MoviePoster - Virtual movie poster display software. - Page 4

What OS do most of you run on your Raspberry Pi? I don't have one but I'd assume I could set up a similar environment in a VM (Id gladly accept a donated Pi to develop on though) Does anyone have a recommendation for a UI framework to work with? I've written Java apps using swing before, but other than that most of my work has been in a Microsoft environment.

yeah a signage player would work, though many of those dedicated signage units are just as expensive as a PC. i also think my software has some advantages in that it can be run on an existing htpc. Its also pretty much st it and forget it. it downloads all posters and trailers on its own. There doesnt need to be any interaction for it t keep automatically downloading and displaying the newest posters. I can see the advantage of running it on something cheap like the raspberry pi though.

I had a thought today for a new feature. What do you think about integrating ratings from rotten tomatoes? MoviePoster could display the current rating and the 'certified fresh' icon so you know if an upcoming movie is worth seeing. I had an idea to integrate the Microsoft Kinect too... maybe have it so the display could go to standby and it would automatically turn on when people are around. theres also the possibility to use gestures to play trailers and change posters. would those be worthwhile things to add?

MoviePoster will scale to any screen resolution, so it doesn't matter if you use a 720p or 1080p display. I used a 720p, simply because it was laying around and cheap. The posters are usually 1500x1000 resolution so they will look great on a 1080 display.

Yes, MoviePoster will display album art for music playing as long as the artwork is in XBMC. I havent looked into displaying anything when an external app is launched through a plugin. I could look into it though. It might be cool to show the game cover art.

Currently Im working on adding support to display movie ratings from rottentomatoes.com since they have a lot more rating data than themoviedb.org. I have the basic classes done, I just need to figure out how i want it displayed.

I have had another request for media browser support. There is a mediaBrowser plugin that provides a JSON interface similar to the one XBMC uses, so it should be possible to support MediaBrowser in the future. I cant say for sure when I'll get around to implementing it though.

MoviePoster by default caches posters to the hard drive. There is also an option to download and play trailers from the movie cache so you dont need to stream them every time they are viewed. If you really wanted, it is possible to create your own files in the poster cache. Let MoviePoster download a couple posters and trailers, then take a look in the Cache/Movies directory and you'll get an idea of the required structure. the .nfo files are just xml and can be modified using a text editor. Also, if there is a media file ending in -trailer in the cache for a particular movie, it will be played instead of streaming from the internet.

Well I have the RottenTomatoes integration working. However i want to make a few more adjustments before i release it. RottenTomatoes limits their queries to 10,000 per day which actually will get used up by less than four users of MoviePoster with a 30 second poster interval if its left running 24/7. So I'm going to add the ability to store the RT ratings in the cache and only refresh them once per day or something. Im also still trying to figure out where to display the RottenTomatoes info. Admittedly, it isn't a problem when displaying upcoming movies, since they don't have media flags (resolution, audio format, etc) to display, so i could just use that area. But for the 'now playing' screens it would be a problem, I'm kind of out of room unless i decrease the size of the other metadata. Ive also thought about an optionally viewable panel to show the movie synopsis, RT rating, release date, stuff like that. For now its just overlayed on the poster for testing.. but to show its there and working:



Next, I plan to look into showing game covers or artwork for games launched through a plugin like advanced launcher as suggested by D-MaxPWR. It could be pretty easy, and its the next feature that i might actually use myself. MediaBrowser support will be on the list somewhere after that. And unfortunately, crossplatform support is gradually being pushed down my list, simply for the fact that it will take considerable time to pretty much rewrite everything, and it doesn't really have any benefit to me. However, I do want to become more proficient in python, so I will explore porting the business logic and base classes to python. I'm still undecided about what framework to use for a cross platform GUI, but I'm leaning towards Qt.

Sorry.. its Windows only for now since it uses .Net 4.5 and a WPF front end, so Mono is a no go too. I am doing some very slow work to port the backend to python, so at some point there might be a cross platform version, but it most likely wont have all the features of the Windows version.

Lunatixz, right now all the media flags are embedded resources, although only one class would need major modification in order to support external images. I'll look into making that addition when i have time. I'm trying to focus more on my theater construction at the moment.

Also, just to share another project idea of mine:
I didn't want to leave the poster display on all the time and it is a bit tedious to have to turn it on and off all the time. So I designed a solution to use a Teensy USB development board (like an arduino) , a PIR motion sensor, and some relays to control the screen. the plan is that the device will watch for motion in the area, turn on the screen and wakes up the PC. When no motion is detected for say 30 minutes, it turns the screen off. It will monitor the power state of the screen so it wont send the 'power on' button press if the screen is already on. This will be independent of the PC, so it can be used even if the PC is set to go to standby after a set amount of time. The Teensy can send a simulated keyboard event over USB to wake the PC in this case.

Motion poster support is explained in the changelog.txt file, under the section for version 1.0.1.4:

support for motionPosters in .swf format - these must be manually downloaded.
-put .swf file in the movie's cached folder. name of file must end in -motionposter.swf ex. moviename-motionposter.swf
-a motionposter.html file will be generated for for the .swf file which can be modified to
refine the layout of the motionposter (height, width, position). This is useful for motionposters
that have an annoying frame, or to enlarge them to fill the poster area if desired.

Since then I have found a motion poster in animated Gif format for Oz the Great and Powerful. But MoviePoster only supports .swf motion posters at this time. However, it will be trivial to add support for animated gifs, once i get around to it...

While motionPosters are cool, unfortunately all the sources I've found for them are fairly low resolution. Has anyone found any high resolution motionposters?

Yes, actually the Kinect was my first idea of how to do it. If i get my hands on a Kinect cheap, I'll definitely look into integrating it. But, I needed to buy the hardware to hook up the the LCD to determine its power state and simulate the power button press anyway and I stumbled upon the Teensy boards. It looks to be a cheap and easy way to set it up in a way that doesn't depend on the PC. The code I have written for the Teensy is only a couple dozen lines of C, so its pretty simple. I'll post details once i get it all put together and tested... still waiting for goodies to show up in my mailbox

You can either use Windows to rotate the display to portrait mode (if your graphics card supports it) Or MoviePoster has its own rotation mechanism built in so that it essentially displays itself sideways and looks normal when you set the TV on its side. Your TV doesn't need to do anything special.

Make sure your computer meets the minimum requirements: Windows Vista or above with .Net framework 4.5 installed. other than that, I'm not sure why you'd be getting that error.

I used a 32" display I had laying around that needed a new power supply. Once i repaired the power supply and built a wood frame, I was into the project less than $100. Any PC than will run Windows Vista or higher can be used, It doesn't need to be anything all that powerful. I run mine on a nettop with an Atom CPU and its perfectly fine.

32" is smaller than a standard movie poster would be, only about 16" in width. I think it looks great on my wall. However, if you want to display a poster at about 27" x 40" your going to need around a 55" screen.

To get widescreen (16:9) TV dimensions:

Width = Diagonal x 0.87157554
Height = Diagonal x 0.49026124

remember, posters aren't going to fill the entire screen due to aspect ratio differences, so if you want the actual poster portion of the display to be 'full sized' you just need to be concerned with the width, but we're turning them sideways... so just multiply your screen size by about .49 and thats the poster width you'll get.: 55" * 0.49 = 26.95" a 42" would give you: 20.58" width, but personally, i think thats big enough.