Projects

I feel like i should explain why i haven’t been blogging recently, why, i don’t know… Anyway, i’m in the final year of my degree at Salford University and between now and the end of May i have 3 exams, 2 presentations and a dissertation deadline. So it’s fair to say i’m quite busy. I don’t really have time for much of anything apart from work at the moment. But in June i’ll be back in a nice office job and so i will have plenty of time in the evenings to devote to interesting projects which i can then blog about.

In the meantime, i discovered an excellent project for Vista Media Centre in the form of MediaBrowser – www.mediabrowser.tv it’s essentially a plug in which manages movies, pulling metadata from local and remote sources (the open source TV and Movie DB’s). But, the big difference between this and most open source projects – it actually looks nice, with iTunes style ‘cover-flow’ browsing.

As well as metadata, it can make use of mediainfo.dll to extract technical details from the files, so will display within the UI it’s resolution, aspect ratio, sound type, codec etc. It’s also the first open source project i’ve contributed to, now that is a big thing for a developer. The first time you get annoyed with some software and your solution is to download the source code, fix and compile rather than submit a bug report feels very good. Granted it was a simple bug, but nonetheless, i worked around it.

That’s it for now, i’ll be back in June, after i’ve moved house.