2009-08-16, 08:57
Hi All,
I love XBMC very much, i've been using it since the old days of XBMP. Until now I've not contributed anything, not because of not wanting to but mainly because of a lack of coding skill and time. Unfortunately i still don't have a great deal of either of these but i may be able to get someone else to do it for me (paid). {preamble almost over now}.
I have an apple TV, a home theatre pc (windows) and an old xbox all running XBMC. There's a number of things i'd love to have for XBMC to make them all sing together nicely, such as saving all the metadata to NFO files to reduce the need for doubleups on scraping and so forth. The main feature i'd really like though is a nice way to share play count/watched status information for tv shows and movies between the three.
My thoughts on implementation was that some kind of sidecar xml file is needed that records an entry each time it's watched. Each entry would need to have:
1)datetime
2)machine/user id
The reason for the machine/user id is so that xbmc would be able to work out if the watched flag was actually relevant to the current user. The idea being that there would be a way to tell each xbmc installation about other installations/users it cares about. It may be possible to do this automatically (i haven't looked into the automatic discovery stuff yet). This way when the file is copied onto a foreign system it would then be considered 'unwatched' but if read by a system on the same lan it would be considered 'watched'.
If it was done right lots of user specific metadata could be recorded in the sidecar file, such as the date it was added to each library, user rating and so forth.
Before i jumped into documenting a breif i thought I'd better post here and get any feedback other's might have.
I love XBMC very much, i've been using it since the old days of XBMP. Until now I've not contributed anything, not because of not wanting to but mainly because of a lack of coding skill and time. Unfortunately i still don't have a great deal of either of these but i may be able to get someone else to do it for me (paid). {preamble almost over now}.
I have an apple TV, a home theatre pc (windows) and an old xbox all running XBMC. There's a number of things i'd love to have for XBMC to make them all sing together nicely, such as saving all the metadata to NFO files to reduce the need for doubleups on scraping and so forth. The main feature i'd really like though is a nice way to share play count/watched status information for tv shows and movies between the three.
My thoughts on implementation was that some kind of sidecar xml file is needed that records an entry each time it's watched. Each entry would need to have:
1)datetime
2)machine/user id
The reason for the machine/user id is so that xbmc would be able to work out if the watched flag was actually relevant to the current user. The idea being that there would be a way to tell each xbmc installation about other installations/users it cares about. It may be possible to do this automatically (i haven't looked into the automatic discovery stuff yet). This way when the file is copied onto a foreign system it would then be considered 'unwatched' but if read by a system on the same lan it would be considered 'watched'.
If it was done right lots of user specific metadata could be recorded in the sidecar file, such as the date it was added to each library, user rating and so forth.
Before i jumped into documenting a breif i thought I'd better post here and get any feedback other's might have.
