[mythtv-users] Anyone working on a Movie Trailers plugin? Considering writting one

[Michael T. Dean]

Michael Knoll wrote:

>On 6/19/05, Michael T. Dean <mtdean at thirdcontact.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>Michael Knoll wrote:
>>
>>>I've been considering writting a movie trailers plugin for MythTV.  I
>>>noticed on http://www.mythtv.info/moin.cgi/NewVersion there's items in
>>>the change log for movie trailers, but I don't see any such feature in
>>>MythTV .18.  Am I missing it and about to work on something that's
>>>already been done?
>>>
>>There's now a script in contrib called trailer.pl.  It goes to the Apple
>>website and searches for trailers.  Works pretty well, although there's
>>some room for improvement.  (I tried to download 109 trailers using IMDB
>>numbers pulled from the database and got 78 of them with the script.  I
>>was able to manually download 20 of them, several of which were missed
>>due to small differences in Apple's pages.  The rest seem to be
>>unavailable from Apple.)
>>
>>By default the script simply outputs the URL, but there are a couple
>>lines at the end that can be uncommented to have the script download the
>>video (and name it using the IMDB number).
>>    
>>
>How can this script be used within MythTV?  Is there an area to enter
>in the movie you want?  Is it to get the trailer for a movie you have
>in the mythvideo section?
>  
>
Not yet usable from within MythTV.  Yes, the general idea behind it is 
to allow users to download trailers to movies they have in MythVideo.  
It's very useful if you have a large number of movies and allow other 
people to decide which movie to watch (prevents a ton of, "Hey, what's 
such-and-such about?" questions).

Currently, I have it set up with each trailer in the "Trailers" category 
and did the IMDB lookup on both the trailer and the movie (so movie 
information is available whether the user is browsing trailers or 
movies).  Then, people can browse the trailers and just play any of them 
that look interesting.  Once they decide on a movie, I switch to the 
"Movies" category and play the movie.

I was considering setting up the trailer as "part 1" of every movie 
(with "Play after" set to play the movie), but unfortunately, I'm 
missing several trailers (for really old movies, mainly), so there would 
be no way to know if pressing play would start the trailer or the movie.

>I think I'm going to work on a more browsable trailer plugin.  One
>that mines the list of avaliable trailers, and allows you to browse
>and play them.  Make it extensible to handle any of these trailers
>sites.
>  
>
That would work very nicely--especially with MythMovieTime (i.e. if you 
allow the user to find the trailer for the movie from the listings in 
MythMovieTime).  Kevin Kuphal suggested a use like this ( 
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/dev/82344?search_string=trailers;#82344 
). 

I would like to see MythVideo updated with a column under videometadata 
for the filename of a movie trailer and a button in the UI (specifically 
the Gallery view) to allow the user to play the trailer instead of the 
movie.  I think it would look nice to put it in the movie details page 
(i.e. the page you get when you select a video in the Gallery view) at 
the bottom of the page.  There could be two buttons--one to play the 
movie (which is the default action) and one to play the trailer (if the 
video has an entry in the trailer column).

To make it really well integrated, the IMDB lookup should offer to 
download the trailer (since some users have slow 'net connections, 
forcing the download is probably not appropriate) or there should be a 
configurable option to always attempt to download the trailer.  Either 
way, I prefer the "ask it to download" as opposed to the 
"mythfilldatabase-like" approach suggested by Andrei (i.e. make it work 
like IMDB lookups instead of as a scheduled job).  I have a ton of 
videos that aren't movies (and therefore shouldn't have 
trailers)--things like Red vs. Blue, my own videos, etc.

Mike