Coverart

Displaying movie art (posters/covers)

Since firmware version 1.0.3 the Xtreamer can display movie posters/covers next to the selected movie folder. All you got to do is to have a JPG image inside the folder, e.g. folder.jpg and to enable the preview mode. Due to the low resolution of the GUI, the images shown on the screen are not very nice.

But from firmware version 2.0 on, the Xtreamer supports a high resolution GUI which will use an area of 450x450 pixels for the images. So either width or height is resized up or down to 450 pixels, while keeping the aspect ratio, of course. Usually only music covers are square sized so they will fit perfectly into that area. I know a lot of people who are using media center software, like Windows Media Center (with plugins), XMBC, etc... which generate these images anways so I think this is a very welcomed feature and a good step of Xtreamer to make the GUI look more fancy for the fanciness-loving people like me :) so to say, the v1.0.3 release was a very nice gesture of the developers to fulfill a few cosmetic and usability wishes that the beta tester group reported to them. And even better, they have announced a 3D cover wall for the GUI, so stay tuned for more fancy stuff.

See the movie poster feature in action in the following video along with some video time skipping and subtitle layout tests.

As you can see, it does not take too much time to load and display the images. When I replaced the WDTV with the Xtreamer I missed the WDTV's thumbnail view so this is a step in the right direction to get this done as good as or even better than on the WD players in the future.

How to get covers, fanart, etc... for your movie folders

Just until the day I got my WDTV and Xtreamer I used to watch my videos in VLC or MPC (with ffdshow) on a Windows XP Pro PC which was (and still is) hooked to my Yamaha AVR (via digital coax cable) and Samsung TV (via DVI2HDMI cable). I neither liked the old Windows Media Center nor media center software like MediaPortal or XMBC, so the videos resided very lonely in their folders. No movie posters, no fanart, no .NFO or .XML files...

What to do, now that the Xtreamer supports movie posters? I tried a lot of tools and I forgot most of their names... the most common that I remember are Xtreamer's XMJ itself, XBMC, TViXiE, MyMovies.dk, Ember Media Manager, Yammm (Windows Media Center plugin)... I gave up on all of them for several reasons. To make it short: most were just too feature-rich, some didn't have good hits on searching movie databases, some were simply not working and producing results which I didn't like.

So after searching for a long time I finally seem to have found THE tool for my needs: a leightweight tool, which does not need to be installed and easily retrieves movie posters and fanart from THE online movie database - themoviedb.org - my favorite source. Additionally it creates .NFO and .XML files because it was actually meant to be used with media center software like Windows Media Center, XBMC or YAML. But it is also working great without them as a standalone tool!

Simple tool, simple name: MediaScout - Metadata fetcher for TV shows and Movies

Go and get it :) you need to download the .ZIP file and extract it on your PC. After that you'll use the MediaScoutGUI.exe to start the tool. Of course there is always a downside. As nice as MediaScout can be, in its current state it tends to crash every now and then. But when it doesn't, it works pretty good. The crashes might be due to the fact that it is still a beta. I used the version 0.9 Beta 2a!

If your folders are named properly (containing only the international movie title) you can get complete meta data for like 15-20 movies per minute! Too bad it does not support batch processing without crashing yet, otherwise it could surely achieve like 30 movies per minute! So in the following images I will try to demonstrate how I use MediaScout to get covers, fanarts, etc... for my movies. You will see, it's easy as pie :)

Let's take these folders as an example.I guess you should see this when you start MediaScoutGUI.exe for the first time.Go straight to the "Options" tab.Click on "Browse" ...... and select the folder which contains the example movies.After that switch to the "Movies" tab.MediaScout will start to import the folders and mark them red, which means that they are not processed yet.Choose the first movie now and click on "Fetch Selected".In most cases it should find the correct movie immediately. If there are multiple hits on the movie name, it lets you choose from a list.So choose the correct movie and click on "Select".Few seconds later you'll see that some meta data has been retrieved, like movie length, user rating, etc.Right now you can already select the next movie to proceed ... or you can wait until MediaScout finished downloading the movie poster and fanart (backdrop).As you proceed you can see that processed movies are marked black.Now what to do if you are not satisfied with the downloaded images. Let's take the latest Star Trek movie as an example.Click on "Change Poster" and you get ...... a selection of other images. Choose the one you like and click on "Select Poster".Do the same with the Backdrop image and you should get something more appealing.You may ask yourself how you can process 15-20 movies per minute ...... easy as pie: I select a movie with the mouse, hit the [TAB] key followed by the [SPACE] key and just when I see the meta data is retrieved ...... I continue immediately with the next movie ...... no need to wait for the images to finish downloading ...... until you will finally ...... get to the last movie folder. Enjoy these images now in your Xtreamer!