[plugin] Movie Showtimes (August 4 Update)

[Doc Holiday]

First off this is one of the coolest plug-in's I have ever seen. Thank you so much for making it. The best part is the movie trailer option.

I have one question about the trailer playback. What is it using to play back the trailers? The reason I as is that my trailer play back is rough. It looks like it skiping every other frame of video. The rest of my media PC is working fine though. All my BeyondTV files playback along with others that I have on hand.

Any Suggestions on how to fix this or is it just something I am going to have to live with. Which I can do because the audio remains insync and only skips every once in a while.

Also it's not critical to the plug-in. It just adds a very nice wow factor.

[nanook105]

Installation Instructions: Install Quicktime Alternative from your favorite place (such as: http://www.free-codecs.com/download...Alternative.htm) Double click MovieShowtimes.bmplugin

[Doc Holiday]

Originally Posted by nanook105

Installation Instructions: Install Quicktime Alternative from your favorite place (such as: http://www.free-codecs.com/download...Alternative.htm) Double click MovieShowtimes.bmplugin

Was this reply torwards me? If it was I have already done that.

[nanook105]

Originally Posted by Doc Holiday

Was this reply torwards me? If it was I have already done that.

Yes - I was under the impression that he was using that for the trialer playback

[Kilrsat]

The trailers use the DirectShow filters that are part of Quicktime Alternative to play a quicktime file in a directshow player. The filters basically create a bridge between Apple's QuickTime codecs and the Microsoft way of DirectShow. Unfortunately these aren't always perfect.

A little round up of what's going on:

Already Fixed:
-Trailers deleted when they shouldn't be
-Purge showtime information for previous days
-Occasional parse error getting showtimes from yahoo
-Center single line showtime lists when viewing by theater
-Movies with ~20 showtimes not listing all of them when viewing theater details

Already Investigated:
-Trailer skipping - Seems to be a result of the DirectShow filter for the particular audio codec used. Short of creating a media player that doesn't use DirectShow for playback this might be as good as it gets.

Investigating:
-movies.xml not being an accurated representation of what's in memory

To Do:
-Add option to change number of theaters loaded
-Add option to select/deselect theaters
-Add option to adjust # of days it looks ahead
-Add Denmark showtimes
-Add Canda switch (basically renames Zip Code to Postal Code)
-Add trailer management (Manual Delete Trailer && Manual Delete Trailer + prevent redownload)
-Improve trailer download accuracy (Works 29/30 right now, I want 30/30)
-A surprise or two

The next week is a very busy time for me, so I don't know how much of this I'll get done. Everything might not be addressed until after the holidays, but I'll see what I can do.

[Doc Holiday]

Cool, thanks for the reply. I figured that's how you were playing the trailers. That's how I would have done it. Thanks for all your work.

[Baylo]

Just want to add my thanks. This is a very cool plugin.

Only criticism I have right now (and it's a small one) is that when displaying the showtimes for a given theater the font used doesn't line up properly within the background blue bar.

Mark

[Kilrsat]

Originally Posted by Baylo

Just want to add my thanks. This is a very cool plugin.

Only criticism I have right now (and it's a small one) is that when displaying the showtimes for a given theater the font used doesn't line up properly within the background blue bar.

Mark

Its always assuming a 2-line tag, so anything that doesn't require 2-lines will look a little funny.

I'll add centering 1-line items to the list.

[jonhargett]

During installation of this plugin, I get an error message that says "Unable to find an entry point named SHCreateDirectory in DLL shell32.dll". Any ideas?

OS: Windows 2000 SP 3
shell32.dll version: 5.0.3900.6922

[stephenm]

My guess is that your version of Internet Explorer is out of date. Maybe a reinstall to the latest will fix this.

I'm not the developer of this plugin, however I am A developer.

[geoffstewart]

I get that on all plugins with win2k... I have the latest version of IE... I end up unzipping the plugin and installing it manually and that works.

Geoff

[jonhargett]

I was able to install it manually, thanks!

[Rich A]

How did you do this manually?

Originally Posted by geoffstewart

I just installed this plugin. I had to do it manually since I got the same runtime excpetion as mentioned earlier in this thread. It was complaining about not having a method defined in shell32.dll. Could this be a XP vs. win2k thing? I have win2k. Anyways, once installed, it works great!

And I live in Ottawa, ON, Canada. I just put in my postal code and it worked great... take a look at yahoo.com to see you can get listings for your area first. If so, then you might just get them in the plugin too.

Cheers.

Geoff

[geoffstewart]

1) I stopped BM.
2) I renamed the plugin to pluginname.zip so winrar (or winzip... whatever) knows it's a zip archive
3) I unzipped pluginname.zip to a temp directory.
4) I moved the contents of the temp directory to:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\SnapStream\Beyond Media\Plugins\MovieShowtimes
I'm on Win2K... I assume it's the same for XP, but have no idea.
5) I restarted BM.

voila!

Hope this helps.

Geoff

[mickwall]

Are you guys using the retail version of BM. I had this error with the last RC but works fine with the release version.

Cheers

Mick