[mythtv] Mythvideo and fanart - minor defects

[Robert McNamara]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 11:56 AM,  <paul10 at planar.id.au> wrote:
>> Thanks, and outside of this little blip I hope you're enjoying the
>> fanart/banner/screenshot functionality!
>
> I am - I'm really looking forward to it, and I see this morning updates to
> Terra to use it.

I've only used it in my theme so far, but from a little hacking around
with Terra + fanart last night I think at least the browse mode looks
pretty kick ass.

>
> I was wondering how the fanart was going to work with sites like tmdb.
> They have a list of fanart for each movie, and they don't seem to have a
> great way to separate fanart from banners from covers - so it is hard to
> tell which you are getting.

Their API makes a distinction-- the tmdb.pl script already uses this.
-P pulls the poster (coverart) and -B pulls the fanart.  I haven't
seen a broken aspect ratio yet in a few hundred films of experimenting
with this code over the past few months.

>
> It seems to me that the distinction is largely aspect ratio - so a
> cover/poster is portrait, fanart/banners are landscape.  I know that is a
> bit simplistic, but if you think about where we use them it kind of fits.

See above, no need to get this fancy, TMDB handles all of this for us.

>
> Anyway, in an ideal world (i.e. a world where someone does a lot of coding
> just to make me happy....) we would have some logic that pulls down the
> thumbnails for each of these, and lets you pick which one you want.  We'd
> then download that one and store it as the fanart or the cover as
> appropriate.  That probably implies merging the download code bases -
> since tmdb seems to give all the images back in a single list.
>

The forthcoming download rewrite allows for background
downloading/selective downloading/user choice, as I understand it.

> Is this the kind of thing you're thinking of when you say you're rewriting
> the download code?  Are we keeping the grabbers, with just the myth end of
> it rewritten, or are the grabbers going away too?  I kind of like the
> grabbers, although the error handling could be better.
>

I'm not rewriting it (and didn't want to draw a third party into a
conversation unless he felt like getting involved), but as you've
likely seen above, yes, it's what I mean.  :)  The grabbers will stay
but be at least slightly re-engineered for the new way of doing
things.

Robert