Wednesday 13 May 2009

MediaInfoFetcher Release 1.2

I've just released version 1.2 of MediaInfoFetcher. This is a application that can be used to find Film and TV Show meta data, and store it in various formats. It also can be used to rename media files using this data. The latest version can be found here.

Changes are as follows:

  • FEATURE: Recursive renaming of media files
  • FEATURE: Added a MythTV Store for writing film information to the MythTV database.
  • FEATURE: Added logging to the application (Using log4j).
  • FEATURE: Added new Film Hybrid source that takes the best of all the film sources.
  • FEATURE: Films can now have a genre flagged as primary
  • FEATURE: Added new www.tagchimp.com source for films.
  • FEATURE: Films can now also have chapter name information and long descriptions.
  • FEATURE: Films and TV Shows can now have non numeric ID's.
  • BUGFIX: Updated all the web parsers for latest changes to the websites.
  • BUGFIX: Fixed text output. Now shows text for "Fetching film from source" instead of "Fetching show from source".
  • PERFORMANCE: Speed ups for MP4 store using atomic parsley. It now longer writes metadata unless it needs too and artwork is removed at the same time as writing the metadata.
Let me know if you find any bugs with the relase! Enjoy!

Friday 1 May 2009

XBMC on ARM

I saw this today, which is very interesting. It's basically a short demo of XMBC running on the ARM platform. This is is the start of a really great media centre. I've so far been using Mac Mini's as media centres for their size, however the setup is a little complex and I've no need for local storage really. All the media I watch is on my server.

So the video shows XMBC running on a ARM Cortex-A8 beagle board. The actual hardware is tiny. The operationg system looks to be be booting of a SD Flash Card. I guess it would need some kind of IR control for me to use it and maybe a DVD driver, but these should be doable, both could be attached by USB. I think once OpenGL ES support is working I might see about getting once of these boards. They should be noiseless to.

Most my TV's are old, so I wonder if I can connect it to scart (I'll probally replace the TV at somepoint, but would nice not to be force into it).