MovieList 1.3

A utility to catalogue and play media.

A utility application to catalogue, sort, filter, and play media files on local disk. The catalogue can be imported using csv text, and it can be maintained by adding, editing, and deleting records.

In addition to flat lists of media, support is provided to group the media into ‘series’ in an arbitrarily deep tree structure.

Installation

For Versions up to 1.3 the only supported platform is Linux. It should work with Mac, but I do not have a Mac available for verifying the port.

The port to Windows is not possible at present (July 2013) because the Python-gi libraries are not available for that platform (it may be possible to back-port to Python 2.7 and use PyGTK instead - I have not tried it and don’t plan to anytime soon).

System Requirements:

• Python 3

• Gtk

• Python Gtk+ introspection bindings 3.4.2

• lxml >3.0 (and supporting libraries)

Installation (Linux):

1. Unzip the tar.gz somewhere.

2. In a console window navigate to the MovieList-1.3 directory and run the following command as root (on Ubuntu/Debian use sudo):

   [sudo] python3 setup.py install

3. On Ubuntu a desktop launcher is installed, which you should be able to find in the Dash and drag to the launcher bar.

Upgrades

Upgrading does not require removal of the older version.

However, to avoid compatibility issues with the configuration file, any existing configuration should be removed or renamed before running an update for the first time. Any configuration you want to recover can be copied into the new configuration from the saved one after the first run.

On Linux, the configuration file can be found at ~/.config/MovieList/MovieList.cfg

Design Notes and Plans

MovieList allows storage of data in two formats, a Python ‘pickle’ file, or an xml file. The pickle has some advantages for a large database, but the xml version makes it easier to transport data between other packages and manually edit the data when required. Xml is also easy to use to generate printable output - this is planned for a later version.

Rather than use Python’s own sax and dom parsers, the xml implementation is based on element trees, using lxml.

The playing of the media is delegated to VLC Media Player, which, of course, is assumed to be installed. A future version of MovieList may be able to choose the media player to use.

A simple import from csv text is available to facilitate creating a new file. Future versions may enable importing to add to an existing database, possibly by using csv, but also possibly by extending the xml facilities.

Author:

Bob Bowles <[e-mail]>