1. Jason Carr Avatar Jason Carr
  2. Untitled project
  3. LaunchBox
  4. Issues

Support for media like movies and tv series

Issue #279 new
David Hein created an issue

Ability to scrap data from tvdb and similar. Add things like seasons , episode selection. Think many will support this idea.

Comments (28)

  3. Ryan Bramantya

    Just little suggestion. I recommend MPV - fork of MPlayer - as movie player if those features will be implemented as it has no GUI, has simple built-in controller, has little dependencies, has many command-line switches, very portable, and support most format.

  5. Eisa AlAwadhi

    It will be indeed great and even more than great given the beauty of LaunchBox.

    All other media managers alike to Kodi ruin the folder structure if I use them by adding all the info to the same folder which contains the media forcing me to never use file explorer as it will look cluttered with many different pictures, info files, etc.. And forced to use Kodi or similar programs to navigate.

    Also what's worse is that we are mostly forced to use their player and can't select our favorite player that provide the best decoding experience in its playback.

    However, LaunchBox can save the posters, fan art, info and etc.. In it's folder and this will avoid all clutter.

    Also LaunchBox as seen allows for flexibility as we can select desired emulators and so on, so same thing can be said about the players for the future. Like I can make the most of my media by opening it by default using MPC-HC if that's what I chose in LaunchBox.

    This dream would be so great as I searched many days and wasted a lot of time to find a perfect solution for a great media theater experience and never found. That's why when I found exactly what I need but for gaming I wished the same thing would exist for media and I became addict to this website entering it everyday and looking at what everyone is suggesting, hoping that the productivity and what LaunchBox has to offer will continue to surprise.

    I'm very happy to hear that this is planned for the long term as there's no program that currently does this (Uncluttered Movies/ Anime/ TV Shows folders, Option to choose player, scraped media for all)

    I hope my point reaches you @jasondavidcarr in this long boring message which contains many random feelings :P

  7. David Hein reporter

    Eisa you say it best , same problem here , not satisfied with any media center , media collector managers dont get you play your media , Launchbox looks like perfect solution , question is when ,

  10. William Jones

    Not only would it be great to be able to have movies, TV, books, music, audio books (and all forms of media that I didn't mention) eventually added, but if they all could be controlled with a gamepad (I hate having to use an external keyboard) that would be amazing!

  11. Brad Cheyne

    William, for TV and Movies there is Kodi, but there isn't a decent solution for Books, Comics or Audio Books. Audio Books could be treated as any other MP3 player would treat it, but Audio Book features are nice like in Maple Player on android or Angel VOX on windows.

    I will say though that while in the long run we want to do it all, it's honestly not all that high up there for the time being. That could certainly change in the future, but we are dedicated to making LaunchBox the best at what we are currently aiming for so I hope you understand.

  12. William Jones

    Yes I understand Brad. I just want Launchbox to reach its full potential. As you and Jason probably see it, Launchbox, in a very very long-term view can be the default front end for all media. However, the priority now is on games. I agree.

  13. Brad Cheyne

    Ok, thank you for understanding! We do one day want to get there, but we do only have 1 developer on our team besides myself and I am not a developer. :P

  14. Erin Haleen

    Unpopular opinion: It's better to do a few thing and do them amazing then try and be the be-all-end-all. Launchbox is a game management system. It does what it does and it does it well. Maybe the analogy will be lost on some but think of the example of McDonalds vs. In-and-out Burger: McDonalds sucks because it tries to do everything so it can't possibly do anything well. In-and-out makes hamburgers, fries and shakes. That's it. They do it amazingly too. This focus on only a few things lets them offer the best possible product. Its why there is ALWAYS a line.

  15. Brad Cheyne

    That's not an unpopular opinion, that's our goal for right now. That's also why we're not on Linux, Mac and Android. Jason COULD technically do my example and the ticket given enough time, but everything else would suffer in the mean time, especially when there are capable alternatives. Well not when it comes to other OSes, but that will still take too much time currently. ;P

  18. ALI ESSA

    Of course since it wouldn't be forced I could just choose not to use it. But my personal opinion please don't do this! Ever Kodi already handles movies so perfectly & this pointless addition can only take focus away from what matters.

    Edit also Kodi can use any player. If your gonna come with negative argument at least get your facts straight.

  19. William Jones

    I feel that support for different media will happen inevitably. There's a big market (including myself) for people who want all of their digital media to be used on one piece of software, that's portable and syncs up via the cloud. I don't care if Kodi is technically better in some ways. The ease of use of a single software is what has me interested.

    I'm pretty confident that Jason is focused on the gaming side of development and that focus is going to stay there. There's a lot of work to be done on the gaming development side before we can focus on supporting movies and other forms of media. Give it a couple years at least before movies or other media can be supported. I feel that once the video game side of LaunchBox matures (not stops, but matures), then the demand for movie and TV support will escalate.

    When it comes to movies we already have support for VLC/Windows Media Player, support for background videos, and custom themes. It'd need a scraper for movie content (i.e. metadata, trailers, DVD covers etc.) and other things, but if we use the gaming side of LaunchBox as a template, support for other media like movies doesn't sound like it'd be that difficult to implement (famous last words xD)

  20. Adriaan Visser

    I'm not against having a frontend for other media. But please consider keeping LaunchBox/BigBox for games please. When it is decided for other media, please consider creating a new application for it. I would like LaunchBox to be a Games frontend, and it is doing a great job of doing that.

  21. Chris Gilbert

    I agree that Launchbox should be focused on games. Once the product and its features get diluted by other media types, I feel the gaming aspect will inevitable start to suffer and may fall by the wayside.

  22. Anders Hammar

    I think you're worrying too much about this. Launchbox already kinda supports for example movies, the only thing it really needs to fully work well as a movie frontend is character, cast and staff lists, which incidentally are all things that the game part of the database also could really use. Although I would agree that scrapers should not be a priority.

  24. kamyk2000

    Everyone? Less than half the respondents. I would be thrilled if launchbox added other media functionality. Not like it would be hard to have more than one instance of launchbox on your hard drive if we ever get a setting to tell it where to store it's media and settings. You could use one solely for games, one for movies, one for books, etc. For that matter options could be added under the view menu along with Bigbox for the different media types. Then you could choose what media type was the currently displayed set. There are all sorts of options for doing something where the different types of media don't get clumped together in one big set of categories and lists. That would be the only logical reason I can think of why anyone would protest the added functionality.

  25. Jay Thompson

    I don't think there would be anything wrong with media support. Hell, Launchbox already supports tons of media in the backend, what is wrong with taking it one step further and adding support for it in the frontend? I think some folks are making a bigger deal out of this than they should. As long as development of the gaming side doesn't suffer, what's the harm? I'm all for it. Add comic support while you're at it.

  26. Former user Account Deleted

    I'd like to add my opinion and say that video games and other media are very different and I think it would overly complicate LB. I think a good compromise would be a sister program that would work together.

  27. Rod Wilkins

    My thoughts, I believe there should be an OPTION to enable/disable this additional feature in the application (perhaps disabled by default) if it’s added later on, and maintain a default focus on games vs. movies/tv content.

    ‌

  28. Retro808

    LB already supports adding all these different media types and has not affected any development or user experience. Users are using LB for comics, movies, magazines, etc.. We even have a tutorial on importing movies and using a 3rd party plugin for scraping media. Albeit the tutorial is a bit dated.

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