What a list, what a list! xD
joelfernandes Wrote:I don't think you need to load the trailer every time the user changes the movie, just place a black screen with the play button and progress bar and that's it. If the user clicks play, then it loads the trailer.
Also, that panel (where the trailer is placed) should be resizable (vertically), that way the user can resize it to the minimum size and looks like it is right now (no trailer panel).
A placeholder, that could actually work, but still, ViMM can only show movies that can be played in QuickTime. I'm pretty certain that ".flv" movies aren't supported by default, so I really don't have a choice but to open a movie in their 'default' media player such as VLC or MPlayer, as chosen by the user through the finder 'Get Info' window.
joelfernandes Wrote:Thanks! I do think it looks good there too. There's plenty of space on the movie details panel, and that way the user can check all the metadata in an easier way.
Yup, plenty of space, i was also thinking of putting some file format flags in there, maybe some language flags, and possibly some of those extrathumbs.
joelfernandes Wrote:Yup, I agree that with the transparent icons looks better to detect missing data. Regarding the clicking on them... Hmmm... I'm not sure if the users would miss-click on those icons (I mean the ones from the movie details window, not from the list). But, I get what you're saying. It was just an idea
Actually, now that I figured out that you didn't mean the list, it might not be that bad an idea after all.
joelfernandes Wrote: (2012-08-03, 01:29)MariusTh86 Wrote: There is currently an 'update metadata' hidden in the "File" menu which currently, amongst most of the other available metadata, updates any ratings as well. ^^
That is handy
What you suggested might also come in handy, the current 'update metadata' might be to 'aggressive' for some, since it replaces a lot of current metadata with new stuff.
joelfernandes Wrote: (2012-08-03, 01:29)MariusTh86 Wrote: As for the Apocalypse now problem, try opening the folder in the finder and manually throwing everything out except the movie file before going back to ViMM, refreshing the list and then fetching information.
I tried it, still nothing. It did download the poster and fanart, and also created the nfo file, but it doesn't show either the poster or fanart (the icons are on tho).
Atleast it shows up in the list, so it does know of it's existence at all, does it also stay in the list if you do another refresh?
Maybe you can send me the .nfo file to
[email protected] in case i can figure out if something is going wrong there.
joelfernandes Wrote: (2012-08-03, 03:01)robwired Wrote: I've also suggested that there be a way to filter the movie list to show movies that have missing metadata. I thought maybe an inverted list where you see a list of movies and if a movie is missing metadata then you would see the icons of metadata that is missing, for example, if a movie had the poster and the fanart but was missing the trailer then you would see that movie in the list with a trailer icon.
The basic premise is that you should able to view what is missing in your movie collection like you would a to-do list. When you've completed getting all of the metadata the list would be empty because you were done. In this way if ViMM didn't find metadata for a movie you could search elsewhere and when you found it you could refresh the inverted list to see that it was now found and only xx number to go.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and if you think there might be a better way to do this as we haven't settled on anything yet and want to figure out something that isn't confusing to the user. I think a toggle switch would make it very clear but maybe you have a better idea.
That's definitely a filter ViMM should have, regarding how to show it and how it should work... hmmm... I can't think right away of a awesome and easy way to do it, but I will definitely think about it and try to come out with a concept
Actually, I think I know the perfect way to do this!
If you've ever used the torrent client Transmission, when you look under the "View" menu, they've got an option called "Filter Bar" which pops up a little bar on the top of the window with a set amount of options, clicking on any of these options would filter your transfers on, for example 'active'/'inactive'/'paused'.
For ViMM I'm almost certain I could do something similar, perhaps using the mini-icons to conserve on horizontal space.
joelfernandes Wrote: (2012-08-03, 03:01)robwired Wrote: Personally I'm looking forward to the day when I use ViMM to get visibility into my movie collection rather than sitting in front of my TV to decide which movies to watch.
Another idea I had was to be able to create a Favorites and Watch (Next) List. Eventually some of these things could be socially network shared.
Oh man... I'm with you! I would love to have a really cool app to do all the movie browsing and etc.. I have a bunch of ideas. To be honest, I'm not sharing them yet because I think ViMM still needs to get better on what it does right now. Personally, the only thing that really bothers me is the speed. Right now I have about +100 and it is kinda slow to open/load, but I've been rebuilding my collections. I had +500 movies before and, man! That was really slow. But at the time I was using 0.5, I guess.
My top feature request for ViMM it's the speed indeed
If it doesn't get better now, it will be harder after implementing new features like favorites, extras, etc
Since 0.5 I have made some progressions towards more speed, such as how I'm now loading a saved list of movie items instead of recreating the entire list from scratch every time at start-up. I'm also doing more in the way of updating existing movie items in the list rather then refreshing the list by reloading it from scratch.
In 0.5 and early 0.6 alphas, it was also terribly slow just to select a movie from the list, and it cost a bunch of RAM memory too.
The sloweness here was caused because I tried to open up to 1080p quality images and saved them in memory to make sure they where available elsewhere, next to being shown on the media info panel, and if the images were on a storage attached drive it would be even slower to download them into ViMM! And that each time a movie was selected from the list!
What I'm doing now is, I 'cache' a much smaller version of the images in ViMM's application support folder, this way it's going to open much more quickly, and it'll always be available, and I can't even imagine the speed increase on an SSD disk here.
The biggest hurdle possibly is that ViMM is currently a 'Carbon' app, which is an old framework that Apple build when it was transitioning between Classic Mac & Mac OS X, so it's pretty old and on it's way out of being supported by Apple.
REALstudio with which I build ViMM currently doesn't fully support Mac's more native Cocoa yet, but they're working on it, and i'll probably start using it when it doesn't make ViMM crash every 5 seconds. ^^;
In my limited testing though, I found that, for example, where currently ViMM scrolls through the movie list (using scrollwheel or scroll slide) in a practically choppy and sluggish way, especially in comparison, Cocoa made me virtually 'Fly' through the list as if it was nothing!