A Mac and Windows Movie Wallpaper GUI Generator for Media Players - Page 4

I just downloaded the .zip and have version 0.52 running under OS 10.5.1 on a MacBook and a MacBook Pro. So, the archive seems to be okay.

A MacBook Pro is about the last thing I'd expect to have trouble running it.

Time to ask the usual suspects....

1. Try making a new user account seeing if it runs under a generic account.

2. Temporarily disconnect external drives and volumes and see if that makes a difference.

3. Firewall? I doubt this is the problem since it is fine even even with the firewall set to only essential.

4. Failing the above fixing things, the next thing I'd do is let Onyx do its "automation" routines (also with maintenance scripts and clearing all caches)

Beyond that, I'm perplexed.

Oh.... Might be worth first downloading a fresh copy of the .zip and trying with a new copy.

Sorry to hear that. Try version 0.56. I've redone how some things are handled internally so the program should be more reliable.

Also added mechanism for dealing with bad preference files. If the program just won't launch correctly, hold down the option key as the program starts. You'll hear a beep and the program will load known good, default settings. (That's the Alt key for PC people). This lets you get around a bad or old preferences file without needing to search it out manually.

Note: Under OSX, I have noticed that some movies are very difficult for the program to automatically grab text and cover art. The program can hang or crash. Ironically, there doesn't seem to be that issue on the PC side.

Version 0.58 has important bug fix for Amazon Assisted mode. Prior versions could take interminable time or crash when certain specific movies were requested. Usual time to obtain synopsis text & cover art and then render is about fifteen seconds.

Good catch. It wasn't happening under OSX. It appears to be due to a difference in event firing order between the two platforms.

Version 0.59 should fix the crash under Windows when a manual paste is performed. Up on the server now.

Glad it fixed the program for you.

Version 0.60 now provides much smoother upper and lower edges for cover art as it is rotated. Antialiased the jaggies away.

(Comcast servers are intermittently down. So there may be some temporary trouble with the download links)

What ARE you doing with the runtime anyway? I decided to go with a wallpaper GUI because the library got large enough that I couldn't reliably recall the films by title. The addition of cover art and synopsis is for jogging my memory. Beyond that, my DVD cataloging software on the Mac does a far better job at keeping stats and info than the TViX ever will.

Create a 720 x 480 size JPEG file and name it background.jpg. Place your background.jpg in the same directory as my application. The next time you start the program, your background.jpg will be used instead of the built-in background. (This is in the about.pdf instructions)

No. There isn't any need for my program to be on the TViX. It's just a program which runs on your computer and generates files for use with the TViX. If I seemed to indicate that it needed to be in the TViX itself, then that was a misunderstanding.

I think that positioning is possible with some work. The trick is in adding that field without breaking the rest of my program. Possibly could do it by having an option to automatically take the last line of text in the synopsis and render it at the bottom. That would save me from building a new mechanism for storing another text field.

Version 0.61 adds an option under "Amazon Assisted" (On the advanced pane) to enable automated parsing of run time. Run time is appended at the end of the obtained synopsis.

It was a much simpler thing to add once you reemphasized that you really didn't care where the run time was displayed

At this point, I'm just about done with pushing the program further forward. Remember, its availability is a side effect of my needing a program for myself. Features that aren't directly useful to myself aren't likely to be added. It is a nice piece of kit, but not written in a style useful for export to other development environments.

However......

There does seem to be some utility in adding html files to the file structure so the entire collection can be reviewed on my local network's browsers. Is there documentation of the HTML file structure which the Popcorn expects? Does it have a call sequence to initiate media playback from an HTML file?