JHS Movie Sheets Development: JHS Movie Sheets V0.9.0

BACKGROUND:
First I will provide a little background. These movie sheets are designed to be used with ThumbGen application. This highly configurable and powerful application allows you to create a 'movie sheet', a JPEG image containing IMDB information on a movie, up to four screen shots and many other pieces of information. If you own a streaming media player such as the WDTV Live, this application is an absolute must-have.

The basic templates are standard XML based. On its own, this doesn't allow you much dynamic flexibility inside of the movie sheets. Another aspect of the templates are the XSLT component. XSLT allows you to perform on-the-fly dynamic changes to the movie sheets based on information provided to you. Each template.xml file has its own template.xslt counter-part to perform the substitutions.

ABOUT:
Now, high level information about my movie sheet templates. My template was originally based upon Cylent's Multiplex Showcase Info variant. I believe it was a Australian version, because the original didn't come with US certifications. I liked the cleanliness of that particular movie sheet layout, but at the same time, it provided a lot of pertinent information. I only have been creating the full SHEET templates at this point. In the future, I may make a version of the template for WALL and STD modes as well, but I don't like the idea because it will get rid of visual real estate and make it look sloppy.

I had originally used a different template for my TV Season and Episode sheets. They turned out much more cluttered and sloppy than I preferred. So, I redesigned them using my JHS sheets as my default template. I will touch on these in a future post.

FEATURES:

Dynamic Media Info Boxes - There are six total data points that the Media Info section can display. [Video Bitrate (VBR); Video Framerate (VFR); Video Aspect Ratio (VAR); Audio Bitrate (ABR); Number of Audio Channels(ACH); File Size (FSZ)] The great thing about this is you can have any variation of these. For instance, if you have values in VFR, ABR and FSZ, but not in VBR, VAR or ACH. The tool will automatically display the three boxes that have values. These displayed boxes and values will be centered on the main picture. I made this to ignore the 'VBR' (Variable) value that is sometimes placed in Video Bitrate and Audio Bitrate fields. The template will act like it is an empty value and not display it.

Different Color Themes for Media Info Boxes and Episode/Season and Season/Discs boxes - I thought the older color schemes, which had a palette of soft pastel colors, well... sucked. So I changed those out for more distinguishable colors: Red for Video, Blue for Audio, Green for File Size, Orange for TV Series Info. These colors easily distinguishable from each other and work well together.

Hidden Tags - Subtitles and tag line labels and quotation marks will disappear when there is no value for them.

Dynamic Run Time - IMDB has its stock listed run time, but I prefer to show the duration of the movie file if possible. If ThumbGen is able to determine the video file's length, it will display that in the run time field. Otherwise, it will use the run time value retrieved by the collector.

Picture and Sound Quality Ratings - This is another feature that took me a while to figure out how to implement, but turned out very good. I do custom parsing on the Comments field. It can be used as follows:

p 3/5
P 3/5
Picture 3/5
picture 30/100
p 3.4/8
p 3.75/10.8

You can do the exact same thing with 'Audio' as well. Both are mutually exclusive. You can have a picture quality rating by itself, or an audio quality rating by itself or both together. Regardless of the fraction used, the output score will be shown on a 5 star visual rating scale.
I tend to use these for my Blu-ray movies. I will manually pull the scores from Blu-ray.com and assign them to the movies, then save them in the TG Metadata for future use. When no PQ or AQ values are explicitly found, the rating pictures, as well as the labels, will disappear. This is very handy for keeping the standard DVD movie sheets clean.

I have plans to go over more features soon. Check back as this is a work in progress. Whenever I find somewhere to host them, I will make the templates available for download.