[tOM_XB]

Hello

I searched around a bit, I am just being very unobservant or is there not yet much in the way of a scaper than can give you a critics review of a film. e.g. from allmovie, or any major newspaper?

thanks, been looking for ages for one.

[tOM_XB]

hello can I bump this one..

70~ views but no reply.. am I

asking the obvious
asking the impossible
asking the wrong forum section?

still think a review scraper either of professional or amazon, RT etc.. type sources would be great.. no?

cheers

[olympia]

Universal Scraper?

[tOM_XB]

can it retrieve reviews? Just looked at it and I just see options for plot, tagline, outline.. that's not quite the same as reading through a review.. unless as I say, I'm missing something here?

[olympia]

LOL, a scraper addon cannot retrieve information and store it in fields what xbmc core doesn't support. So you will not see review.

However Universal Scraper can fetch Critics Consensus from RT either as plot or outline.

[tOM_XB]

hmm thnaks kind of works..
got a couple of sentence long reviewing scrolling by in the plot outine.. take your point about the xbmc core but would be a great plug. New York times reviews plus RT users, amazon, etc..

btw would your idea work better with any particular skin? think maybe conflunce not making the best of this (or I've not tweaked it well)

[olympia]

Don't know about better skin support. A skin which shows full outline would make it. Maybe you could ask for such feature from one of the Confluence skin modder. Like for instance how there is a switch now between plot and cast. It could be that on the third click it would show the outline.

As for other sites: no. Only those sites can be supported where it is possible to look up a movie by imdb id. New York Times and amazon are not sites like that.

[tOM_XB]

thanks, interesting. I think this could be a 'didn't know you needed until you had it' type feature if you you know what i mean. Personally I don't really see that having the plot is that useful.. a review usually does that and more. I think there was a similar allmusic scraper for a while which worked great.. reading a bit of background about an album while listening (i.e. automatically collating useful info from different sources) is exactly the kind of thing a MC like xbmc is/could be brilliant at.

[DiMag]

tOM_XB raises a valid point, but in a wrong section of the forum. Yes, is IMPERATIVE that a functional movie metadata schema includes not just one, but several review sites (cf. Wikipedia, where four sites - including Metacritics and RT - are deemed essential). For this information to be retrievable, however, the metadata schema used by XBMC's library has to support a tag named <reviews> containing level-2 sub-tags named <review> - or something like that. It doesn't. It is not a matter of design not technological prowess - XBMC provides for such useless and silly metadata as <tagline> but not for reviews. Nor, for that matter, for the equally useful <awards>/<award> tag.

After not getting any replies, tOM_XB asks:

am I

asking the obvious
asking the impossible

Well, it is a story already told by Hans Christian Andersen in his tale about the naked emperor.

[tOM_XB]

haha

thanks.. ok so I was in the wrong place. interesting to read your reply otherwise.. I think I'm right in understanding you're saying this simply isn't built into XBMC right now. am with you onn having awards info - that would be a great feature.

[olympia]

Even then it wouldn't be possible because you can't maintain a one to one link between movies across those sites.

[tOM_XB]

an even better technically no-doubt difficult/impossible feature would be retrieving a choice of review from IMDB external review list for a given film.
e.g.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0398027/externalreviews

[olympia]

technically no-doubt difficult/impossible feature would be...

sure, you would only need to create and maintain (due to frequent site layout changes) 68 scrapers.

[DiMag]

It is not built into XBMC, and it is not for want of IT infrastructure. It is just a flawed design - those people who set up the metadata schema for movies have found a place for the trivial (taglines) and the oppressive (age restriction ratings) but not for the functional (reviews, analyses, referrals to novels in cases of adapted works). My advise to you when confronted with a perceived flaw in a metadata schema devised by the media industry is to assume that they screwed it up again. By contrast, the chances that you got it wrong are negligible.

[DerDon]

which sources does the universal scraper use?
is there a list?

there is a tool called Thumbgen... it can scrape amazon and generate nfo files!