Well over the past week or so I have had a series of conversations with folks I know who are Media Center addicts and I think I have come up with a idea that can make Media Center even more usable and useful for folks that watch the movies they have purchase in movies in Media Center over the Media Center extender.
The problem this proposal hopes to address is the lack of WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) for navigating in large mpeg files (movies) when on the extender, here is what I propose:
1. Take the sample background add-in produced by Steven Toub to navigate to a specific time code.
2. Build a MCML front end for the add-in that would be invoked by the DVD Menu button, this would construct a DVD menu based on the information we have available:
a. Using the folder.jpg of the containing movie, present a large cover art to the left.
è The resulting layout would look something like the Apple iTV layout seen here.
b. Get the DVD id from the dvdid.xml in the folder containing the movie, query a web service to get the chapter information for a given movie (and cache it).
c. If you got the chapter information:
· Using the chapter information retrieved construct the absolute time code associated with a given chapter.
· Using the per chapter absolute time code calculated in 2c get thumbnails for the chapter.
· Display the resulting thumb nails in a film strip positioned top-down, each thumbnail would be selectable and when selected the chapter name would show on the top of the screen.
· When a item in the film strip was selected and the OK button was pressed it the add-in would navigate to the absolute time-code represented by the thumbnail.
d. If you did not get the chapter information:
· To the right of the folder.jpg there would be ui elements (fields /w up/down controls?) that you could select the time code to navigate to, this would allow for visual confirmation of the buttons you have entered via the remote.
This approach would have limitations, for example:
1. Would not work with content that does not have sequential time codes.
2. Thumbnail generation would not work for DVD-MS.
3. Would not work for video play lists as they wouldn’t be treated as a single stream.
4. Would not work for VOB files since they are chunked and would likely need to be in a playlist (see 3 above) and are probably don’t contain sequential time codes in the mpeg stream (see #1 above).
I think the above limitations are OK, and I think such a plug-in would be super useful.