Movie Jukebox

At this stage the Xtreamer Movie Jukebox (XMJ) is still in early development. The tool is not developed by Xtreamer.net themselves - another company is doing this task. It uses functionalities provided by YAMJ - Yet Another Movie Jukebox.

I know from my own experience as a developer how strenuous communication across country and continent borders can be if this is the case for the actual fact that we currently only have an "alpha-like" beta version which does nothing more than scrape online movie databases and store some images inside the movie folders. "Alpha-like", coz it seems that there are still too many bugs (buttons not working, invisible application window, not completely working "Browse" feature, etc.) to call it a real Beta. Currently you get two images:

A movie wallpaper including the movie poster/cover and some IMDB (or whatever movie DB you chose) details and an image which shows the movie description. Yep, it's not a .txt file but an image with yellow text on black background.

Looking at the current implementation level: the XMJ is not intregated into the Xtreamer firmware in any ways I have expected. Pictures which were generated by XMJ are just shown in the preview pane of the Xtreamer interface and you can open it, just like any other photos. Okay, if you view the movie description it looks ok: the text is big enough to be readable in the preview pane but the wallpaper does not make any sense to me yet: it's too small in the preview and if you open it, it does not fill up the whole screen and when you zoom in, the wallpaper is bigger than the screen.

Nevertheless, even this seems to be a bummer for me, I am sure the XMJ can only get better and we will have a fully working implementation of the XMJ in the Xtreamer firmware in a few months.

The only thing that makes me worry: I hope the work currently being invested into the XMJ project won't be for nothing coz creating a working(!) final version for the various operating systems is one thing, the other difficult thing is to convince the customers to use the XMJ. Why? Easy answer: there ARE ALREADY 3rd party tools which do the same what the XMJ's purpose is: to generate images which are put into the movie folders. Just to name some: MyMovies, TViXiE, ... so why reinvent the wheel? :) rebranding the software could have been a solution and for sure it isn't hard to add some export rules for the Xtreamer interface in these 3rd party software perls.

An alternative to the XMJ: if you have been following the NMT scene you will know (or at least have read about) YAMJ or UMC (UltimateMediaCollector, a very promising German project). These are HTML movie jukeboxes generated by tools on the PC and if you have seen these movie jukeboxes in action your mouths would be watering all over.

So I would really like to ask the Xtreamer developers to enable support for HTML pages and the option to start movies/music/images by links on these pages. I am sure it would be just a matter of (short) time until we will have the first alternative movie jukeboxes and a greater community behind the Xtreamer creating new stuff for it! An advantage of these standalone jukeboxes is also that the data for the jukeboxes is kept inside one single location and not spread all over in the movie folders.