Universal Media Server | Forum

Greetings

I have been going over documentation and some of the entries in this forum, and I am very confused.

I am running UMS on a Linux machine and have been putting movies on it to tet it with my Bravia TV. So far it is working well (an excellent application, by the way). One thing that is missing in the functionality is a way to get data about the movies (and TV shows) that I want to stream.

I checked out the plugins and learned about the plugin MovieInfo. I decided to try it.

The first thing I discovered was that all the links to the plugin (including the link in the UMS help HTML file!) point to a github source repository. There is no pointer to the actual plugin.

After searching for quite some time, I found a movieinfo jar on a google site. Odd, but I downloaded it.

According to the UMS documentation, one installs a plugin by putting the jar file into the "plugins" folder under the UMS distribution. I did that and restarted UMS. There is no indication that the plugin even works.

I checked information in other documentation and in this forum. I saw references to a "plugin installer" and a "plugin management" tab that is supposed to be part of the UMS user interface. This added to my confusion because the UMS user interface does not appear to have any tabs that deal with plugins or any controls that install them. Besides, the mention of such controls contradicts other documentation that says I should just put the jar file in the plugins folder!

Furthermore, after searchin through the forum, I find several suggestions that movieinfo is the plugin to use for getting movie information -- yet these suggestions are contradicted by folks who say that this plugin does not really work with current UMS versions and that "another" plugin should be used for getting movie information. The other plugin is not specified and there is apparently no information about it, where it is, and (most importantly) how to get it. Similarly, all the suggestions about using movieinfo are lacking in information on where to go to get the actual plugin, how it is supposed to work, or how to use it.

As one might imagine, I am quite confused.

My questions are:

1) Is there a plugin that can be used with the latest UMS version (I have v8.2.0) that can be used to acquire and display movie information? If so, where can I acquire he actual plugin?

2) How do I install the plugin? What is the "plugin installer" I see references to or how do I get the "plugin tab" that people talk about here?

3) Is there any real documentation on how to use the plugin? I mean, is there a user manual? If so, where can I find this?

Thanks for your attention. And thanks in advance for any assistance.

The plugin code has been disabled in one of the 7.x versions (I'm not sure which). It seems like they didn't bother to update the documentation.

There had not been any updated plugins for years, I think I did the last update to the MovieInfo plugin in early 2016 (https://github.com/Nadahar/MovieInfo). You're right that there's no compiled version for download there, I guess I thought that others would take care of it. I only did the bare minimum to get it to work at all, but it has since been broken again. The reason that it "breaks over time" is that both the UMS code changes and that the websites it use to gather information changes.

If you want this to work, I think you'll need to use an older version of UMS and either find a built version of the "latest" version of MovieInfo or build it yourself. Even if you do all that, I'm pretty sure that it won't work because the information sources have changed.

That is unfortunate.

This tells me that I won't have a good movie information plugin (at least, not yet). That is the bad news.

The good news is that I am a software engineer who has been programming in Java since 1997. I might be able to get this plugin to work with the latest UMS. It may take some time because I have various other obligations, but I should be able to do it.

I will grab the code for movieinfo from the source you referenced. The only thing I am going to need is (a) some documentation on how the UMS plugin system works, and (b) access to a snapshot of the latest UMS source or any plugin test environment(s) that exist. With either or both of these I could conceivably update and test the movieinfo plugin.

Can you or someone point me to the UMS source?

Thanks.

One more thing:

In the meantime, is there another movie info gathering plugin for UMS that exists? One that may be better or even less functional than movieinfo? Maybe I can use that for a while while I am looking at movieinfo...

I don't think there ever were any "centralized" plugin registry, so it's hard to know what exists, but there were none other that did this as far as I know. The UPnP AV browse protocol doesn't allow presenting "arbitrary metadata" for items, so what MovieInfo does is to "fake it" by creating non-existing items whose name is the description. It's quite the hack IMO, and doesn't present very well on many renderers. Since there's no "good" way to present the data, I doubt you'll find other plugins that attempt to do it.

As I said, the latest version of UMS doesn't support plugins at all. You'll thus have to use an older source of UMS. This is the commit that disables plugins: https://github.com/UniversalMediaServer ... 08d148d950

If you want to use the "latest" version that still supported plugins, you should go for 7.5.0: https://github.com/UniversalMediaServer ... tree/7.5.0

The latest version of MovieInfo that I know of is the master branch here: https://github.com/Nadahar/MovieInfo

Thanks.

I will look things over...

We will bring back the plugins tab if you become an active maintainer of one