MediaSpy 0.7.4 is out! With this release, you can now edit the title of every media, in order to make it as close as possible to the actual title. Of course, you may want to add data to know what kind of media it is (like dvdrip, or the number of a disk file), so the title is divided into two parts. The first one is the title as it is requested in online databases. The second part is whatever you want and not inserted in the request.
I had to choose a character to separate both parts, it will be ‘_’ (underscore), as I think it is not very common in media file names (at least less common than . ou -). Here is a screenshot where you can see a title being edited and the tooltip explaining how to do it.

The main window with editable title and tooltip

As you may have noticed, correctly found medias are no longer colored in green, they are just transparent as usual table view now. Enjoy!

Download

https://fedorahosted.org/releases/m/e/mediaspy/mediaspy-0.7.4.tar.bz2

I just released a new major version of MediaSpy. A lot of new stuff is here:

• operationnal filters for title, tags and seen/unseen movies
• easy tags edit
• option and media edition dialogs
• medias are playable directly from MediaSpy and player is at your choice!
• MediaSpy is available in French, English and (almost completely) Tamil
• and some bugfixes of course

As usual, you can the last version on the fedora repo : https://fedorahosted.org/releases/m/e/mediaspy/

Thanks to Kushal Das, the first release of MediaSpy is done! He even said me he was planning to package it for Fedora!! Great news!
So, from now on, I will release every version as a tarball. You can find them here.

DISCLAIMER: this “release” is far from being usable on a daily basis! Use it at your own risk. Please, feel free to warn me of any bug you found. If you already used an old version of MediaSpy, you may need to delete the .MediaSpy directory first.

For those of you who didn’t notice, the yesterday’s release closed the first use case I presented at the beginning of the project. The only differences are about automation. Step 6 and 10 don’t need the user to interact with MediaSpy, it is done automatically. Enjoy!

Yes, I know, it’s been a long time since version 0.5, but this one is made of several nice small steps. Together, these steps allow me to release an « almost usable » version of MediaSpy. Now, when you add directories to the collection, imdb website is requested for every media of the list. Information from the site are displayed on the right side. The nice plus is the ability to see which media has been found on imdb via a very simple color code. When the media name is on a green background, information has been found. It is red otherwise. When no color appears, it means that the media was already in the database when you launched MediaSpy, therefore research has already been done. Here is a screenshot of these features:

A major issue is the sensitivity of Mediaspy to the media names. In fact, if your medias aren’t well named, imdb queries will be hazardous and result in erroneous movie information…. The good news is I got some ideas to change this

Far from perfect and still a lot of things to do, but still going on!

While writing a (small) IMDb API for MediaSpy, I encountered the following problem. When you make an IMDb research for a movie title without ambiguity, IMDb makes an automatic redirection from the research page to the full page of the movie. The question is: how to handle this in Qt? Happily, Nokia provides some nice snippets like this one. Some adaptation later, here is my code:

QNetworkReply* networkReply;
QVariant possibleRedirectUrl =
    networkReply->attribute(QNetworkRequest::RedirectionTargetAttribute);

// We'll deduct if the redirection is valid in the redirectUrl function
QUrl urlRedirectedTo = redirectUrl(possibleRedirectUrl.toUrl(), urlRedirectedTo);

// If the URL is not empty, we're being redirected.
if(!urlRedirectedTo.isEmpty())
    this->networkManager_->get(QNetworkRequest(urlRedirectedTo));
else
    urlRedirectedTo.clear();

The function redirectUrl being:

QUrl InfoManager::redirectUrl(const QUrl& possibleRedirectUrl, const QUrl& oldRedirectUrl) const {
    QUrl redirectUrl;
    if(!possibleRedirectUrl.isEmpty() && possibleRedirectUrl != oldRedirectUrl)
        redirectUrl = possibleRedirectUrl;
    return redirectUrl;
}

Easy, don’t you think?

Last week, I was on holiday in the Gulf of Morbihan. Had just some time to work on internationalization. Now, MediaSpy can speak your language!! For this, just ask me to provide you a .ts file for your language. Translate it with the use of linguist, and send me the .ts file back. I’ll integrate it in the git repo and we’ll all be happy!!

This is my fourth release in a week, following the FLOSS habit: “Release early, release often”! This time, the main feature is under the hood, as I separated the collection update off the main thread, allowing the whole GUI to stay smooth and responsive. This is my first attempt in doing this, so bugs are surely here! If you want to test it and report bugs to myself (by mail or here), please do so!

Here is a simple use case (yours may vary):

1. Open MediaSpy
2. Add directories (preferably with a lot of movies)
3. Directories are scanned
4. Movies are added to the list
5. Close MediaSpy

And again, the magic happens here:

git clone git://git.fedorahosted.org/mediaspy.git

Now I won’t be here next week, for a small week of holidays, so please, keep the good vibe and crash MediaSpy as much as possible

OK, just made a good (i hope) commit, now, it’s your turn to help!!

Basically, MediaSpy can now add, remove and count the movie medias that are in the directories you selected. Please, test these simple functionnality and report me any bug you encounter! Thanks

PS: the good stuff is here:

git clone git://git.fedorahosted.org/mediaspy.git

MediaSpy is still in movement, and today, I finally had a fully functional directories adding/removing! The only glitch is that the operations with the sqlite database are very slow…. I have to find a way to do it better!
Anyway, here is an exemple of what you can have with this version:

Mediaspy main window

Next step: filling the nice empty ‘Movie Information’ box