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OS X ViMediaManager - Media Manager for Mac OS X!
I'll have to do more testing on sets anyway, so i'll take a look at that. Wink
I know I had an issue with posters not being found by XBMC because of my batch renamer, if that's the issue it'll also be fixed in the next alpha.

Subtitles are on the list for v2.0 Wink
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ViMediaManager 0.6α3 - released on August 2, 2012
  • Finaly support for unicode characters when looking up movies! Movies like Amélie will now pass through successfully.
  • Adding a set now automatically tries to add movies to the set.
  • Added a entirely new search field to the 'manual search' window.
  • Also Added the same search field to the main window so people can filter their movies list.
  • Added some support for .nfo files with only an IMDB URL inside, ViMM will search for information using the IMDB ID from the URL.
  • Improved IMDb Data fetching.
  • If the TMDB does not have a match for your movie, it now will still pass trough the unofficial IMDB API to search for information if you have an IMDB ID.
  • Better support for international information fetching.
  • Support for NL, DE, FR & UK MPAA rating fetching & displaying.
  • Lots of changes and improvements to 'batch renaming' files & folders.
  • Fixed a bug where .nfo files would not be updated with the new poster location after batch renaming, leaving XBMC with nothing but a screenshot to fill in for the thumbnail.
  • Fixed where movie root folders with the same folder name would overwrite each other in the preferences.
  • Lots of other minor bug fixes and changes.

With a lot of thanks to my special alpha tester, Rob!

Enjoy!
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Awesome!!! Thank you for making this alpha so soon Smile

btw, I was re-fetching a movie (it was already fetched before, but I wanted to include a trailer I've recently added), and I got this error:

Image

I've tried quit the app and try again, but no luck. So far it's only on that particular movie. Let me know if you want me to send you the current xml file of it.
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I might have JUST fixed that bug in the latest alpha, is it still doing that in 0.6a3?

Edit: Edit nevermind, i can see in the screenshots that you are. i'll look into it, apparantly I didn't fix it well enough. Wink

The error is most likely actually coming from the movie file itself, and a unix app called 'mediainfo' translated the movie file's information into an XML file.
However it seems like it gave a bad translation and made the App crash. ^^;
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yeah, it's the new version.

One other thing, I'm trying to re-fetch another movie, the data was all fetched already but for some reason ViMM is not showing the fanart and poster, but they are then (and you can see the icons on the left list too), so I tried to re-fetch and this is happening:

Image

I know there were some problems with IMDB before but regardless how many times I try I always get that error. I've also tried to fetch the poster and fanart individually and it does download, but doesn't show on the movie details window.
One more thing: when multiple titles are found and the select title window pops up, the first item on the list is selected but it's like it's not, I always need to select a different one and then re-select the first one.

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And that's why a developer needs to do a thorough checking and testing before releasing an app. ^^
Luckily, i can still hide behind the 'alpha' label. =P

I'll fix those as soon as possible and release another minor update.
Already fixed the manual search window not showing up the very first selected poster/fanart, for now it's not too much of an issue as the selection still works, it just forgets that update the preview images.

What are the fanart & poster names? do they match the movie name? could you show me a screenshot of the movie's folder?

Also, instead of re-fetching, try opening the metadata editor, and then pressing cancel to update the selected movie in the list, or at least it should update the availability of files.
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Hi Joel!

Thanks for posting the screenshots and being very clear as to your bugs!

I've been working diligently with helping to get the bugs out as well and it's appreciated when users are really clear as to exactly what is going on!

Rob
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(2012-08-02, 20:17)MariusTh86 Wrote: And that's why a developer needs to do a thorough checking and testing before releasing an app. ^^
Luckily, i can still hide behind the 'alpha' label. =P

I'll fix those as soon as possible and release another minor update.
Already fixed the manual search window not showing up the very first selected poster/fanart, for now it's not too much of an issue as the selection still works, it just forgets that update the preview images.

What are the fanart & poster names? do they match the movie name? could you show me a screenshot of the movie's folder?

Also, instead of re-fetching, try opening the metadata editor, and then pressing cancel to update the selected movie in the list, or at least it should update the availability of files.

ahaha, that's true, it's not possible to make "the perfect" app, there's always a bug or two around Smile But, it is a really good alpha version man, congrats!

Regarding the fanart and poster names, they're exactly like the movie filename (just like every in ant other movie that I have). Here's the contents of that folder:
Code:
Apocalypse Now-fanart.jpg
Apocalypse Now-trailer.mp4
Apocalypse Now.jpg
Apocalypse Now.mp4
Apocalypse Now.nfo
Apocalypse Now.srt

(2012-08-02, 21:38)robwired Wrote: Hi Joel!

Thanks for posting the screenshots and being very clear as to your bugs!

I've been working diligently with helping to get the bugs out as well and it's appreciated when users are really clear as to exactly what is going on!

Rob

Hey Rob,

I'm more than happy to be helpful. It's thanks to the community that this little app has so much appreciation, including from myself. I'm glad to help in every way I can Smile

Speaking of that, a couple more ideas:

The Sets Manager should have a resizable panel Smile
Image


The movies in the sets are not sorted right. In the previous alpha version there was a spinner to change the movie position, now it's gone. However, it can work like XBMC: sort the movies in each set by the release year. I think that's the best approach.
Image


Ideas for a new layout:
Image
  • Include the trailer preview in the movie details area. If there's no trailer for the movie, just place a button in the middle of the panel to download it.
  • The small icons available on the list for fanart, poster, subtitles, etc, should be also visible, and bigger, on the movie details panel.
  • If there's an item missing on that movie (subtitle, poster, etc), instead of not showing the icon, this should be more transparent.
  • For those "transparent" icons, the user can click on it to fetch that particular data. Clicking on Poster downloads the poster, and so on...
  • I think it's a cool idea to have a small "refresh rating" from IMDB on that panel. Or not… just an idea.
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Some very intriguing suggestions. Wink

I already had the idea for a 'resize' panel in mind, just didn't get around to adding it yet, thanks for reminding me. Wink
And I had been working on the ability to drag & reorder movie sets rather then adding an ugly spinner at the bottom, but i haven't gotten it to work perfectly just yet, so I disabled it for the moment.
I'll work on auto-sorting it by year so as to minimize the damage from not being able to manually sort the list. ^^

Showing trailers in the app is a nice idea for the user initially, but loading the trailer from, for example a network attached storage device would make the app INCREDIBLY slow to work with, since it would need to download the trailer each time you selected a movie from the list, wait for it to be done, and only then can it move on.

The details panel technically already shows if a fanart and poster is available by loading up the background and thumbnail image, but your edit does look quite nice. Wink

Rob and I had been discussing how to 'invert' the list for missing items, but I thought that would just bring confusion, so your transparent icons might just be a better idea. Wink
Clicking on them to fetch them might not be practical though, since you wouldn't want users to miss-click.

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. ^^


----
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.
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Hi Joel,

I'm glad I'm not the only one that has been thinking about how to display when a movie is missing metadata. I wholeheartedly agree with you on the idea about transparent icons and the ability to click on them to get metadata for a single movie.

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.

Rob

Another thing we've been discussing is adding other available metadata such as languages, cast, crew, etc...

I would love to see any design ideas you have for how we could display this as well.

Finally, I'm with you on the trailer, but it should simply load a play trailer button and maybe you could even hide that window altogether if you aren't using it, similar to the way you can hide iTunes cover art or other iTunes aspects when not in use. Having a black area with a play button in it could be a very small size image that wouldn't impact ViMM's speed and when you click it then it would load the trailer.

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.

Rob
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(2012-08-03, 01:29)MariusTh86 Wrote: Showing trailers in the app is a nice idea for the user initially, but loading the trailer from, for example a network attached storage device would make the app INCREDIBLY slow to work with, since it would need to download the trailer each time you selected a movie from the list, wait for it to be done, and only then can it move on.

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).

(2012-08-03, 01:29)MariusTh86 Wrote: The details panel technically already shows if a fanart and poster is available by loading up the background and thumbnail image, but your edit does look quite nice. Wink

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.

(2012-08-03, 01:29)MariusTh86 Wrote: Rob and I had been discussing how to 'invert' the list for missing items, but I thought that would just bring confusion, so your transparent icons might just be a better idea.
Clicking on them to fetch them might not be practical though, since you wouldn't want users to miss-click.

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 Smile

(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 Smile

(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).

(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 Smile

(2012-08-03, 03:01)robwired Wrote: Another thing we've been discussing is adding other available metadata such as languages, cast, crew, etc...

I would love to see any design ideas you have for how we could display this as well.

That's a good idea to include all that data there. I'll see a cool way to show it for sure Smile

(2012-08-03, 03:01)robwired Wrote: Finally, I'm with you on the trailer, but it should simply load a play trailer button and maybe you could even hide that window altogether if you aren't using it, similar to the way you can hide iTunes cover art or other iTunes aspects when not in use. Having a black area with a play button in it could be a very small size image that wouldn't impact ViMM's speed and when you click it then it would load the trailer.

The idea for the trailer is just to fill some space on the window, it's very empty. Like I said before, the trailer is not loaded when you change the movie from the list, instead it's just a black video screen with the control buttons on the bottom (in that screenshot I used youtube concept just to show as an example). The video is only loaded when the user clicks play. Of course that all that area can be hidden. My thought on that is to work that area as a resizable area, where the user can shrink it to the bottom in order to hide the video.

(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 Smile

If it doesn't get better now, it will be harder after implementing new features like favorites, extras, etc
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This latest version seems to be getting the file locations wrong when set from the startup wizard.

My movies are in /mnt/media1/Movies, and selecting that folder from the wizard results in name "media1:Movies:" and location "Movies" when set from the wizard. This doesn't scan.

If I delete that from preferences and re-add from there, it adds with name "Movies" and location "media1:Movies:" (ie the fields are swapped) and that does scan.

The same thing happens with TV shows (and, I assume, anime — but I don't have any so didn't set that).

(BTW, it would also be really nice if the toolbar was a standard NSToolbar, and supported Use Small Size and Customise — not sure if RealBasic allows that, though…)

Thanks
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Oops, I swapped them round because of an overwriting problem, but i forgot the set-up wizard, thanks for remind me!

The REALbasic toolbar isn't as convenient as a standard Cocoa one, i'll see what, If anything, I can do anything with sizes, but customizing might be a little difficult.
I had one set up for 0.5x that could be customized, but it seemed like it wasn't future proof. When I tried to build the App as a pure Cocoa App it failed to do so at the time.
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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 Smile

Actually, now that I figured out that you didn't mean the list, it might not be that bad an idea after all. Wink

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 Smile

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 Smile

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 Smile

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. Wink

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!
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Hey all,

I'm trying this app for the first time. I'm on Mountain Lion. I've tried build 0.5.4 and the latest (0.6α3). I can't seem to get anywhere with this app. I add my movies folder to the app but ViMediaManager remains empty with no movies in the list. I click "Refresh List" and it simply hangs, becoming unusable.

I know it's an alpha but I haven't seen anyone else having issues this severe where I can't even get the app to read my movies directory. Any thoughts from anyone?
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