I'm trying to get opus to display my folders of videos similar to how media managers such as xmbc do. I have xmbc installed and like its browsing/categorisation capabilities, but don't like it's player and therefore launch media player classic. As opus is such a great file browser, it seems pointless to subcontract the job to another program.
To do this, I wanted to use the collections facility. Ideally, I would like to write some sort of function that gets the category of the film. e.g martial arts, drama, etc and add them to the appropriate collection folder/subfolder. e.g. coll/videos/drama/filmname or coll/videos/action/filmname
I plan to use scrapers to download information from imdb (director, film rating, plot synopsis, etc) and write them to a text file in folder in which the video resides. I plan to write a script that automatically puts this into an html or xml file with the proper formatting.
I wanted to know whether it was possible to get the associated film data html/xml file i previously created to display the film details (displayed in viewer side bar) when I click on the film folder within collections? obviously, it would display ok, if i clicked on the html/xml file itself, but this would defeat the purpose as i would have to go into the directory to do this.
I thought there might be a way through events, but unfortunately the collection folder does not seem to have this associated with this. Is there any other way to do this at all?
Alternatively, I could use convert program to write out data (overlay) onto folder.jpg. however, same problem as viewer won't display folder.jpg when sigle-left clicking parent folder.
I am using the latest 64bit version of opus 9 on win7
i'm not really up on ms-dos or opus scripting, but am familiar with bash and a bit of python, so it would be good to know if the following might work before jumping into learning tutorials.
under settings, file types, you can choose "all folders" in directory opus 9 and edit events.
is it possible to create an event type other than the ones listed? e.g cntrl + right click?
in opus 9, collections have got no events associated with them. has opus 10 got this facility?
in order to get the html page for a film displayed in the viewer window could i do the following?
click the folder (using double middle-click for e.g) in a way that triggers an event that:
copies the formatted html file containing the film details from the film directory to it's parent directory (picture 2 in my last post)
select the html file, so that the film details are displayed in the viewer pane
delete the file on left clicking another directory
No, the mouse events listed are the only ones that can be configured.
I'm not sure. There is a Collection Item type in 10 (and 9 as well I think) but that would only apply to things within collections (not the collections themselves) and you wouldn't want to override it for all collections anyway (if you did, you'd break collections like Find Results).
Hmm... Maybe, but I don't think it would work particularly well.
Something like what you want could be done by writing a VFS plugin for Opus, but doing that is a lot more work than scripting a few events.
Thanks very much for the suggestion MrC. However, the reason why I want to do this with opus is because, my home theatre audio goes through a 5.1 receiver and I have configured media player classic exactly how I need it. Winamp also sorts my music pretty well. All these other programs like xbmc, etc are always lacking in some manner. For example:
xbmc doesn't have as good a content/search filter like opus. Additionally, the internal player doesn't have a seekbar!
using the internal player means that my receiver doesn't automatically recognise & switch to the appropriate audio format (e.g 5.1, dts, dolby II, etc). So I am forced to configure mp-classic as an external player (also because mpc is more configurable & better). This means that I am only using xbmc for its browsing/cataloguing/information capabilities. Something that I am sure that Opus should be able to do more efficiently. After all, all we are talking about is browsing to something, presenting information about an object, changing into a directory and then launching the video.
I watch a lot of foreign films that I need subtitles for. If the sub is broken or not present, it is a pain to switch from a 10-foot fullscreen interface to download appropriate subtitle, uncompress it, test it, etc. Using opus & a broswer to deal with this situation is much simpler than using the built in subtitle feature of xbmc that often fails.
At the moment, I just browse to whatever movie I want and launch it from within opus. the problem with this method is that stuff tends to be unorganised as some stuff such as anime is torrent dloads. editing the folder name or moving the film/tv series breaks it & screws up my seeding ratio. The only alternative is to make copies of the folders; name them appropriately and put them into a separate location for xbmc categorisation. This is an issue I've encountered with many other types of media managers (including winamp) as well and results in media disk space being halved.
the opus collection facility seems a natural solution to this, as you can organise your media into collections without having to physically move the media from where it is located. ideally, upon finishing downloading a torrent, i would like utorrent to automatically launch an external program/script that scrapes the relevant information/coverart, etc from imdb, then adds the film folder automatically to the appropriate collection (e.g. coll/videos/drama/filmname or coll/videos/action/filmname).
Of course, it would also be great of opus has a option (like media monkey or reference software such as endnote) to move and rename all folders on your hdd to mimic the folder structure you have defined in the categorised collection, if you wanted to.
These are some of the reasons that I am reluctant to use another program to categorise my stuff. Managing and presenting media is a key task that most, if not all users have a need for, so I hope that this might hopefully become a feature in future releases as it lies squarely within the potential capabilities of opus.
Additionally, it is important to realise that this is not solely relevant to MP3s and videos, but can also be extended to categorisations of PDFs, office documents, image libraries, etc, etc.
It would be interesting to know what other peoples ideas are on this topic.
Let me suggest you're going down the wrong path w/trying to have Dopus manage your media like this... it wasn't designed for this, and I'm not knocking Dopus by any stretch.
