MoviePoster - Virtual movie poster display software. - Page 2

Sorry I mistyped it in my previous post, I have been attempting to connect on port 8082 with no luck.

I believe I have all of the settings correct, I added a password just now and enabled logging and there's been no change. As for pinging, MoviePoster and XBMC are on the same machine and in the lower right hand corner of MoviePoster it says "connected XBMC 12.0 beta on 127.0.0.1". One other thing i noticed, it acts differently depending on what Im playing. I was streaming some trailers from XBMC and the "Coming Soon" screen popped up with the proper start and end times and the file name at the bottom of the screen but the image was the XBMC logo not the movie poster. But I am watching a movie right now and its streaming different "coming soon" posters still. Ill attach the log thats built up since I enabled it, hopefully it will shed some light on my troubles!
logfile.rtf 64k .rtf file

If I can get the other stuff taken care of Ill look a bit harder at this, right now this is the least of my concerns.

Over all this is a great program and even if I cant use the "Now showing" function I'd be happy just creating some custom lists for a bunch of the posters I own and stream current titles to see whats new.

Well I'm glad to hear that its not just me! Now that I know what the issue is I can use it as it is until the update comes out.

As for playing trailers in XBMC, I used to use Boxee exclusively so v12 Frodo is my only experience with XBMC. I haven't downloaded any Add-on's as of yet, I just select "Trailer" under "Movie Information". Maybe its a new feature within v12? Or an add-on that was already in the install? Its not really a major problem, trailers are only on for a min or two. I just thought it may help in troubleshooting my issues.

Thanks again for this program and all of your hard work!

So I have a possible feature request, if its already in there and this is an issue related to my running XBMC v12 or its just too much work or just something you dont want to do please tell me to stfu!

But, I have this program attached to my HTPC (like I assume most people do). The thing is I dont just watch movies on my HTPC, I watch a lot of TV shows as well .. I probably watch more TV shows than I do movies on a daily basis. Ive noticed that when I start a TV show I occasionally get the "Now Showing" screen .. Im assuming its occasional due to my issues with running v12 XBMC, that's besides the point right now though. The point is your program recognizes that I am playing something and it even places the file name at the bottom of the screen where the "tag line" typically is for a movie poster. It also pulls the sound quality and the resolution and start/finish times, but it only shows the XBMC logo in place of the poster. I was wondering if there was a way that it can search TVdb or possibly IMDB for TV show artwork. I know that XBMC seems to be able to pull artwork for my TV folders as well as programs like sickbeard. So Id guess that some web Db has an API that may be usable in a situation like this.

Also, Ive noticed that some of the taglines for the movie posters that are showing seem to be too long to display. The short ones are nice and centered and typically read just fine, but for example on the poster for The Lost Boys, it should read "Sleep all Day. Party all Night. Never grow Old. Never Die. It's Fun to be A Vampire". Now because it is so long it cuts it off to read something like .. "Sleep all Day. Party all Night. Never grow Old. Never Die. Its Fun to". I didnt know if maybe there was a way to adjust the font size if there are "X" number of characters or add a 2nd line. Or maybe easier, a way to get rid of the tag line altogether? Most are fine, but Ive noticed a good amount are either too long or some other tag lines overlap with the ratings box and other info at the bottom of the screen, possibly due to the scaling of the different image sizes. Not a major issue, but if its an easy tweak to an XML or I could just remove a paragraph from an XML and do away with it and save you the trouble, that would work as well.

I know we were working on the "Now Showing" issues I have encountered with XBMC v12 and we sorta glossed over my issue with opening the web/remote page. I didn't know if you may have any other suggestions as to what I could do to get this working? I was going to look at making some custom poster lists and figured the remote would be the easiest way.

Thanks again for all of your help!

This is an awesome app, exactly what I've been looking for. Thank you for this, cannot wait to figure out how to utilize this in my "theater" I'm still playing with the settings and learning.

Quick question though, I want to only use covers from movies that are in my collection. I have them all saved locally to the specified subfolder of my ripped movies. IE Movies/Dark Knight Rises/cover.jpeg. How do do this?

Thank you for even more improvements to this nifty program - I was finally able to nab some time to try it out last night; I was floored by how intuitive and responsive the web-based remote was! Really impressed, I'll definitively be making a donation to help your efforts!


Here are my experiences/thoughts:

1. Trailers and Coming Soon worked exactly the expected way after following the steps in your readme, no problems there whatsoever!

2. I believe that I experienced the same issues fallenangel1 did earlier in the thread when I fired up XBMC - once I started a movie, it 'froze' on whatever Coming Soon poster was currently showing, and reset to the home
Great Dane' theater page once I stopped the movie - I couldn't get the 'Now Playing' to show with the currently showing poster/metadata after several attempts. I still haven't figured out what I'm doing wrong, but in the bottom right hand of the poster, it did say 'Connected' once I started XBMC, at least. I'm using stable Eden - since it was thought that the issues fallenangel1 encountered were Frodo-related, I thought you might want to look at my log file? I'm thinking something else might be the culprit for this problem. Here's the log snippet where it happened:
logfile.txt 3k .txt file
It looks like the error specifically was: 12/7/2012 2:33:26 AM - Error updating media information from XBMC - Object reference not set to an instance of an object.



Also, some feature suggestions/requests that I thought would be neat enhancements:

1. I think you're moving in this direction anyway based on your 'to do' list in the readme, but I think utilizing locally stored trailers/posters would be a great feature to have - for instance, sometimes TMDB doesn't have the particular poster you want for a movie (or at a high enough resolution), but that way you could essentially pick the poster you wanted from anywhere, move it to a folder on your PC, and then have that one added to movieposter's cache instead. Same with trailers, you wouldn't have to worry about whether the youtube link is working, etc. Maybe when you select the 'Choose Alternate Poster' option in the cache view, there could be an option for 'Browse for local poster' or something to that effect, where you could select a poster on your hard drive (doesn't necessarily have to already be in your XBMC library), and maybe the same for trailers?

2. I didn't see this as an option, and please correct me if it's already there..I do like being able to hit the Remote 'Play Trailer' button when I want to see a trailer play for sure, but as of right now, it's strictly a manual process? I thought it would be cool to create a custom list of posters where I want to have the trailers shown for all of them, and have them show a poster, hold for a specific period of time on the poster, and then automatically start the trailer...after the trailer is done, show the next poster, hold for a specific period of time, and then etc. Would be really neat for showcasing!

3. Maybe an option remove the 'eye' on the poster? I know it serves a functional trailer purpose, but I think if you weren't planning on playing trailers (or had them automated), it would be useful to have it not show...or maybe it could be moved to somewhere below the poster, a little less obtrusive? The posters look so clean without it, is all...



Again, I really appreciate the work you put into this great program!

That did the trick; 'Now Playing' and XBMC integration both working beautifully now, thank you!

I went off radar for a few days, love the update Brent!! Now Playing seems to be working well! I liked it so much I decided to stop watching it on a TV turned on it side and built this from a 32" TV I had laying around!

You can see all of the pics I took of the build here;
https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/106177607191254337017/albums/5819701860507729697

BEFORE!!


AFTER!!

So .. after having this up and most of this evening, "Now Playing" is working much better than it was, however, it does seem to lock up once and a while. Ill attach a log, the start of the log it was pulling from cache and I started a show and it just locked up and didnt do anything until I stopped that show and started another movie. Then after a minute or so the poster popped up. It happened earlier and I just restarted MP and it pulled the poster info and worked just fine. Not too sure what it could be .. its working but something is causing an "glitch" once and a while.
log.rtf 13k .rtf file

It also doent seem to like it when I stop a movie in the middle and start another one. I just did that and the Start/End times changed but the poster stayed the same.

I also still cant get trailers to play!
Edited by fallenangel1 - 12/8/12 at 7:16pm

Thanks, I saw you're frame and the molding you picked up I liked it as well. So I ran with it. I finally got to use the Logan framing equipment I got last Christmas! I just wish I had a newer/thinner TV to work with. But that would have cost me $200-400 more. I'm OK with this for now, I may look into rebuilding another one later down the road.

As for my issues, I watch a lot of TV shows so by default most of my issues seem to happen when I'm watching them. But this morning I decided to test it out. The HTPC was on all night, so I just had to turn the screens on. MP was already running, but I had to open XMBC. MP wasnt maximized, and when I maximized it it shifter over to my main TV screen. I had to move it back over to the poster screen and maximize it again. Then I got into XMBC and started the movie 'Invasion'. The gears started spinning, then after a few minutes the gears disappeared and the poster stayed the same 'American Beauty'. I then closed and reopened MP and with in seconds it popped up with now playing and the poster for 'Invasion'. So, it is working .. just something seems to lock it up once and again.

I know you say you do a lot of work in your dev machine, if you want to poke around in my HTPC sometime and see if there is anything that is significantly different. I can set up set up a remote session and let you do some digging.

I've been putting it through some hoops today, I just finished watching 'Invasion' so I started another movie and it was fine, I stopped that movie and started another with no issues. Then I thought, what if I don't "stop" the movie I'm watching and I just start another? So I tried that, while the movies playing I just back up to the menu and start another movie. It worked once and locked up on another. No gears or spinning circles. When it locked up I stopped the movie and started the same movie and MP posted up the correct poster almost immediately. I'm not sure how you have it set up, but it seems like when I 'stop' a movie it resets MP, it goes back to the Great Dane screen and then picks up again. But if I just start another movie while its playing it doesn't get that chance to reboot itself. I'm not sure if that helps or means anything to you, just figured that I'd pass the info along, "Knowing is Half the Battle!"

Some more info, same kind of issues. Finished with another movie, backed out without stopping the movie. Started another and it froze up on the old Now Playing screen. No gears or circles, stopped the movie let a cached poster pop up as coming soon. tried another movie and it froze up on the coming soon screen, no circles or gears. Tried that a couple times, and had pretty much the same results .. either the Coming Soon screen would lock up or the Great Dane now showing screen would appear and lock up, at no time would I see gears or circles.

Here's my log with some notes on what I think its doing at that point.
Log2.rtf 36k .rtf file

Awesome! Thanks a lot!

This is very intriguing - just subscribed !

Love this. Absolutely a must have in my dedicated home theater. Any thoughts on adding the ability to play "local video/trailers" at start-up? Was thinking it would be great to have a custom trailer/intro that plays when the app starts up before going into the "Coming Soon" slide show.

Basically was thinking of the following sequence

1. Home Page
2. Intro video ( DTS/Dolby Intro or some other custom video)
3. Coming soon posters / trailers

I would like to see the Intro video centered in the middle of the marquee where the posters are typically displayed... since most of us would have some sort of LCD in a portrait orientation, having it full screen would be tough to do.

when trying to use the remote on the local machine I keep getting the following error:

500 - Internal Server Error

System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException: Could not find a part of the path 'F:\xbmc\release 1.0.1.3\Cache\Movies\lists'.
at System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath)
at System.IO.FileSystemEnumerableIterator`1.CommonInit()
at System.IO.FileSystemEnumerableIterator`1..ctor(String path, String originalUserPath, String searchPattern, SearchOption searchOption, SearchResultHandler`1 resultHandler, Boolean checkHost)
at System.IO.Directory.GetFiles(String path, String searchPattern)
at MoviePoster.CustomLists.getCustomLists()
at MoviePoster.processModule.handleRemote(RequestContext context)
at MoviePoster.processModule.Process(RequestContext context)
at HttpServer.Server.ProcessModules(RequestContext context)
at HttpServer.Server.HandleRequest(RequestEventArgs e)
at HttpServer.Server.OnRequest(Object sender, RequestEventArgs e)

I had it work once before last week. I have tried a handful of different ports but they all lead to a nunknown internet page.