Spider, IMDB

[lar282]

Hi
I have prob getting spiders to work good.

if I go to imdb and search for "An American Haunting" I get this
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0429573/

If I search in a skin for the same in Xlobby I get no hit on the name?

If I search within the GUI(F2 datasbe...) I get lots of names but nothing on the name

Is anybody good with the spiders to wrewrite the dvd - imdb.com.txt

I tried with only this txt file in \spiders\ and yes I have downloaded the latest one here
http://www.xlobby.com/spiders.zip

Also, coverart from imdb seems broken as well.Try "star wars" and see if u get any covers?

regards
Lasse

[lar282]

dgemily or tswhite70, I know u are REALLY good with Spiders. Please help me out


//Lasse

[dgemily]

I think the problem is when you are doing a search for "An American Haunting" you get only one result and you are redirected to the movie details page and not for a result list page.
I don't have too much free time right now to look at the spider, but what you can do is, make a search for "haunting" instead of the full name, that should work... ( you can do it using keabord or virtual keyboard)

later,

ps: to understand what I mean, look at those links:
http://us.imdb.com/find?q=An%20American%20Haunting;tt=1
http://us.imdb.com/find?q=Haunting;tt=1

[lar282]

If I type(in the skin) "haunting", I get NO hits from imdb.really wierd.I thought that would work too...
Too bad u don't have a hour left.....



//Lasse

[dgemily]

If I type(in the skin) "haunting", I get NO hits from imdb.really wierd

I tried and the imbd spider works very well for me ......

Also, coverart from imdb seems broken as well.Try "star wars" and see if u get any covers?

you can not get cover using imbd spider , there is not parameter for cover in it.... ( covers from imbd are too smalls, use another spider to get covers, you can combinate several spiders using a variable like:

Code: Select all

dvd - *

you will make a search with every spiders starting by dvd - .... )

later

[tswhite70]

dgemily - is correct about why you are seeing the bad results for "An American Haunting". IMDB finds a perfect match and automatically forwards you to the details page which screws up the spider as it is expecting a search results page. There's not anything that can be done from a spider perspective to avoid this at the present time. Searching for "Haunting" should work though (it does for me)...

Use the Buy.com, Amazon.com, DVDtown.com, or Impawards.com spider for coverart - they are a lot better quality.

good luck,
tsw

[jackryan]

I'm sorry if anyone takes this personally because it is certainly not meant to be so, but this spider functionality (or rather a lack thereof) in XLobby is really lame, esp for anyone who is migrating from an Xbox Media Center (XBMC) which is infinitely easier to setup.

I just don't understand why setting up this app has to be so difficult.

For example, XBMC automatically found all of my avis in a directory (and in sub directories of that directory), was smart enough to know that amelie-1.avi and amelie-2.avi are actually one movie, and plays them as such. And what is the most amazing to me is that XBMC with the push of one button will find thumbnails for *all* of my movies and tv shows. I have almost 300 and at the rate I'm going with this 'spider' garbage will have my shows all thumbnailed in about 2-3 weeks!

It is really surprising that xlobby is such a wonderful application in so many ways, but falls flat on its face with these setup steps which should be the most polished aspects of the app by now. I appreciate all of the hard work the xlobby team has done, but file directory structure recognition without having to write those rediculous 'meta tags' and simple IMDB thumbnail lookups are just *BEGGING* for some dev support.

[stevenhanna6]

I could setup a button function to pick the first match of a selected spider for an entire database. But would you complain when it didn't get exact cover art matches? This assumes all your folders are named for the exact movie name. dvdprofiler is always an option too.

I don't know what you want for the movie importer, take a look at the import templates of the database section, no one else seems to have an issue like this.

[lar282]

suggestion:
Have 2 imdb spiders. One for exact match and one normal like today.


//Lasse

[rembetis]

I appreciate all of the hard work the xlobby team has done.

Many have contributed feedback, support, skins, and plugins, but the xlobby "team" consists of one man, doing all the coding in his spare time. One. And the app is free. FREE. So that one man has done an unimaginable amout of work out of the kindness of his heart. Please keep that in mind when making any future posts like the one above.

Perhaps you would care to explain why you're migrating from Xbox, and why, if a gazillion dollar company with infinite resources and armies of programmers couldn't come up with something that satisfied you, you expect a free app to do so?

p.s. It takes all of 15 seconds to do a Google image search for your movie cover when adding a new movie to your database. Put it in the folder with your .avi or whatever before you import and the problem is solved.

[abobader]

Sure my friend rembetis did not have his morning coffee yet

I am with rembetis here word by word! true fact indeed.

p.s. It takes all of 15 seconds to do a Google image search for your movie cover when adding a new movie to your database. Put it in the folder with your .avi or whatever before you import and the problem is solved.

True, that what I have been doing, in fact, I orgnized my coverart better this way.

My best.

[stevenhanna6]

I think the general point was that there was no spider system that could do the whole db unattented. Well now there is so no more complaining! just kidding, its something that we needed and it wasn't that hard to add. I can understand the frustration in getting so many covers.

You will need the new exe

http://www.xlobby.com/xlobby2.zip

and you will also need to update your spiders

http://www.xlobby.com/spiders.zip

Just go to the advanced spider section when editing a db, and click a spider...( I suggest amazon-dvd, since I just fixed that one up) and uncheck the check box if you want to redo all the covers.

[Colby]

on topic of spiders, I find big coverart at DVDtown.com Could we spider there too?

[jackryan]

I could setup a button function to pick the first match of a selected spider for an entire database. But would you complain when it didn't get exact cover art matches? This assumes all your folders are named for the exact movie name. dvdprofiler is always an option too.

I don't know what you want for the movie importer, take a look at the import templates of the database section, no one else seems to have an issue like this.

I think this is a challenge for me since I have a very large media collection. Probably for others with say 20 or 30 movies, the spiders are not so bad and they could get the setup done in one night. I worked on this last night until early this morning, have put in a good number of hours now, and am about half way through at this point. Believe me it is painful with so many files. Again, I can really appreciate all of the hard work that must have gone into this app and its presentation, power, and flexibility overall is fantastic.

After some experience with the imports, if I may, I would suggest that a solution for those with large movie collections (and indeed would be a great benefit to anyone) would be to first download the info for all selected spiders to the local hard disk. By default movie thumbs should probably be mapped to the first hit with *exact* title match on amazon.fr, since this has the best hit rate and best quality images, while movie info should be mapped to the first hit on imdb. Then with other hits saved to local disk, the user could (with a nice right arrow) tab quickly through all movies and make adjustments as needed. I mention the right arrow, because the user currently has to select the default tab, pick a movie, select the spider tab again, then select search, then select a result, wait, select another result, wait, chose the selected result for image, now select another result for data... With the right arrow, half of the clicks in going back and forth from the tabs to select the next movie could be eliminated, for me this alone means 1200 fewer clicks, woohoo With my collection, and with trial and error of selections it will be about 2500 clicks before I'm done.

I am willing to put up with the effort it is taking now only because I can see what a great app this will be once properly setup. With this added functionality and some minor polish here and there, I would even suggest this product could be sold. If you decide to add some functionality in this area, I could beta test for you. I am a tester by trade and would be happy to help out.

Keep up the great work!

AC

[jackryan]

I appreciate all of the hard work the xlobby team has done.

Many have contributed feedback, support, skins, and plugins, but the xlobby "team" consists of one man, doing all the coding in his spare time. One. And the app is free. FREE. So that one man has done an unimaginable amout of work out of the kindness of his heart. Please keep that in mind when making any future posts like the one above.

Perhaps you would care to explain why you're migrating from Xbox, and why, if a gazillion dollar company with infinite resources and armies of programmers couldn't come up with something that satisfied you, you expect a free app to do so?

p.s. It takes all of 15 seconds to do a Google image search for your movie cover when adding a new movie to your database. Put it in the folder with your .avi or whatever before you import and the problem is solved.

Yep, I certainly appreciate the hard work gone into this app, and the fact that it is free, no question there. As to the dev being one guy, frankly I'm a bit surprised to hear that. I work in 'the industry' and see teams of devs coming up with far less impressive work.

As for the Xbox Media Center- actually XBMC is a hack with requires soldering a new chipset into the box, then flashing with a new bios and software setup and configuration. It's not an MS product, but a Linux based hobby project of a group of blokes, much similar to this one, though I'm sure now with much greater resources.

And why migrate? XBMC is fantastic in most every way except that it is based on aging Xbox hardware which has its limits and can not come near to producing the image quality of DVDs played through a modern PC with say TheaterTek, FFDShow, Lanczos upscaling to 1080 HD, noise reduction, HQ deinterlacing. In its day, it was top notch, but best DVD quality is through a PC now.

If you are wondering, yes I have been building HTPCs since long before there was a name for it. My first truely successful build was on an ATI AIW 8500 based PC (back when those were brand new!) and the biggest challenge then was writing one's own video drivers for their HDTV. Then along came nifty tools like PowerStrip to help with driver authoring and the 'masses' started jumping in. Of course that was a long time ago

Anyway, if you're interested in drastically improving your DVD image quality, here's a basic setup guide:

http://www.htpcnews.com/index.php?optio ... &Itemid=48

To the above, which is a bit dated now but still a great place to start, I would suggest VMR9 and some fine tuning. More info here:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=26