Please add here any features that you would like to see in More TV for Vista - I can't promise to include everything, but will certainly have a go at the most popular features.

For those who don't know, More TV is an add-on for MCE2005 that allows you to have additional "views" of recorded TV shows, videos, etc. on your Media Center or local network, outside of the "Recorded TV" view.  You can create collections (e.g. Movies, TV Shows, Kids Stuff, etc.) and move/copy shows that you have recorded into those collections, and out of the Recorded TV view.  You can also edit the metadata for the shows.   The application also handles WMV files, and other formats such as AVI, DivX, MPG, etc. with the addition of XML files to contain the metadata that DVR-MS and WMV files hold within the actual file.

Cheers,
Andrew

Hey Andy.. great to see this thread. I have two ideas.. one is not necessarily a direct feature request for More TV:

1) An external app that can scan the files in a directory and based on file name create the necessary XML files with info from a source like TV.com... I was actually thinking of writing this, with your permission.

 

2) For those who want to use their Xbox 360 with Divx files cataloged in More TV, there is an API for the Media Center Plug-in called Transcode 360. The Media Center Team at Microsoft was actually involved in getting this plug-in to work in Vista. Basically it transparently sets up a session to transcode the Divx file on the fly and stream the result to the Xbox 360. It's a plug-in for Media Center but they have their API available for free for integration into other apps. Maybe this would be a nice new feature, to detect that the extender supports the file type (not sure if thats even possible) and switch to using Transcode 360 for the stream.

Since I don't have MCE2005 I haven't been able to evaluate what it can do already, so as soon as there is some kind of test available for Vista I can put it through it's paces and see what I can think up. I now have Vista RC1 up and running. Thanks a bunch AndyC

On 1) I was thinking of changing the way that More TV picks up the files when scanning the collections - at the moment it looks for DVR-MS, WMV, or XML file extensions.  For the Vista version I was thinking of making it look for any file that has a PerceivedType of "video" in the registry (i.e. search for *.* and if a file has a PerceivedType of video, then include it).  For files that are not DVR-MS or WMV, I would then look for a corresponding XML file, and get the metadata out of that. If the metadata file didn't exist I'd create a new one that contained some rudimentary information such as a show title equal to the filename, and a recorded date equal to the creation date.  At least that way the files would show up straight away without you having to create the XML files manually.

If you want to create an app that gets this info from TV.com be my guest - I'll look at the potential of providing some kind of search plug-in interface so that it can be incorporated into the app at some point, but in the meantime, make sure you write the app in such a way that the XML file spec can be changed reasonably easily!

 

2) Like the idea - I'll have a look at how transcode 360 works.  From memory it creates a ListMaker interface for the transcoding on the Media Center and then puts the transcoded files out to the extender via UPnP - is that correct?   If so, if you have any thoughts on how to integrate the interface let me know.

 

Cheers,
Andrew

File searching approach

In my first attempt at this application (Saved TV) every time you viewed a collection the metadata for the files would be read from each file. The metadata reading process has about a half second overhead per file, which makes reading a collection very time consuming.  I tried to improve on this by caching the information after the first read of a collection (so that pressing the back button didn't result in a 20 second wait while the collection was re-read), which meant adding a refresh button etc.

With More TV I moved the reading of the metadata to a Windows service, which meant that the viewing of the metadata (when you were using the UI) took less than 2 seconds regardless of the size of the collection, as the legwork had been done by the service.  To get any changes to the files in the Recorded TV folder, and the existing collections I implemented "FileSystemWatchers" to watch the folders and add new files to the collections.  This works for Recorded TV as Microsoft create the metadata in the file right at the start, and make the files available for reading even though they are being written to.  For the collections, this wasn't possible as the files didn't contain the metadata at creation time, and they were locked out against reading while being written to. In the end I gave up trying to fix this issue, and put the code for adding the metadata to the collections in the program itself, so when you move a file from Recorded TV to a collection, or from one collection to another, the metadata was moved too. 

This works well for files that originate in Recorded TV, but for files from outside of the application (e.g. your WMV or DivX collection you've just moved into the collection folder), it means that they don't appear in the collection until you restart the More TV service, or reboot your computer.

What I propose for the Vista version (unless anyone has any better ideas) is to adopt a hybrid approach - I will continue with the service to read the metadata out of the files, but I will also check the collection folder when you view it for any files that are new or have a "last modified date" that is greater than the currently held date for that file.  If either of these conditions are true, then I'll read the metadata from the file, incurring the 0.5 second time penalty, but this will mean that the collection is always up to date, with the best trade off I can think of between performance and inclusion.

Cheers,
Andrew

Icon view vs list view

At the moment, More TV has two views - list view, which is the MCE2005 "normal" view (wide buttons with the show name and recorded date), and icon view which is equivalent to the DVD library, or My Movies.

Do people want a list view in the app?  I've seen posts from people requesting list view to be reinstated in Recorded TV as they don't like the thumbnail icon view.

For the icon view, I'm thinking that I will use a graphic with the same name if one exists (so if you have a file called House_2006_10_10.dvr-ms then putting a file called House_2006_10_10.jpg in the same folder would cause that graphic to be used), or if not then extract the thumbnail from the file (if one exists).  Failing those two, a default icon for the type of file with the show name on it (like the music view with album names).

Cheers,
Andrew

I think list view still has it's merits.. the option to do either would be the best I think. For my own personal use I think my preference would be to see an Icon at the series level, and then a list at the episode level.

One interesting feature I was thinking of was some kind of indiciator as to whether you watched a particular episode or not. Let's say you have all of season 2 of House to catch up on. You watch 3 or 4 episodes and then want to come back to it later, it would be nice to know which episodes have yet to be seen. Maybe some kind of Icon or flag identifying new files that have not yet been viewed through More TV. Again I don't yet have the app installed to know if this exists already, so I'm just throwing out ideas.

I like the icon at series level, list at episode level setup - I can define that  as the default setup, but allow for changing being icon/list view in the settings page. 

Theres a flag for "watched" that already exists for dvr-ms files, and I think it's now set properly by MCE (it existed in MCE2005 but didn't seem to work), so I can flag items that have this set/clear as appropriate.  This means you should be able to view through normal Recorded TV and still have it picked up as watched by More TV.

How would you see this being flagged visually? (e.g an icon on the thumbnail or button depending on icon view/list view?)

Cheers,
Andrew

I can imagine in episode list view there being a small icon to the left of the episode title that says "New", in thumbnail view... perhaps a small icon on the bottom left corner of the thumbnail (if that's possible)

And maybe carry that one level up to the series if there are any unwatched episodes.

At the series level Vista MCE does this already - below the thumbnail line where the series title goes.  I'll follow that design for the series level thumbnail/icon view.

Cheers,
Andrew

Are three levels enough?

At the moment in More TV, I separate shows out into collections (top level), shows (second level), and seasons (third level).  So, you could have a collection called "Sitcoms", a show called "Friends" and seasons "Season 1", "Season 2", etc.

Is this enough flexibility?  I'm trying to balance flexibility with ease of use, but wanted to check if anyone had any thoughts on this.  I know that many people store their shows under My Videos currently with lots of different levels, but wondered whether this was just due to the lack of flexibility in showing the titles, or whether there was some other reason.

Cheers,
Andrew

I can't speak for everyone but 3 levels seems plenty to me. Personally I think I would make one collection for movies and one for TV and put all of my tv series in the one tv collection

Here is an idea... if it's not already there..

howabout the ability to play an entire collection as a playlist? Or some option to automatically continue to the next episode of a series when one is finished.

Yes - More TV does that already!

If you select "Play Series" at the series/season level, all the episodes will be played back-to-back via a playlist in ascending date order. 

Cheers,
Andrew

Re: Transcode 360

Their API is available and it seems like it would be fairly straightforward to integrate their functions into your app. The API allows all of the functions of the MCE add-in. So from your end it seems like you should be able to automate the process...

Keep in mind I have no experience programming for MCE.. is there some way to enumerate the capabilities of an extender? If so then you could detect if the video file that is chosen to play is not supported and use the Transcode360 api to start the transcoding session and provide the resulting stream to the extender. Otherwise if the file format is supported by the extender than nothing needs to happen except to play the file.

It does appear however that it is not free for commercial projects.. I'm not sure what their licensing is like. For a project like this they may make an exception.

http://runtime360.com/projects/transcode-360/

I've setup Beta 2 of Vista... I can't get RC1 or RC2 to install.

I have Transcode 360 installed and it seems to work great (except for the glitch which Vista has fixed in RC2)

All I need now is a plugin like yours to organize my files, and a way to autodetect if the transcoding session needs to be performed (some way to make the use of Transcode 360 transparent to the user of the extender) and I am set.