---edit 7/2 2008---
New Trial versions available for download here. There hasn't been a public announcement made yet, but the files are there. Version 1.0.08038c is the current build.

Will post full details with new screenshots and an overview of the application in a day or so.
---end edit---

---edit 10/13 2007---
Trial versions available for download over here.
---end edit---

---edit 10/9 2007---
A public pre-release is now available, more information can be found at around page 25 of this thread or over at http://mytv.senseitweb.com/. A trial version should also be available shortly.
---end edit---

---edit 9/24 2007---
No more beta spots available at this time. If you haven't received a callback by now (few minutes ago) you missed out I'm afraid.

Features are being added, GUI is being reworked, bugs are being exterminated, things are moving along just fine at the moment, so the guestimated timeframe for public release is within a week or two.

I'll update this post again when that happens. Until that time, keep looking through the posts in this thread, and have a gander over at http://mytv.senseitweb.com/ for a couple screenshots - will update them within the next couple days also.
---end edit---

Ok, so I'm nearly done with the myTV addin for Vista Media Center. Just tidying up a few bits and pieces now and I should have a working beta available for download. Developed in MCML so it should be fully XBox360 compatible (although I have not included any streamers at this stage, so XBox360 compatible files only - this is not to say other files are not indexed though, every filetype seen by VMC as valid video is indexed, just not playable on the 360 - yet).

Figured I'd ask what you guys are looking for in a application like this first though. Personally I think I've covered all the bases, but there is always some sort of functionability I've missed completely or deemed unneccesary for some reason or other.

Here is what it currently does.

1. On first startup it'll ask you for your TV folder(s). Once this is done it'll scan the specified folder(s) and connect to an online database downloading metadata for the shows found. This metadata includes (but is not limited to) Showname, Actors, Writer, Director, Show graphic, Network originally aired on, First time it was aired, Genres and whatnot. It then stores this in a local SQLexpress database readily available for use the next time you use the application.
2. It will then take you to the main Show menu. Showing you a list of the currently available shows including a short description of it.
3. Once you select a show it'll take you to a Episode screen, showing you all the available episodes with original airing dates, actors and overviews (Again, this is all downloaded to your local database the first time you select that show - and checked for updates every time after that). Selecting one of these will play the episode as well as update the lastViewed column in the database so you can easily keep track of which episodes you have or haven't already watched.
4. Separate screens are available to search for a specific show or episode by Title, Actor, Writer, Director, Network or Overview.
5. A button on the main menu which allows you to directly play the next unwatched episode (if any).

Ok, the download is gonna be slightly heavier than the other available addins for VMC at the moment as it includes the Microsoft SQLexpress server. I chose to use this is it leaves you filesystem clear of all the various .xml and .jpg files current TV archive addins use though. IMHO this makes for a cleaner filestructure and a better exit strategy should you decide the plugin is not for you.

Now, as for the functionability. Currently when you select a show from the main menu it takes you directly to displaying all available episodes for that show. Obviously with shows such as Law and Order or The Amazing Race this is a LOT of episodes in one place. Would it be a useful addition to take you to an intermediate screen showing the available Seasons of this show before showing the episodes? I currently chose not to as this is yet another screen to get past before actually enjoying the show, but I'm sorta undecided myself. Input please.

So this tracks what you have and haven't watched. This works well if you're a very lonely person or you all watch the same shows at the same time. If there are several people using the same VMC box in your household obviously it won't work as well, as you may very well have watched all episodes of Weeds, but your wife for some reason has not. Would it be a nuicense to add another layer here, allowing you to select a user before seeing the main menu? Again, this is not currently included for the same reasons as above.

Partially implemented functions are; filtering the main menu based on Genre and the ability to navigate the main menu by tripletap'ing.

Have I missed that specific function you are looking for? If so lemme know and I'll see if I can add it.

If you're interested in becoming a beta tester, PM me here on the forums and I'll get back to you with a download link and further information once available.

Finally a heads up, this plugin is not going to be freeware at the end of the day (it's taken quite some time to develop and it will take time to keep the database up2date), but the price charged will be affordable to everyone. Also, all betatesters will obviously receive free "lifetime" registration/activation.

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Probably depends on what your actual interface looks like before someone could suggest whether they would prefer to be given a choice of season / every available episode. Without seeing your interface, i'd say the option to pick a season first would be great. With either season banner's or the actual dvd cover picture for that season. Anyways, I sent you a pm and would love to beta test. Good luck with your plugin and please don't give up on it like so many other vista mce plugins that have just disappeared! :)

When drilling down to a specific episode for a show, does the program allow for the displaying of a short description of the episode?  This might be something you would want to add, as it allows users to quickly browse through shows to find the one they're looking for (especially shows without descriptive names for their episodes), without having to partially watch a bunch of episodes just to see if they've got the right one.  I'm not sure where you're pulling your data from currently, but many of the info services provide this as part of their data package.  Thanks!

Although not something I'm sure you will think has priority for an early beta release, I would desperately love a random button.  Example: once choosing a show, I could select a button that would pick an episode at random from any season of that show.

Another feature that might be something to add would be the ability to play the entire season of a show, either starting from the beginning or from a designated episode on to the end of the season.  So for example, if you had already seen the first episode, you could choose to play the second one, then have it automatically play every one after that, in order.  It could possibly be a box to check on the screen where you are viewing the episodes in that season.  Just a thought.  Thanks!

PM for beta testing sent.  I figured I'd also post my points here for discussion:

- Separating shows by season - I think this is a good idea, ideally we could turn this off and on depending on possibly the user (see next point) or even better by show (i.e. I'd like to separate Law & Order or Amazing Race by season, but not the Simpsons reruns.  The new Simpsons are important, but it's probably the only show we watch live on Sunday nights for the new episodes every week, and the remainder of the viewings are just whatever's most recently recorded, therefore no separation by season required).  I personally don't mind an extra button click but the rest of the family, maybe...?

- Separating viewed show tracking by user - Yes yes yes yes!!!  This is something we've dreamed of for a long time, between my wife and I and our 5 kids, many of us have shows that 'cross over' between users, and with all of our different schedules it's hard to keep track of whether both I and the 16-year old girl have watched the latest Desperate Housewives, and whether my wife and I have watched the latest Jericho, and whether the 5 and 8 year old boys have both watched the latest Sonic X.  Ideally I'd love to be able to set certain shows as 'watched' by certain users, have the system track whether all of the appropriate people have watched a specific episode, and then be able to delete it (no more asking around if everyone's watched the last Family Guy or not).  Even without the extra functionality, just what you've described in being able to track where everyone is would be a blessing.

The random button that bledsoe suggested - I like that!  Not so much for me, but the little kids have 7 or 8 shows with episodes recorded every day, an easy way to pick one of the (unwatched?) Blues Clues or Dora the Explorer would be pretty cool.

g.

 

Finally a way to archive! This sounds great.

The user selectable "view by season" would be a great feature. For examply my wife loves Friends but hates the first season and this would allow her to avoid those shows.

I'm also for the viewed by user tracking. I'm not sure how to accomplish this but you would likely need to add x number of users to the database. Then have the ability to check a box indicating when each user has viewed the episode. If this is too cumbersome I can see it going unused in my home.

PM sent for beta

Second the "view by season" option.

Also, it'll index any type of media (as long as playable by the 360) right? I have two ReplayTV's that I can pull the shows off-would love to be able to add those to the mix.

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Antec FusionV2 (Black)
Asus N4L-VM DH board (T7500 Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, Vista Ultimate)
ATI HD 2650
HDHomeRun
Sony XL1B2
Samsung LN32A330 32" LCD

Hi, i'm a first time poster as i'm getting ready to put together my first VMC. I'd love to beta test, and will send you a PM

A season screen is mandatory in my opinion.

So the path would be to pick a series, a season, and then list the episodes.

thetvdb.com has a reallllllly great API for getting this information as welll as thumbnails for series, seasons, and episodes.

The other thing that makes tv sections handy is having a view that lists the last aired shows. Since you can pull that date from thetvdb.com, you would then be able to present the user with a list of shows ordered by air date.

This is great because if you have 2+ people in the household, you don't have to worry about listing by "not watched". Just a simple list of the last few shows is very usable.

Then they user can pop over to a view by Show, and browse seasons etc for their archives.

Do you have a date in mind for beta release or are you still working out features and such?  I'm not trying to rush anything, just excited that someone has finally taken on the challenge of a TV browser in MC using a very elegant SQL approach.  Also, I PM'd for a beta test spot.  Thanks!

Ok, sorry for the lack of updates on this. Been busy coding to get a releasable beta out. Have a few more issues to iron out before I get that far though. But I'll try to post some screenshots later in the day.

Everyone who has applied to be a tester will receive a PM/email as soon as I've got something usable.

Just to clarify; whilst this plugin is developed to manage archived TV shows/episodes it does not currently work out of the box with your recorded shows. Personally I have a library of around 2TB of downloaded/recorded shows (stored on a central server) which I wanted to manage more efficiently than using the built in Pictures/Videos interface. However, I have automated support for recorded dvr-ms files on my todo list.

moontan: Don't worry. I've got no plans on abandoning this project. This is a plugin I've been after ever since the beta days of XPMCE, and although I have seen various plugins since then I have found nothing that has ticked all the boxes for me. I want it to be fast (ie. no waiting for half a minute to display one season of a show), intuitive, extendable (ie. usable on more than one box at a time without taking a hit on performance) and last but not least automatic. I don't want to spend hours renaming or moving files, I want them to be picked up and indexed without having to move my ass of the couch . Most of this I think is working now, it does require a somewhat of a folder and filename structure, but it tries to get the pertinant information using several regex's so as to not have you rename and do the footwork beforehand. More info on this in the releasenotes (if I get around to writing any
I was actually really looking forward to BigScreen TV, but since nothing materialized of that project I had to sit down and write my own.

lchuck: Yes it does. On the episode selection screen it has a two-row scroller with information about the currently selected episode below. It currently shows Episode name, Season & Episode number, Episode overview and guest actors. I'm trying to come up with a good way of showing more info on each episode without having yet another screen to go through and without losing more precious screen realestate, so the Episode interface is still under evaluation. Once the beta is out I'll be looking very much for feedback on UI and layout (as well as obviously actual bugs). Oh, and I added your 'play season' request to my todo list also.

bledsoe: Great idea. I'll add this to my todo list. Might even make it into first release as it's not gonna take that much time to put in.

groovejumper: Thanks for the input. However, I should probable have been clearer in my original post. The plugin does not currently grab data from recorded files, so separating reruns and whatnot is not going to be in the first release. I do plan on adding this at a later stage, but to start this will be a plugin to archive already locally stored (downloaded?) shows/episodes. Of course you can still use this to browse your archive, but it does currently require a bit of work from your side in moving files around.
Usertracking is something I'm still working on, so it will not be in the initial release, but it will be implemented sooner rather than later. I'm just trying to get my head around how to do this in a intuitive user-friendly way without having even more buttons to click/check.

MrTybalt: You'll be happy to know there is now a user selectable setting to use or not use a season chooser. It is currently either on or off, so not definable by Show, but this is something I may add in the future.

BrandonL: It will index any file percieved as MediaCenter as a videofile. It doesn't care if it is playable by the Xbox or not - for a future release I will implement some sort of transcoding for xvid|mkv|your-favorite-filetype-here files.

seven5: I am currently getting the data from thetvdb.com, however due to availability and legal reasons I may change this to a 'proprietary' database once released. I will have to speak to zsori and see what we can work out first. Sorting is available as a user defined setting, so if you want you can view them alphabetically, by air date or even by actors . Not sure I follow you on the "last aired" shows thing. Are you meaning to have a separate screen showing a list of say the 10 last episodes added overall? If so this is a great idea, but will not be available in the initial release due to the way the episodes are currently scraped. The plan is to implement a background service at some point which will make sure all data is up to date, once this is done a feature as you suggested would be possible.

Right. I think that about covers it for now. I'll try to get some screens posted later and a initial beta should follow "shortly".

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ahelseth:

groovejumper: Thanks for the input. However, I should probable have been clearer in my original post. The plugin does not currently grab data from recorded files, so separating reruns and whatnot is not going to be in the first release. I do plan on adding this at a later stage, but to start this will be a plugin to archive already locally stored (downloaded?) shows/episodes. Of course you can still use this to browse your archive, but it does currently require a bit of work from your side in moving files around.
Usertracking is something I'm still working on, so it will not be in the initial release, but it will be implemented sooner rather than later. I'm just trying to get my head around how to do this in a intuitive user-friendly way without having even more buttons to click/check.

Not sure if this came across in my last post, but I'm pretty excited about this.  The other similarly themed addons haven't really hit the mark as far as what my family and I would find beneficial, but this one really seems to be going in the right direction.

As for dealing with currently archived shows, and doing some extra work at the beginning, I'm ok with that.

When it comes time to start working with user tracking, I'd be happy to help, I have lots of ideas in that area (and my 12 and 16 year olds do too...)

g.

Sounds like a great plugin. PM sent for beta testing.

ahelseth: Awesome. I'm very excited. I've been playing with More Tv but its support is pretty bad. It hasn't had a release in quite a while. But its pretty decent. Yes, i meant a view that showed the last 10 or so shows. It wouldn't be too hard, if you just sorted by air date. What i've really always wanted though in a plugin like this is the abilty to do "smart views" where i can set rules based off metadata, thats what meta is for right! Then we could have our own views. That'd be way nice. Maybe its my ignorance, i'm not much of a microsoftie, but how come none of these plugins are open source? it seems like it would lessen the load off of only one maintainer. In the MediaPortal world, all the plugins are open source and maintainers get patches from other users when they have extended the work in their own way. It seems like there's a lot of badgering of plugin maintainers on these boards, mainly because its just one person developing the plugin, without giving users the ability to make the changes themselves. I think because of this, these plugins seem to die. And even if they die, why have the projects die too?