MLDVDQuery 2.0.1 Released!

[mosleyh]

guess i need some spoon feeding

. . .not really. If you look at my rather lengthy post above, you'll see a couple of your issues almost verbatim. I think there are a few kinks to work out in the new version. . .

[gregoryx]

Are you sure that the variables you describe contain the values you expect them to? Those variables do not exist by default. Their values are not automatically populated in any way.

Two ways to verify: what shows up in MLServer log when you send the variable-based command; and what is the value of those variables in the variables window in MLServer?

[mosleyh]

You talkin' to me or dbarker? (OK, I was tempted to do a Taxi Driver thing, but I restrained myself )

[gregoryx]

Sorry... mostly to dbarker... your documented issue appears to be rather different from what I'm guessing.

FWIW, I have NOT seen what you are seeing... and I've been using the DVDQuery plugin for months now.

[mosleyh]

I had a feeling.

The commonality I saw between my and dbarker's problems was the problem with lastadded not populating variables, and (from my earlier post) Location not working when it has to get parameters from other variables.

Of course it works for you. You probably scared it! (at my old IT-type job, when something would work for me when it wouldn't work for someone else, I used to tell them I had sprinkled techie dust on it when they weren't looking)

[gregoryx]

I can tell you that most of what I'm doing with MLDVDQuery did NOT work when I first tried it. I remember working a bit with the logs and such to see what was going wrong before getting it working.

[dbarker]

Are you sure that the variables you describe contain the values you expect them to? Those variables do not exist by default. Their values are not automatically populated in any way.

Two ways to verify: what shows up in MLServer log when you send the variable-based command; and what is the value of those variables in the variables window in MLServer?

no errors in the mlserver logs

looks like my problem is that i have very little understanding about
how this all works.

i have a button in dvdlobby labled {{dvdnumber}}
when i run this command

MLServeCmd.MLDVDQuery|Location~Title~dvdnumber~1~220
then the title of the movie in that slot shows up in the above button

so i expect that if i enter any other command using the button above as the variable, i would see a similar response.

gregg got me thinking so i copied the name of a variable in the mlserver
variable window to the button name and ran the random trivia command.
and the random trivia showed up in the button.

so i was right in that i just don't understand how this all works. where do the variable come from and how do i create them correctly to be able to
use them in dvdlobby.

one of the things i really want to be able to do is to
click on a thumbnail in dvdlobby and have the trivia show up in a button.
or any other info that is in the db

[gregoryx]

Mmm...

First, let's be clear that there is no such thing as an "error in the log" in MLServer, it's a matter of determining if it did what you expected it to do.

Second, let's see if we can get closer to getting this to happen.

Clicking on a thumbnail is not going to do what you want (unless Mario sends us some "triggers" for the "selected" movie ). When you hit a thumbnail, it makes that movie "active" but the rest of the ML/MLS system doesn't know what happened. Only when the "play movie" or "play trailer" commands are pressed / sent do you have the opportunity to take the few bits of information that DVD Lobby knows about the movie you're viewing and change them into something else. It knows about a few variables which are referenced ONLY in the DVD Lobby MLServer configuration by their <<>> references, such as <<TITLE>> and <<LOCATION>> and others.

If you make the play movie or play trailer command actually NOT play the movie or the trailer, but just load <<TITLE>> into a full MLServer variable - by using a command like SetVariable|DVDTitle~<<TITLE>> in the play movie line - then the variable {{DVDTitle}} becomes available to the entire ML/MLServer system.

Wrap your head around that for a bit. Test it a bit. Read in the DVD Lobby help file a bit. See where you get to.

In case it isn't obvious (like because I'm suggesting that you use the DVD Lobby "Play Movie" command to do something other than to play the movie ), you're dealing with some off-the-beaten-path stuff; so don't suspect for a moment that it's "just you".

BTW, I've asked if it's possible to expose the underlying variables of the "currently viewing" DVD Lobby movie, but I haven't received a response on it. Ideally, I'd like to see all the <<>> variables exposed as something that the client system can trigger a transfer to {{}} variables and add in the {{clientname}} to it as they do it. But... I digress...

[mosleyh]

An update:

I reinstalled MSXML, and the plug-in is populating the overview variable correctly , but lastadded still seems to be broken . . .

BTW, is there a character limit for variables? The overview seems to be getting truncated. . .

[mosleyh]

BUMP. . .

I forgot to ask, is lastadded working for anyone out there?

[gregoryx]

Huh... missed this post, I guess.

Not sure why lastadded might not work. If that's the accurate field name in DVD Lobby, it oughta' work the same. You've checked in MS Access?

The carriage returns do not work in the standard text box; though the full content is probably actually in the variable. I used a custom-built text-box / scroller SWF for this purpose. It's in my MLS files.

[mosleyh]

Thanks gregoryx.

The reason I was asking about lastadded, is because I tried the command straight out of Dave's docs, and I got an error that is documented earlier in this thread.

There's been very little activity here, which made me think that either Dave ran screaming into the night (his last post in this thread was over a month ago), or I was the only one having a problem (Read - some sort of config issue, and not DVDQuery.)

It just suddenly dawned on me to ask the obvious question. Lastadded is far from a necessity, but I think it would be cool to do a screen showing art from the last 10 DVDs added to the library. . .

BTW, any hints on which .mls contains the scroller you mentioned?

Thanks

[gregoryx]

I haven't heard from Dave lately either - and I have the beta stuff he had be testing.

The file is called "textbox.swf" I believe. It does not use a variable value, though, since I didn't know how to do that. I didn't get a clear answer on how and I don't understand Flash enough to make sense of the answer I got. It currently uses a text file... which works well enough to just load the data into a text file and display it.

[mosleyh]

In trying to push the NOTES field into a variable independent of DVDLobby, I think I found the answer to my question: DVDQuery seems to have a limit of 254 characters that it can pull from the database.

I noticed that the info I was trying to get out of NOTES was truncated, which sounded like the problem I'd been having with OVERVIEW. So, I performed a character count (with spaces) on the NOTES info that landed in the variable, and also on the OVERVIEW info that landed in its variable. Lo and behold, both came up as 254 characters. When I push the info into the same variable using <<NOTES>> from within DVDL, all of the info is there

One other bit of strangeness - while DVDL keeps CRLF intact when it pushes NOTES into a variable, DVDQuery replaces the CRLF with a double space.

FWIW

[Bago]

I finaly got around to installing the new version, and all of the pictures still say Demo on them - any ideas as to what I am doing wrong?

Thanks!

Barry