[Gamester17]

@spiff and Nicezia, please have a look at and reply to MediaPortal's and the Moving Pictures project developers feedback here:
http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/improv...ing-35312/

I can't speak for the MediaPortal guys, but on the Moving Pictures project, I spent a lot of time looking into the XBMC scraper system before we implemented our own generic Cornerstone Scraper Engine. I have not looked too closely at the new ScraperXML project (although I did take a peek and by the way it is written in Visual Basic, not C#). But if it works similar to or is based on the older C++ scraper engine for XBMC it has a couple problems.

1. The method of outputting results with the XBMC scripting engine is fairly cryptic. The script writer has to basically construct an XML document for the output. And what makes this even worse is this construction is embedded in an existing XML document, which means all special characters must be escaped. This dramatically complicates things, reducing the maintainability of existing scripts and making new scripts much more difficult to write.
2. The output of the search function is only a text based string and a url for the details page for the movie, tv show, etc. The string is not even consistent, sometimes it is title, sometimes it is title and year, sometimes it is official title, english title, then year. It's just not reliable. This would create difficulties with the auto approval system in Moving Pictures.
3. The way the scraper engine is written, it's just not that extensible. What if someone wanted to add XML parsing tools to be provided to the scraper? What if someone wants to execute XSLT queries on a web page found on the internet? Or what about pulling details from the filesystem rather than a URL? These are not features I particularly care about, but my point is it would not be easy to add these features with the way the XBMC stuff is coded. The core of the scraper engine would have to be modified and this would bring risk to existing functionality, because everything as it is, is lumped together in a big class / file.

For these reasons I chose not to get involved with the XBMC scraper engine a while back. Instead we created the Cornerstone Scraper Engine (also GPL) that powers Moving Pictures. I think that a community effort to create a common data provider system for multiple HTPC apps is a good idea, but if the project is going to base the engine on the XBMC implementation, I am unfortunately not really interested in getting involved.

For reference; fforde is the main developer of the "Moving Pictures" (movies) plugin for MediaPortal (which is a plugin used by basically as all MediaPortal users as MediaPortal itself has no native scraper engine:
http://code.google.com/p/moving-pictures/

Moving Pictures 0.7.3

Moving Pictures is a movies plug-in for the MediaPortal media center application. The goal of the plug-in is to create a very focused and refined experience that requires minimal user interaction. The plug-in emphasizes usability and ease of use in managing a movie collection consisting of ripped DVDs, and movies reencoded in common video formats supported by MediaPortal.

The plug-in's intended focus is exclusively on movie content. It is not designed to manage clips, music videos, TV shows, or any other type of video content. This narrow focus will allow for a much more refined interface than something like the MyVideo interface included in the standard MediaPortal distribution. This focus is based after the similar focus and success of the TVSeries plug-in for MediaPortal.

Moving Pictures is also designed to require the least amount of user interaction possible. If a new movie file or DVD rip is placed in a watch folder, it will automatically be added to the system. Meta data will be retrieved and artwork, both covers and backdrops (fanart) will be automatically downloaded. If user interaction is necessary to clarify the actual title that has been added, the user will be prompted, but this is a last resort.


Staying Informed

The community for the Moving Pictures plug-in revolves around the sub-forum located on the MediaPortal website. This is the first place to go for up to the minute information on the plug-in. If you'd like to keep up to date with new releases of Moving Pictures but don't frequent the forums, you can subscribe to the Moving Pictures General Discussion Group. As new versions of the plug-in are released, status updates will be posted to the Discussion Group which will in turn hit your email inbox.


Getting Involved

The team for the Moving Pictures plug-in is currently pretty small, but if you are interesting in contributing, make a quick post over in the discussion group or send a developer a message on the MediaPortal forums and we can talk about how you can help out. We currently (always) could use C# developers, and skin developers, but if you have another skill set that you think could be useful, don't be shy. If you are interested in helping in any way, we'd be glad to hear from you. Make a post in the Discussion Group. As a side note, we could definitely use a logo for the project so if you are a graphic designer and are interested in throwing something together, we would be very grateful.

If you are a C# developer and want to take a look at the existing code base, you can browse the source code repository via the link above. You could also take a look at the Developers Guide which will, among other things, help you get your local environment setup for working on the Moving Pictures project.