Overview

How the My Films plugin works to integrate your Ant Movie Catalog (AMC) XML database, other supported catalogs and integrated components like the MyFilms Setup tool, AMC Updater (AMCU), Grabber Scripts and Editor (Interface tool).

How Does My Films Work?

The following diagram shows you how the different modules of the plugin work and interact with MediaPortal.

Historically, My Films was developed to display and use the XML movie database of ANT Movie Catalog (AMC) in MediaPortal.

AMC natively supports XML format for it's database - so changes MyFilms makes to that XML file also reflect in your AMC catalog - and vice versa. Thus data can be updated in either AMC or My Films. My Films can be used to update watched status, movie data like internet info, covers, etc. while AMC can still be used to comfortably maintain and edit the catalog.

Thus the core of My Films itself is based on a XML based database handling.

As it is quite easy to import and "translate" XML data, support for other catalogs is possible without major efforts, if the external catalog manager either supports XML natively as database format - or supports the creation (export) of an XML file with the catalog contents.

This XML catalog can be read and imported by My Films, and used as a movie catalog. However, changes MyFIlms makes to that XML catalog are not reflected in your external catalog manager, and are overwritten when another (re)export is done.

MyFilms

• GUI front-end - presentation of the catalog content to the user interface for viewing, searching, sorting, filtering and playing your films.
• Updating Movie data - many functions to update and maintain movie data have been integrated into the GUI to allow you to perform more tasks in the living room using a remote.
• Global updates - such as adding local trailers to your database, updating availability of films for playback, or downloading fanart and integration of an external application, AMC Updater, to importing new films in the background.
• Global settings - main settings are integrated into MyFilms GUI for customization without needing to use the separate MyFilms Setup tool.

See Using My Films for further information.

Ant Movie Catalog (AMC)

• External Catalog Manager - AMC is a windows standalone application to manage your XML based movie catalog without MediaPortal
• Same XML database - AMC natively supports an XML format to store catalog data and thus allows bidirectional data updates from and to My Films plugin
• Script based grabbing of Movie Data - AMC has a built-in script engine and provides it's own grabber scripts - those scripts are not the same as used by My Films - so depending on the support, there might be scripts available in either part but not the other
• Manual management of database - as a full feature windows standalone application, AMC allows you to also manually edit all your movie data via the GUI

Grabber Scripts Editor (Integrated)

The My Films Grabber Scripts Editor (or Interface) is used to create or edit "scripts" to retrieve internet data for the movie catalog from My Films GUI or via AMC Updater - the scripts are shared between those two parts and use the same "grabber engine".

Basically, the grabber engine supports string and regex matching, regex grouping and parameters for (user) customization like limitation of actors to be loaded.

User parameters can be set by end users, while creating or editing the scripts itself requires understanding and knowledge of HTML source code (websites) and regex for best results.

See Grabber Scripts for further information.

AMC Updater (Integrated)

AMC Updater was formerly a separate application written in Visual Basic (VB) to overcome the lack of AMC to "autoupdate" your AMC movie catalog.

As it also includes a tab to browse, edit and update your movie catalog data, it is a "mini catalog manager" too - although it's main purpose is to scan, add and update movie data to your AMC catalog.

• Scanning/adding new films - scan your directory for movie files, load media info and add them to the catalog, remove orphaned records from your database, when you deleted/removed movies from your share(s)
• Manually updating data - you can update data in your catalog globally or in single records by simple expressions, e.g. to rename a category within the whole collection
• Grabbing Internet data - load internet movie data via the My Films grabber engine based on the grabber scripts
• Grabbing fanart - load / update fanart for your movie collection
• Managing internal Movie Catalog - as there is a mini interface, AMC Updater can be used as a simple catalog manager to view, edit and maintain the movie catalog
• Editing internal database - Catalog can be edited and updated manually

See AMC Updater for further information.

External Catalog Manager

• My Films supports a number of 'External' Catalog Managers via XML data import to it's internal AMC catalog format
• Since most external catalog managers only export their data to XML files, and do not natively support XML based catalogs, My Films can only  import data. Any data changed in My Films cannot usually be imported by the external catalog manager

See Supported Catalogs for further information.

My Films Setup

All setup tasks are done in My Films Setup. The setup is organized in "tabs" and provides access to all options. Some options - like certain global settings - are also accessible and can be changed via the GUI interface.

• Setup Wizard - The Wizard is a help for users to get an aided setup. The wizard asks for very little input from the user (like catalog type, location of movies and country) and creates a My Films configuration with many presets in the various parts of My Films. Users can still change everything to their personal taste, but can get a quick result and a good starting point for a new My Films configuration without having to deal with all options My Films supports before using it.
• synchronization with AMC Updater settings - changes made in MyFilms setup are automatically synced to AMC Updater so the user need not change the same settings again.  AMC Updater also allows the user to use independent settings if they wish.
• Tool tips - Almost all options provide explanations about their use via tool tips
• Logos - configuration and editor
• Filter Editor - for advanced filter expressions
• WOL options - for external storage on NAS systems, supporting WOL (WakeOnLan)
• Central config - to automatically update client configurations with changes to settings

See My Films Setup for further information.

Related

• Overview