and scrunching that png to all the different ratios....

if not, i'm still incredibly grateful for the image. it's perfect for the script. thank you for your contribution.

alexpoet

[andrewjm]

whenever i move down the list of movies, i get times that are not accurate.. however, it i move up the list, the times are...

anyone else have this? check citysearch.com or something and see if yours are accurate

[Alexpoet]

hmm...

i've had a known issue for a while where certain lists of showtimes will stick when you move up or down by 1, but then you move on, and it corrects, and moving back shows the correct time.

i'd had some trouble tracking that down, and i believe it may have simply been a timing issue. so i added a .02 second delay before getting the selected item from the list.

unfortunately, the error's never shown up very consistently on my xbox, on any of the zip codes and theaters i've tested it with. so i can't be certain it's fixed.

i'll go ahead and make a public version of my newest script, though, and release that. maybe it'll help. please check, and let me know whether or not it fixes things.

other known issues i'd like to correct:
* resolution resizing - obviously, i've mentioned it in all of my most recent replies....

* empty lists - currently (at least, before xbmc 1.0) empty lists would often cause the script to crash. i need to write in some error handling to prevent that in my script.

[Alexpoet]

new version of movieguide is now available on my website that should fix these showings errors onup and ondown.

also, it should resolve empty lists lockups. i tried a couple tests (entering zip codes that i knew had no theaters in them) and i had no problems. but please let me know if you experience issues.

i'm still working on graphics issues--that's not my strong suit, so i can't promise anything right away.

[Alexpoet]

new release just posted to my website! it's much cleaner code, and should look better on ntsc tvs, at least. i hope to get to pal soon.

i've officially switched to the hollywood.com logo'ed background image that painbreak provided. many thanks to painbreak for it; i think it looks great. it also provides more room for the textboxes.

oh! and i learned how controltextbox works, and it's awesome! :-)

new readme included has some actual instructions for use, too.

as always, let me know what you think.

[footle]

i like it.
spent a few fun hours reworking it to use http://www.scoot.co.uk (for uk films/locations) whilst "learning" python last night.

i can imagine it'd have been a *lot* harder without your emulator stubs.

[ i'll upload any significant changes if anyone's interested once i've finished fiddling ].