My first plugin… for a plugin!

As I have already mentioned on previous posts, I love MediaPortal and I love its plugins, specially OnlineVideos. Unfortunately, as much as I appreciate what OnlineVideos does for MediaPortal I feel It could be greatly enhanced, in terms of configuration features.

The first step I took to solve the problems I’ve had with the plugin was the development of OnlineVideos SiteManager, which is nothing more than a tool ease the process of selecting which sites you want to “enable” within the plugin.

The next step I wanted to take was to ease the process of adding new web sites. But, in order to fully understand how this currently works (so that I can improve it) I had to, first, familiarize with the current model.
So I decided to start a new plugin project for OnlineVideos as this will help me understand how it currently works. This plugin will simply add support for a set of web sites that many MediaPortal users have requested (TV A La Carta) and an additional one (FirstRow) which I really and truly want!

The plugin, at this moment, provides partial support for a a couple sites but, hopefully, this will change soon.

The project is being hosted at CodePlex so “anyone” can (and hopefully will) contribute to speed up its development: http://ovsxfx.codeplex.com/

OnlineVideos SiteManager

I’m an avid user of MediaPortal. Actually, since about 4 months ago, it has been my only mean of watching TV… just last week I cancelled my cable subscription and, right now, the only thing that is shown on my TV comes from MediaPortal.

I have to admit that it is not (yet) perfect but it is, by far, the best media center I’ve tried (and I think I have tried them all).
One of the things I like the most is that MediaPortal has been designed around a robust plugin API which allows developers to create AddOns that either enhance MediaPortal or provide additional features.

One of my most beloved plugins is OnlineVideos. But as much as I love this plugin I feel there are some areas that could be greatly enhanced. Such is the section in the plugin where you select which “stations” or “sites” to include.
I’m sure that many users are happy by having all the sites included but me, being a control freak, I like to fine tune which sites I want available for streaming.

So, to mainly satisfy my (apparently unique) needs I’ve started working on a small utility that can, considerably, ease the process of selecting which sites to include in the plugin.

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Subtitles Editor (Beta 1)

Here’s the first beta version of Subtitles Offset which includes many improvements and changes.
This version is considered to be feature complete so all future version (until 1.0 is released) will only include bug fixes, performance and UI improvements.

• Changed the name of the program from Subtitles Offset to Subtitles Editor
• The Captions Browser has been considerably improved as it now displays the audio wave form detected in the video
• Added icons and controls to facilitate zooming into the Captions Browser
• The Captions Editor has now been integrated into the main window
• Added support to easily specify HTML tags to define the color and font of the captions
• Fixed a very annoying bug that caused the Captions Browser to incorrectly calculate the correct time of the video
• Added full spell-checking capabilities with support for multiple languages. Note that downloading new dictionaries is a bit buggy and you may need to refresh the dictionaries list several times before it’s properly populated
• The program now includes an Installer
• Many, many small bug fixes…

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Spell checkers are politically incorrect

Apparently, spell checkers do not display suggestions for swear words. [...]

Follow me @ trakt.tv

You can follow what I’m watching, as well as what I’ve watched, at trakt.tv: http://trakt.tv/user/morphx