[plugin] Movie Showtimes (August 4 Update)

[jdbarnes63]

How do you get the trailers to play correctly without the stutter effect? I have tried the new QuickTime alternative and it does not play very well.

[Harold]

Some earlier versions of QT Alt may work better. See the posts in this thread.

When I went to the latest drop, the trailers wouldn't play at all. I had to go back to version 13.

[Kilrsat]

I think I know what's wrong, but it'll have to wait until tonight before I can look at it.

[RiderFan]

Originally Posted by Harold

Some earlier versions of QT Alt may work better. See the posts in this thread.

When I went to the latest drop, the trailers wouldn't play at all. I had to go back to version 13.

I had the exact oposite problem, my older version of QT Alt would not play about 25% of the trailers and when I updated to the newest version, they now all play.

[cfaslave]

I used QT Alternative 1.65 and it works perfect. The more recent versions stuttered too much.

[Kilrsat]

Updated.

[Kilrsat]

I've been doing most of my testing against Quicktime Alternative 1.68

[Madcoder]

How about that ability to read a generically formatted xml file? Yup, I am asking again. Any chance you might have time to implement that any time soon?

[scottlindner]

Originally Posted by Madcoder

How about that ability to read a generically formatted xml file? Yup, I am asking again. Any chance you might have time to implement that any time soon?

What do you mean by this? Internet Explorer and FireFox will both read an XML file and display it to you. I know this isn't what you're asking for, but I'm curious what capability you're looking for.

Cheers,
Scott

[Madcoder]

Originally Posted by scottlindner

What do you mean by this? Internet Explorer and FireFox will both read an XML file and display it to you. I know this isn't what you're asking for, but I'm curious what capability you're looking for.

Cheers,
Scott

Hi. I mean that there are many countries that the Movie Showtimes pluggin will not support, but yet there are various local web sites with the Showtime data. So, rather than expect that the pluggin could support all the countries out there, local people would be willing to write their own grabbers that just format the data (or in the case of the actual trailer, the URL where to download it from) into an xml file or something. This way we don't have to write a whole pluggin to get support for our country, but can just implement the grabber part. I mentioned it once before and he said that he had thought of that but just had not had time to implement it or something like that. So I was asking again now that some time passed.

[scottlindner]

Originally Posted by Madcoder

Hi. I mean that there are many countries that the Movie Showtimes pluggin will not support, but yet there are various local web sites with the Showtime data. So, rather than expect that the pluggin could support all the countries out there, local people would be willing to write their own grabbers that just format the data (or in the case of the actual trailer, the URL where to download it from) into an xml file or something. This way we don't have to write a whole pluggin to get support for our country, but can just implement the grabber part. I mentioned it once before and he said that he had thought of that but just had not had time to implement it or something like that. So I was asking again now that some time passed.

Sounds like you'd need to write some XSLT to do the intermediate transformation from the locale to the BM Showtimes XML format. That's probably the best way to do it. The only trouble is, someone will need to write the XSLT for each locale. This isn't necessarily a simple request to make the plugin itself universally capable. But to use an adaptation approach where the plugin will redirect to a collection of XSLT, that could work nicely.

Do you know XSLT?

Cheers,
Scott

[Ineffigy]

I noticed in the debug logs I am getting this error

[3792] Input string was not in a correct format.
[3792] at System.Number.ParseInt32(String s, NumberStyles style, NumberFormatInfo info)
[3792] at SnapStream.MovieShowtimes.GenericYahooParser.Downl oadDay(DateTime dtNow, Hashtable& movies, Hashtable& theaters)


Thought it might give a clue to a bug in the app. I wish I had more details, I don't really see a problem, but there appears to be one.

[Madcoder]

Originally Posted by scottlindner

Sounds like you'd need to write some XSLT to do the intermediate transformation from the locale to the BM Showtimes XML format. That's probably the best way to do it. The only trouble is, someone will need to write the XSLT for each locale. This isn't necessarily a simple request to make the plugin itself universally capable. But to use an adaptation approach where the plugin will redirect to a collection of XSLT, that could work nicely.

Do you know XSLT?

Cheers,
Scott

It's not my idea of a fun time, but yes I could do it. I was suggesting that I do a screen scrape (I don't have any xml file access where I am but rather some web pages with show information), and format the xml appropriately. I could mimic the format used by one of the existing supported sources for show data, and then use a hosts entry to trick the media box to actually poll my own source of data rather than the one specified in the plugin (unless that address is hackable in a file somewhere, but I haven't looked around for it to know yet). I was just hoping for some support directly for external sources.

[scottlindner]

Originally Posted by Madcoder

It's not my idea of a fun time, but yes I could do it. I was suggesting that I do a screen scrape (I don't have any xml file access where I am but rather some web pages with show information), and format the xml appropriately. I could mimic the format used by one of the existing supported sources for show data, and then use a hosts entry to trick the media box to actually poll my own source of data rather than the one specified in the plugin (unless that address is hackable in a file somewhere, but I haven't looked around for it to know yet). I was just hoping for some support directly for external sources.

It isn't possible to write a generic format parser that does not require you to get deeply involved in the process of screen scraping, or data reformatting for each host for show information. You're going to need to do this, one way or another. OR.. the plugin will need to be hard coded and updated for each and every host of movie information and every time that source is updated. This is exactly what XSLT was made for, and it can be used to transform an HTML document just as well as an XML document. You won't need to screen scrape if it's a web page.

Maybe this is what you're suggesting and I'm missing it. Are you looking for this plugin to define an XML Schema for showtime information with an endpoint of sorts to allow for anyone else to write their own adaptor to fetch the information? If this is the case, it seems like it should be easy to support. Maybe it should be added as an XSLT call.. which will in turn be the trigger to fetch the updated information.

Hmm... I'm just starting to brush up on my XSLT.. I'm doing more examples to get better at it. Maybe this should be one of my examples to force me to learn a bit more....

[Madcoder]

Originally Posted by scottlindner

It isn't possible to write a generic format parser that does not require you to get deeply involved in the process of screen scraping, or data reformatting for each host for show information. You're going to need to do this, one way or another. OR.. the plugin will need to be hard coded and updated for each and every host of movie information and every time that source is updated. This is exactly what XSLT was made for, and it can be used to transform an HTML document just as well as an XML document. You won't need to screen scrape if it's a web page.

Exactly, one way or another it has to be done. In my example, the original web pages are not necessarily formatted nicely, and I want to aggregate a few different local theater companies data. The idea is that the plugin would NOT be hard coded for each example. I am already heavily involved with screen scraping in situations and with my case it seems like the way I would probably do it unless I find a single clean local source to transform.

Originally Posted by scottlindner

Maybe this is what you're suggesting and I'm missing it. Are you looking for this plugin to define an XML Schema for showtime information with an endpoint of sorts to allow for anyone else to write their own adaptor to fetch the information? If this is the case, it seems like it should be easy to support. Maybe it should be added as an XSLT call.. which will in turn be the trigger to fetch the updated information.

Bingo. Everyone could make their own "adapter" if they are able. Also, perhaps it could be made easier for when the existing supported sites make changes. The plugin would not need to be updated for that, just the adapter for that country.

Originally Posted by scottlindner

Hmm... I'm just starting to brush up on my XSLT.. I'm doing more examples to get better at it. Maybe this should be one of my examples to force me to learn a bit more....

Sounds like an offer.