MP TV series (2)

A little over a year ago I reported about the MP TV series plugin and how it blew me away. Last week a new version was released and it's even better. It still makes extensive use of the TV series database at http://www.thetvdb.com/. Not only the series banners, screenshots and episode guides are used, but also the fanart graphics are used in the background. The user interface for configuration has been improved.

By now my TV series folders are standardized to the extent that I don't need to tweak the regular expressions for filename parsing anymore.

The first screenshot on this page shows the opening screen where you can select which series you want to watch. The second secreen shows the different season posters. The last one has the individual episodes for a particular series and season, including a screenshot and an episode guide.

Interestingly, this plugin project is hosted on Google Code, not on Sourceforge.

My weather in MediaPortal

Since a transfer to MediaPortal 1.0 requires a fresh new install, I'm revisiting a lot of settings that I haven't touched in a while. Among which the maps for My Weather. With many websites using unsupported formats for their weather maps, finding images that My Weather can display is a challenge. For instance, the .png files that are used by the dutch KNMI website and many other weather sites are not supported. But I found a number of close matches:

Satellite: http://www.sat24.com/images.php?country=nl
Temperature: http://www.teleweer.nl/common/data/nl_middag2.gif
UV Index: http://www.knmi.nl/waarschuwingen_en_verwachtingen/images/zonkracht/zonkracht_kaartje_dag0.gif
Winds: http://db.eurad.uni-koeln.de/prognose/data/aktuell/sto_cen_1h_movd0.gif
Humidity: http://icons-pe.wunderground.com/data/640x480/2xeu_rh.gif
Precipitation: http://www3.buienradar.nl/images.aspx?jaar=-3&soort=sp-loop

This also gave me an opportunity to make my first ever contribution to the MediaPortal wiki.

Shoutcast Plugin

Today I installed the shoutcast plugin. This plugin uses the shoutcast directory at http://www.shoutcast.com/ to find internet radio stations from within MediaPortal. For install it requires only unpacking in the MediaPortal directory and there are no configuration settings. The plugin is easy to use and within a couple of minutes I created a favourites list of the stations I'd like to listen to.

But that's about all the plugin has to offer. If I were frequently in search of new radio stations to listen to, I'd use the plugin more often. But once you found your station, it doesn't offer anything that My Radio doesn't do. So I'll write down the station names and add them to My Radio.

As an obvious improvement, the plugin could provide a list of the most popular stations, as shoutcast does on their homepage. An annoyance is how the selector for minimum bitrate resets itself over and over again. This is by design, as the author wrote on the forum.

My conclusion: this shoutcast directory search is great if it was integrated with the My Radio section of MediaPortal. As a stand alone plugin, I won't be using it a lot.

MP TV series

One of my favorite features in mediaportal is the tv-series support. Enjoying the tv-series you like, all you want, when you want, is absolutely great. But MediaPortal just adds a little user's joy to the excercise. The developers found out that somewhere on the internet, there's a community of tv enthusiasts collecting heaps of banners, episode guides and what not for every imaginable tv series. The community can be found at http://www.thetvdb.com/ and there is some beautiful stuff from dedicated fans out there. All of which is now neatly displayed through the MediaPortal TV Series plugin. The banners, episode guides and screenshots make picking the right episode a breeze. And MediaPortal remembers what episode you watched. It even hides episode guides of unwatched episode to prevent "spoilers".


Now, under MediaPortal 0.2.3 RC 3 there were some issues with the database and I never took the time to fix that, so I reinstalled the plugin when I had the final 0.2.3 release installed.

I downloaded the plugin v1.2.9 build 34660. It comes as a RAR and requires unzipping in the MediaPortal program folder. In the MediaPortal configuration tool an icon appears under plugins. After enabling the plugin, you can enter its configuration.

First you enter the location of the tv-series files. But then comes the tricky part. The filenames have to be parsed into the data base according to parsing rules. These rules extract properties like series and episode number from the filenames on the hard disk. This requires some level of organization in the tv series on your hard disk. The pre-programmed parsing rules work on most naming conventions, but not all on my harddisk. So, the choice was to do a lot of renaming, or edit the parsing rules.

The parsing rules come in two shapes: simple and regular expression. The simple expression proved too simple for my chaoticly named series collection. I basically had to make a rule for each series and each season and there were too many expressions to uniquely parse the filenames. So, I had to get familiar with regular expressions.

The overview and the tester on regexlib.com proved very helpful here, as well as wikipedia and this page. Eventually I found out that this parsing rule works best for me:

Apart from the parsing rule I also used string replacements, so that the characters _, [ and ] are removed from the filenames. When the parsing test shows your files are parsed correctly, it's time to hit "Start Import". The actual downloads may take a while. In the details tab you can check the data that's currently in the database. After closing the configuration and starting MediaPortal, the same data will be displayed through the My TV Series screen.

One more screenshot below to prove my point: The MP TV Series plugin looks neat!

MediaPortal 2.3.0 RC3

A couple of weeks behind schedule, I've installed release candidate 3 of MediaPortal 0.2.3.0. The changes with respect to 0.2.2.0, build 13411, that I was using before, the changes are not that apparent. But there are some!

A long time annoyance with MediaPortal was how to best browse through my music. My music collection is arranged by album. So when looking for some tunes to play, I want to first pick an artist, then one of that artist's albums. Now in that list of artists, I only want to see the artists that actually have albums in my collection, not the artists that only appear in compilations. I found that in this version you can actually build a "view" that does this. See screenshot below for how it's done. Now, next on my wishlist is to have the albums sorted by year of release...

Another change is in the TV series plugin. It's supposed to look real nice, but I'm having some issues because the database is not compatible with the previous version.

I had to re-configure the Web EPG tv guide grabber. If you use digital tv, the tvguide information comes with the signal. If you uses analogue cable tv, like myself, the tvguide has to come from the internet. This grabber pulls the tv guide information from a website, like http://www.tvgids.nl/ for dutch users. It creates a personalized xml file with tv guide data that MediaPortal uses. Since version 0.2.2.0, the grabber that comes with the standard MediaPortal package is excellent. Previously, separate grabbers had to be downloaded to give satisfactory results. Most annoyingly, the station names in the grabber had to exactly match the station names in MediaPortal.

Now, all you have to do is run the Web EPG configuration tool. With the push of a button it gets all your channel names from the MediaPortal channel configuration. Each channel can easily be assigned to a channel in the program guide that the grabber downloads. You can even use different grabbers for each channel.

Once configured, all that's needed is to set the plugin configuration. The plugin is called WebEPG Grabber and in the configuration you can set the days that you want the grabber to run, as well as the time. The Web EPG configuration that's included in the actual MP configuration remains untouched.

The problem with the web based guide, is that the information is only as good as the information on the website.

Of course, by the time I'm done installing release candidate 3, the final 2.3.0 version was released.