Apple Movie Trailers Import Utility - Updated v3.4 - 6/01/08

[dalanik]

Have you considered making a real xlobby plugin from this prog? It could be convenient, i.e. you could set xlobby variables during trailer download to display which trailer it is downloading (because it takes some time to download them all) so these could be displayed in overlay...


D.

[ingalls]

Hi, thanks a lot for the plugin!

I tried to choose the directory of the database and covers, but I couldn't do what I wanted...
Is it possible to have:

-AppleMovieTrailers.exe in C:\Program Files\XlobbyFr\applications\Apple Movie Trailers directory?
-Covers directory in C:\Program Files\XlobbyFr\applications\Apple Movie Trailers directory?

-and the database in C:\Program Files\XlobbyFr\databases directory?

thanks for help!

[gravy]

Is this plugin still working for anyone? Has apple changed something on the back-end to break it?

[dalanik]

It crashes for me when I run it the 1st time, then if I run it again it kinda starts working, but doesn't update the database - only downloads pictures (covers)....

[tswhite70]

I ran it over the weekend successfully and I ran it last night on two different pc's without issue. Seems to be working fine - over 1000 trailers collected. Maybe Itunes was having issues when ya'll tried it? Do you see errors in the command prompt window when it's trying to parse the trailers?

tsw

[gravy]

Ah ok - i was able to get the plugin to download the names of the new trailers into an xml database - but I'm such a skin newb that I haven't figured out how to make a screen to show this new database. I was under the mistaken assumption that the plugin was actually going to download the trailers to my hard drive!

Time for more reading on my part, I guess!

[gravy]

Got it working last night - just had to clone some screens to understand the category/screen relationships!

Thanks for this! I'd sure love to see a random trailer feature.

[P3rv3rt B3ar]

xPerT contains a method to fetch random field from any category, of any depth. When u use this to fetch parameter field of trailerbase, and launch it, there is the feature u r requesting.

EDIT: just for the record, this fetch method, or command rather, is called "random", command "fetch" has other purpose.

[gravy]

Excellent! Thanks alot, i'll give it a shot this weekend.

[P3rv3rt B3ar]

Is there a way to run it so that it would only fetch info about new trailers (by new i mean, not included in local database, not anything about "new section") Cause now it seems that subsequent runs take as much time as first run... and i would really like to run this each time XLobby is started and do only additive fetch, but currently it seems unfeasible.

[tswhite70]

P3rv3rt B3ar - It's not possible today to do what your asking - the only option is the 'New Section' download. It would require the parsing of the original XML which the script doesn't really do today which isn't a big deal. Should it delete trailers from the DB that no longer exist on Itunes when doing this incremental update? New trailer field to designate which ones are new? The only real problem I see with doing this is that Itunes does update the info related to a trailer on occasion which wouldn't get picked up without a full parsing.

dalanik & ingalls - Converting over to a real plugin is next on the agenda, which should take care of path issues and I'll include a progress overlay option (I'm not sure how useful this will be as it blows through each trailer pretty quickly, but we'll see how it looks - maybe a rolling list in the overlay like the way you see it in the cmd window).

I'm working on the next version of InTheaters right now that is taking up all my spare time, which there is very little of at the moment. As soon as I get that finished up I'll start back on improving the Trailers code.

good luck,
tsw

[gravy]

Anyone else getting the following message when the run the plugin nowadays? It was working fine a month ago..

Processing Trailer: <whatever the trailername is>
Unable to process trailer: Object reference not set to an instance of an object....

[R32]

Seeing how Apple continues to change their code wouldn't it be easier to use another site, something like Dave's Trailer Page (I think someone had mentioned this in another post)? I'm not as good at VBS as tswhite70 but it should be possible to simply parse the original HTML and look for the direct download links from Apple's website and pass the link to something like WGet to download. I might be able to knock up something crude to do this.

[tswhite70]

Apple changed the back end structure a month ago - I've been sitting on the updated code trying to find time to make some more changes, sorry about that.

v2.1 Highlights/Changes:

- Executable must be placed in Xlobby\Plugins directory
- XML Schema change - DELETE your old trailers db before running the new version
- default db xml file is Xlobby\Databases\trailers.xml
- default coverart directory is Xlobby\plugins\covers
- Fixed code to match iTunes backend update
- DIRECTOR field removed, no longer available from Itunes
- RUNTIME field added
- SIZE field now accepts 480, 720, and 1080 (HD links)
- size code will now link to the largest available trailer up to the SIZE specified; ie if you put 720 as SIZE but only Medium is available you'll ge the link to the medium trailer
- pulling higher resolution cover by default when available
- added /lowres option to force low resolution cover download
- increased default timeout from 5000 to 10000
- made a couple of code/speed improvements
- updated SortTitle code to process "A" and "An"
- /db and /covers command line parameters now support Xlobby path options of:

"root://" - The XLobby root directory.
"skin://" - The XLobby skin directory.
"directory://" - A path under the XLobby root directory.
"\\WindowsShareName" - standard windows share path designation

Special thanks to Jack Simbach, aka spencer171 for the Xlobby path options idea and code from the XscriptNG Plugin!

Download links for executable and src in 1st post. Let me know if you find any issues...
good luck,
tsw

[gravy]

Thanks for the update TSW - things are working great and are nice and quick. Great job!