Moving Pictures Social - An Interview with the People behind the Curtain

Social interaction is where all the buzz is at, and MediaPortal does not stay behind. Two of the most popular community plugins (Moving Pictures/MP-TVSeries) are working on integrating social aspects right now. Let's find out why you should be excited.

Today we'll hear from Travis Collins (TravisTX / ZealotSix) and John Conrad (fforde), known for their work on the Moving-Pictures plugin, to talk about their latest feature: Integration into an Online Platform known as Moving Pictures Social. Oh, and they developed that on their own too. 

 

What is Moving Pictures Social (MPS)? Moving Pictures Social is a website for people to connect about the movies they are into.  If you have ever wanted to send a quick URL to a friend that lists all of your movies, or shares information about what you have been watching recently then this is the feature for you. The Moving Pictures Social website works in concert with the Moving Pictures MediaPortal plugin to automatically synchronize what movies you have in your collection, what movies you have been watching, and what you rated them.

The Moving Pictures Social Website

 What benefits does a user get by joining the MPS community?

Share your movie collection, ratings and recommendations with friends and family.  Keep up with what your friends are watching, what they like and don’t like.  Connect with your friends using movies as a commonality.  Forum badges, achievements, and more to come!

Moving Pictures Social also brings a few new feature to Moving Pictures users that have multiple installations throughout their house. MPS will automatically synchronize information about what movies you’ve watched and how you rated them. And if for some reason a user reinstalls MediaPortal and Moving Pictures, MPS works as an offsite backup for this information.

What motivated you to create MPS?

Movies are a big part of our lives and something we feel very passionate about, and it’s natural for people to want to share with their friends and family what they love. Most of us have large and constantly expanding movie collections and we wanted a way to easily share with people close to us what movies we have, what we have been watching, and what we liked. We couldn’t find anything out there that fulfilled this desire, so we decided to make it ourselves.

It is still in semi-private Beta, can anyone join? What software requirements are there for the best experience?

Anyone can join, but keep in mind it is beta, so bear with our occasional glitches or changes in direction.  You need Moving Pictures 1.1.1 or greater if you want to sync Moving Pictures to your MPS profile.

You can see what other people have watched, and what movies they like or hate. If someone doesn't want the whole world to see this information, can they still use MPS?

We have a couple of options depending on your preferred level of privacy. If you are only concerned about a subset of movies in your collection, you can filter what is synchronized to the website in the Moving Pictures plugin. If you only want your approved friends to be able to see what you have been watching you can make your profile private.

Is the site linked to Moving Pictures alone, or can other software interact with it too?

The API is designed to be usable by any software, but at this time, Moving Pictures is the only application utilizing it.

Do you have a long-term plan, and if so, can you share it with us?

In the medium term we would like to better integrate with other social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. The whole point of Moving Pictures Social is to share with your friends what you’re watching, so it would make a lot of sense if we could tap into the user’s existing network of friends they have built up on other websites.

We would also like to expand to other platforms. Moving Pictures Social is launching with support only for the Moving Pictures plugin for MediaPortal, but in the long term we would like to make this service available for other platforms like XBMC and Boxee. An Android companion application is a possibility as well. Moving Pictures Social has been designed from the ground up with these goals in mind, and for this reason we will probably change our name before long.

Finally we would also like to expand our API to support retrieval of generic movie information, allowing programs like MediaPortal and XBMC to use  the website as a source for movie information pulled down to an HTPC. This is a niche that is already handled very ably by themoviedb.org, but alternatives are always advantageous for the user. This is a little bit outside our originally intended scope but if we have the data it would be a shame to not make it available.

There are other projects out there that seem to serve a similar purpose, why create your own? Why, in your opinion, is MPS better?

There are several sites and programs that partially satisfy subsets of what we are trying to do with Moving Pictures Social. Flixter for example is an excellent social networking website focused on movies, but it lacks an API that allows full integration with HTPC applications. Websites like themoviedb.org, while fantastic resources, lack the social aspects that drove us to create Moving Pictures Social in the first place. Various applications on the forums like LRFalk01’s movingpicturesxml (http://code.google.com/p/movingpicturesxml) have given users the ability to generate HTML lists of their movie collection but these tools lacked some of the social features we were looking for and required a high level of technical expertise.

Moving Pictures Social makes it effortless for the average user to share with people what movies they have and what they are watching. If you have watched a movie, the website is automatically and immediately updated. Something with this level of integration and ease of use did not yet exist.

How can people get started with MPS?

Sign up at http://social.moving-pictures.tv/ To synchronize with Moving Pictures, you will also need Moving Pictures 1.1.1 or greater (>http://code.google.com/p/moving-pictures/).

Are you looking for any help with MPS?

We are always looking for the help of talented individuals. We would accept any type of help offered but what we need most right now is a designer and/or artist.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Travis Collins (TravisTX / ZealotSix): I’m a 31 year old software developer from Texas. I started writing code professionally in 1998, and I’ve been primarily a web developer since about 2003.  My day job is heavily .net, and asp.net.

John Conrad (fforde): I am a 29 year old software developer also working out of Texas. Software development is something I have done all my life but I have been writing software professionally for about six years. At my day job I primarily write inventory optimization and management software for a relatively small software company.

How long have you been using Mediaportal? How long have you been developing for it?

Travis Collins (TravisTX / ZealotSix): I started using an HTPC in 2008.  I had done months of research on all of the platforms available before that, and already knew I would go with Media Portal, primarily because of it’s extensibility model with plugins, and that it used .net.  I immediately started played around with the plugin model, mostly for learning the API.  I made plugins to scrape the NASA image of the day, and make a slide show out of them, and another one for flickr interesting photos of the day.  My first serious development would have to be when I started helping on Moving Pictures in Jan 2009.

John Conrad (fforde): I first started using MediaPortal in the summer of 2007. At the time my TV provider stopped broadcasting ABC (one of the major networks in the United States), so I decided it was time to start looking into alternatives. Originally I wanted to use over the air broadcasts managed by MediaPortal but I eventually abandoned this. By then though I was already hooked, primarily due to the MP-TVSeries plugin. I did a few patches for MP-TV-Series and eventually started working on Moving Pictures as an alternative to MyVideos. It took me about a year of off and on evening and weekend work, but in August of 2008 the first version of Moving Pictures was launched.

 

This concludes our interview. Thanks guys, and keep up the great work!