Media Companion - Manage Icons, Posters, FanArt, .NFO's & more for Movies & TV Shows

[billyad2000]

Time for a new program from me, I've been working on it for a while now and am happy with the functionality included in this initial release.

The idea was to create a standalone windows program capable of cataloging and browsing movies, with the addition of built in scraper functionality. Hopefully faster than the XBMC scraper

The Program Title is: "Media Companion" (formerly "XBMC Media Companion")

It allows you to select the icon for the thumbnail posters/covers as well as the FanArt image. Movie and TV Show metadata can be modified and edited from the user interface. It also uses API's from a lot of the same sites as XBMC, including the community driven and wiki basedthemoviedb.org (a.k.a. TMDb) and TheTVDB.com (which yourselves can contribute to directly), with images from mediaicons.org and impawards.com as well as meta data from IMDb.com

And now for a look at the interface.



This is the main page, when you first run the program most of this screen will be blank - use the "Add Folder" Button to add a folder containing movies, any folders you add will be saved to a config file located in the program root folder. The program will then scan the added folder (and subfolders) for nfo files. If your movies already have nfo files then these movies will be listed to browse. Likewise the the tbn files you have will be displayed. If you have no nfo files then the list will remain blank. You will have to scan your movies first.

To add your unscanned movies you will need to press the Scan Folders for new movies button - this is the 4th button across the top - the one with a + on it. Doin this will start automatically scraping each movie from IMDB and creating nfo and tbn files which it will place with the movie file.


With this option the First choice in an IMDB search is the one scraped. These IMDB searches appear to be pretty accurate, but mistakes are made and the wrong movie is scraped. in these cases there is quite an easy way to fix it. The 2nd button across brings up the Editor.


As you can see there is a button labeled "Search for a different title" select this to bring up the manual search window shown below:-

The above shows a simple browser with the page set to an IMDB search for the movie title - it's just a case of navigating to the correct movie and pressing the "Go" button, simple as that.

The editor window also offers additional options, as its title suggests if you make changes to the info in this mode and save it this will replace your current nfo file with a new one. Like wise the Cover thumbnail can be altered by inputting a url for the jpeg.
The Re-Scrape can be used to scrape the same movie from IMDB. This option also gets the first page of thumbnails from IMDB - this is usually 8 thumbs - any one can be selected - or can be added to by entering a jpeg url. - The chosen thumb will be saved along with the nfo.


The Scraper Speed is definately much faster than XBMC and seems to be limited by IMDB, during testing I was timing the scraper and it seemed to vary greatly between 2 and 10 movies per minute. The average seemed to be about 4.

It is my belief that this could go much further - I am currently thinking about where to go next, but the following is my shortlist of things to do.

1, Fix any bugs
2, Add support for TV shows
3, Add Standalone SQL DB support



This program outputs nfo files to a specific format, and only has the following entries.

<movie>
<title></title>
<rating></rating>
<year></year>
<top250></top250>
<votes></votes>
<outline></outline>
<plot></tagline>
<runtime></runtime>
<thumb></thumb>
<mpaa></mpaa>
<watched></watched>
<id></id>
<genre></genre>
<credits></credits>
<director></director>
<premiered></premiered>
<studio></studio>
<actor>
<name></name>
<role></role>
<thumb></thumb>
</actor>
</movie>

As many actors as is displayed on the IMDB movie page will be saved- usually 15

Download it here
p.s - this program was written with Visual Basic 2008, so make sure you have the latest .net framework installed

p.p.s. And let me know what you think, feedback is appreciated.

[Gamester17]

Very cool!, it reminds me of MeD's Movie Manager, ...come to think of it, why not use that as a base and expand on it?, it is because iits code is in Java?

http://xmm.sourceforge.net
http://xmm.sourceforge.net/index.php?menu=screenshots

Both this and MeD's Movie Manager kind of also reminds me of TwonkyMedia without the UPnP MediaServer.

[nate12o6]

Would it be possible to connect this up to your xbox by using sql connection to sql light?

[Rand Al Thor]

Wow! This is great. Just the thing I was looking for. I can manage all of my movies and even add custom genres all from the desktop. One thing I would suggest is better handling of thumbs. Perhaps show the alternate thumbs as well(ie impaawards) and let the user choose between them. Perhaps a croping tool for thumbs with white space as well. These are just suggestions. This thing is great!

[Bram77]

I'm getting the following error with every movie I select...

See the end of this message for details on invoking 
just-in-time (JIT) debugging instead of this dialog box.

************** Exception Text **************
System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
   at XBMC_Media_Companion.Form1.loadinfofile()
   at XBMC_Media_Companion.Form1.ComboBox1_TextChanged(Object sender, EventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnTextChanged(EventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox.OnTextChanged(EventArgs e)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.set_Text(String value)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox.set_Text(String value)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox.UpdateText()
   at System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox.WmReflectCommand(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
   at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)


************** Loaded Assemblies **************
mscorlib
    Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0
    Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.1433 (REDBITS.050727-1400)
    CodeBase: file:///C:/WINDOWS/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v2.0.50727/mscorlib.dll
----------------------------------------
XBMC Media Companion
    Assembly Version: 1.0.0.0
    Win32 Version: 1.0.0.0
    CodeBase: file:///E:/Bestanden/XBMC/XBMC%20Media%20Companion%201.0/XBMC%20Media%20Companion%201.0.exe
----------------------------------------
Microsoft.VisualBasic
    Assembly Version: 8.0.0.0
    Win32 Version: 8.0.50727.1433 (REDBITS.050727-1400)
    CodeBase: file:///C:/WINDOWS/assembly/GAC_MSIL/Microsoft.VisualBasic/8.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a/Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll
----------------------------------------
System
    Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0
    Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.1433 (REDBITS.050727-1400)
    CodeBase: file:///C:/WINDOWS/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System/2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089/System.dll
----------------------------------------
System.Windows.Forms
    Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0
    Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.1433 (REDBITS.050727-1400)
    CodeBase: file:///C:/WINDOWS/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Windows.Forms/2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089/System.Windows.Forms.dll
----------------------------------------
System.Drawing
    Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0
    Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.1433 (REDBITS.050727-1400)
    CodeBase: file:///C:/WINDOWS/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Drawing/2.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a/System.Drawing.dll
----------------------------------------
System.Runtime.Remoting
    Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0
    Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.1433 (REDBITS.050727-1400)
    CodeBase: file:///C:/WINDOWS/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Runtime.Remoting/2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089/System.Runtime.Remoting.dll
----------------------------------------
System.Xml
    Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0
    Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.1433 (REDBITS.050727-1400)
    CodeBase: file:///C:/WINDOWS/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Xml/2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089/System.Xml.dll
----------------------------------------
System.Configuration
    Assembly Version: 2.0.0.0
    Win32 Version: 2.0.50727.1433 (REDBITS.050727-1400)
    CodeBase: file:///C:/WINDOWS/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Configuration/2.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a/System.Configuration.dll
----------------------------------------

************** JIT Debugging **************
To enable just-in-time (JIT) debugging, the .config file for this
application or computer (machine.config) must have the
jitDebugging value set in the system.windows.forms section.
The application must also be compiled with debugging
enabled.

For example:

<configuration>
    <system.windows.forms jitDebugging="true" />
</configuration>

When JIT debugging is enabled, any unhandled exception
will be sent to the JIT debugger registered on the computer
rather than be handled by this dialog box.

I've got the latest .NET installed (Windows XP SP3). The movie files are on a mapped network drive.
Does this program add the scraped info to the XBMC movie database somehow? Or does XBMC read the tbn file before it starts looking for the info in IMDB?

[Aenima99x]

Great work! I've been waiting for something like this. Thanks for your time putting it together!

[flipped cracker]

i get the same error.

[flipped cracker]

i find that the error happens with the movies that already had an existing nfo file.

i have a few other issues that i'll post about after playing around with it more.

[flamez]

.. Great Program! it does crash on certain movies like the sample provided above.
Keep up the good work!!!

[Aenima99x]

Getting the same error as well